The reason I have an a cappella group is because it gives me every Tuesday evening the chance to do some surrendering. Which is, by the way, the reason people go to church, I think, as well. And to art galleries. What you want from those experiences is to be reminded of what it’s like to be taken along by something. To be taken. To be lifted up, to be whatever the other words for transcendence are. And I think we find those experiences in at least four areas. Religion, sex, art, and drugs. […] Essentially they’re all experiments with ourselves in trying to remind ourselves that the controlling talent that we have must be balanced by the surrendering talent that we also have. And so my idea about art as gardening.
Tag: brianeno
15th Anniversary: The Brian Eno Evolution
What do people want from Art? I don’t know the full answer, but one thing I’m increasingly sure of is that they want life. They want the sense that there is something going on, that something real and exciting and of its moment has been captured […]
In an age of digital perfectibility, it takes quite a lot of courage to say, “Leave it alone” and, if you do decide to make changes, quite a lot of judgment to know at which point you stop. A lot of technology offers you the chance to make everything completely, wonderfully perfect, and thus to take out whatever residue of human life there was in the work to start with. […] It’s a misunderstanding to think that the traces of human activity — brushstrokes, tuning drift, arrhythmia — are not part of the work. They are the fundamental texture of the work, the fine grain of it.
You can afford to expose yourself to uncertainties in art that you wouldn’t allow yourself in real life. You can allow yourself to get into situations where you are completely lost, and where you are disoriented. You don’t know what’s going on, and you can actually not only allow yourself to do that, you can enjoy it.
From a Punk interview with Brian Eno circa 1976, via A Piece of Monologue.
Brian Eno – Another Green world – Arena 2010 Documentary Part 1/6. Just aired a few months ago on BBC Four. (via)
(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)
The Album Covers of Brian Eno.
The album’s pastoral cover art is a detail from After Raphael, a painting by Tom Phillips, Eno’s mentor during his days at Ipswich Art College. (Some believe that the boy in the foreground, with the blond hair and the red beanie, is meant to be Eno.) The back cover depicts the decidedly un-rocking image of Eno sitting up in bed, reading a book – underlining the album’s general vibe of stillness, solitude, and quiet reflection.
I never think of anything as finished until it’s released. If you came round to my house one day and I said, “This is something I haven’t finished yet, but it’s going to be much better when I’ve mixed it,” and blah blah blah – all these defenses – and then I played it for you, that’s one thing. But if you pick up my album at a shop and take it home and put it on your record player and I’m not there to give you all those excuses, that’s quite a different thing. A work is finished for me when it’s no longer in the domain of my excuses about it.
Brian Eno in Interview magazine, 1990. By the way, there is a massive archive of interviews with Brian Eno, which I am wont to plunder when I need a little something to think on.
Brian Eno – Music For Airports Interview:
I thought that it would be much better to have music that said, “Well, if you die, it doesn’t really matter.”
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
Brian Eno, Thinking about Miles Davis in an un-Miles Davis like way:
Miles was an intelligent man, by all accounts, and must have become increasingly aware of the power of his personal charisma, especially in the later years as he watched his reputation grow over his declining trumpeting skills. Perhaps he said to himself: These people are hearing a lot more context than music, so perhaps I accept that I am now primarily a context maker. My art is not just what comes out of the end of my trumpet or appears on a record, but a larger experience which is intimately connected to who I appear to be, to my life and charisma, to the Miles Davis story. In that scenario, the ‘music’, the sonic bit, could end up being quite a small part of the whole experience. Developing the context—the package, the delivery system, the buzz, the spin, the story—might itself become the art. Like perfume…
Professional critics in particular find such suggestions objectionable. They have invested heavily in the idea that music itself offers intrinsic, objective, self-contained criteria that allow you to make judgments of worthiness. In the pursuit of True Value and other things with capital letters, they reject as immoral the idea that an artist could be ‘manipulative’ in this way. It seems to them cynical: they want to believe, to be certain that this was The Truth, a pure expression of spirit wrought in sound. They want it to be ‘out there’, ‘real’, but now they’re getting the message that what it’s worth is sort of connected with how much they’re prepared to take part in the fabrication of a story about it. Awful! To discover that you’re actually a co-conspirator in the creation of value, caught in the act of make-believe.
Emmet Connolly collected a bunch of worthy quotes from reading Brian Eno’s book, A Year with Swollen Appendices. I didn’t figure him to be so cantankerous. My two favorites:
I gave a talk about self-generating systems and the end of the era of reproduction Äî imagining a time in the future when kids say to their grandparents, “So you mean you actually listened to exactly the same thing over and over again?”
and
Once we get used to the idea that we are no longer consumers of “finished” works, but that we are people who engage in conversations and interactions with things, we find ourselves leaving a world of “know you own station” passivity and we start to develop a taste for active engagement. We stop regarding things as fixed and unchangeable, as preordained, and we increasingly find ourselves practicing the idea that we have some control.
Mark Larson 