“Brian Eno is one of the most popular and successful music producers of all time. ”
We could try to divide his long, productive, and inspiring career into four sections: musician, producer, artist, and "philosopher of sound." Any musician interested in the history of electronic and pop music knows him. So many words have been already used to describe him and his work, for this reason, it is almost impossible to write a short biography, but we will try to do it by following his path.
Born in 1948 in Suffolk, England, Eno studied painting and experimental music at the art school of Ipswich Civic College in the mid-1960s and then at Winchester School of Art. He has always shown an interest in avant-garde and electronic music.
The most interesting thing we can discuss is that, unlike the vast majority of musicians emerging in the 1970s, Eno was initially a non-musician. He could operate synthesizers and owned a Revox reel-to-reel tape machine to experiment with. Eno has always been more an intellectual thinker than a virtuoso. Perhaps he initially balanced his performing skills with a strong visual image on stage, which he developed even more when in 1971, Andy Mackay invited him to join Roxy Music.
Mackay convinced him to join the band mainly as a technical adviser, and originally, Eno did not make appearances during their live shows. After Roxy Music signed their first record deal, Eno joined the band on stage and became known for his flamboyant costumes and makeup, but his image partly stole the spotlight of the lead singer Bryan Ferry. Later on, Eno made a public statement, maybe also to find a peaceful solution to the problem, to confirm that Roxy Music was Bryan Ferry's band and not his band. He recorded with the glam rock band two albums, Roxy Music (1972) and For Your Pleasure (1973), then he left to begin a successful and iconic solo career, which started with the recording of the album (No Pussyfooting) in collaboration with Robert Fripp in 1973.
“His musical style was still influenced by 1970s experimental rock when he released his initial solo albums, Here Come the Warm Jets and Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), in 1974. ”
1975 was a hyper-productive year for Eno, who had just recovered from a collapsing lung, forcing him to stop the Here Come the Warm Jets tour. Eno's third solo album, Another Green World, was the first turning point of his career, an album that focused more on the experimental sounds Eno is nowadays famous for. The second collaboration with Robert Fripp, Evening Star, increased the lack of pop song structures, focusing on long instrumental suites based on looping. Finally, Discreet Music completed this incredibly influential 1975 production, planting the seeds of a music genre Eno would name Ambient Music only a few years later.
As we mentioned in our Krautrock and Ambient Music specials here on hiphopelectronic.com, this radical style change resulted from Brian Eno's journey and musical background.
Eno, in 1975 was hit by a taxi while crossing the street and spent several weeks recuperating at home while listening to an old record of harp music given to him by his girlfriend. He had set the amplifier to a meager volume, and one channel of the stereo was not working, but he didn't have the energy to fix it. He then declared that this experience opened him to different perceptions and ways to listen to music.
In addition to these personal experiences, I'm convinced that the encounter with members of German bands Cluster and Harmonia gave Eno another boost of inspiration. Eno became a fan of both bands when he attended a Harmonia gig in Hamburg in 1974 and became friends. He started jamming with the band members Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Dieter Moebius, and Michael Rother in their studio in the German countryside town of Forst.
Cluster & Eno (1977) and After the Heat (1978) resulted from this historically fundamental musical collaboration. According to a BBC interview with Rother, they recorded a massive amount of material on tapes. Eno took away with him and remained unreleased until November 1997, when the album Tracks and Traces was finally released, initially credited to Harmonia 76. In 2009, a reissue featuring additional tracks and alternate artwork was released, this time credited to Harmonia & Eno '76.
One of the reasons they stopped recording together could be that Eno got involved as a musician and co-producer in the famous David Bowie's Berlin trilogy in the same period. Inspired by Discreet Music and the Krautrock bands, Bowie asked Eno to work with the American producer Tony Visconti on his new album. Low and Heroes were released in 1977, and Eno's fifth solo studio album, Before and after science. Eno worked on the third album of Bowie's trilogy as well. Lodger was released in 1979.
Eno then embarked on a series of works that would have extended the concept behind Discreet Music which is now considered the landmark album of Ambient Music. Still, the term Ambient started to be used for the genre only when his album Music for Airports (Ambient 1) was released in 1978. To describe it, Eno wrote in the liner notes of the album what sounded like an official statement: "Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular, it must be as ignorable as it is interesting."
The Ambient series included The Plateaux of Mirror (Ambient 2), featuring Harold Budd on keyboard, and Day of Radiance (Ambient 3), with American composer Laraaji playing the zither and hammered dulcimer, both released in 1980, and On Land (Ambient 4)) released in 1982.
In 1981, Eno released an album he produced with David Byrne, My Life in the bush of ghosts. If you follow our articles about the history of Electronic music here on hiphopelectronic.com, you might know we already wrote about it. In a way, this album represents a collaboration many music lovers were dreaming about, combining the style of two of the most influential musicians of our time. Inspired by African music, the songs were built around radio broadcasts Eno collected while living in the United States and sampled music recordings from around the world.
Despite not being included in the Ambient series, 1983's album Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks contained dark, complex textures similar to Eno's previous albums. Other reasons for not being included were that the album was produced in collaboration with his brother, Roger Eno, and Daniel Lanois. It was composed as a soundtrack for the documentary For All Mankind by Al Reinert, a 35mm footage of the Apollo Moon missions.
Eno released two more solo albums in the 1980s, Music for Films Volume 2 in 1983 and Thursday Afternoon in 1985, another Ambient oriented album, then The Pearl with Harold Budd in 1984, and other two collaborations with Daniel Lanois, Hybrid by Michael Brook (1986), and Music for films III with Roger Eno, Michael Brook, Harold Budd, Laraaji and others in 1988.
Eno released 17 other collaborative albums and 17 solo albums in the following decades. His last solo album so far is Reflection, released by legendary electronic music label Warp in 2017, and in 2020 he released Mixing Colours, again in collaboration with his brother Roger Eno. An extended catalog containing a kaleidoscope of styles, genres, philosophy of sound, soundtracks, and collaborations so vast to be highly complicated to condensate in one article of this length.
Alongside his composer career, Eno is famous for being one of the most requested music producers to work with, and he produced an almost impossible-to-calculate number of albums for other artists. John Cale, Jon Hassell, Laraaji, Talking Heads, Ultravox, and Devo were the most famous productions he worked on in the 1970s, while in subsequent decades, he most prominently worked with U2 and Coldplay, alongside Laurie Anderson, Grace Jones, Paul Simon, Slowdive, Sinéad O'Connor, Kevin Shields, James Blake, and Damon Albarn.