Brian Eno

speaker

1,303 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Oct 2025 last heard 21 Jul

Brian Eno’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · 21 Jul 2026 podcast

And I just wanted to hear what things would be like if they were played backwards.

Discovering that, first of all, you can capture sound and make it physical.

That was something new for the 20th century.

But then I thought, if you can make it physical, can't you also make it mutate?

in certain ways.

Can't you make it so the physical medium, for instance, is not reliable?

It will play slightly differently each time.

And so my first experiments in that direction were, I had a collection of broken tape recorders, which I just got from junk shops, you know, or thrift stores, as you might say.

And I would

try to break them a little bit more, but so that they would still play things.

So a tape playing through it would change into something else.

It would have a lot of distortion or it would run unevenly like this.

I discovered that if I connected two tape recorders together, put one tape through one and coming out through the other, so that the playback head is separated by several feet from the record head, you get a very late echo.

And then you can build up those.

You can work on top of those.

I mean, I discovered this in the 60s.

So did Terry Riley and a few other people, I think.

It just happened that I had two tape recorders for a while so I could try this out.

And then I could build up these huge...

sort of orchestras of music live on my own.

Showing 281–300 of 1,303 · page 15 of 66