A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno
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Why did Ezra decide to give listeners a break from the news?
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I've got an email from a lot of you lately saying Can we do a show just off the news? Can one show not be in the grim march of events? So here it is. How do you intro Brian Eno? Eno has a claim, as much as anyone does, to have invented the genre of ambient music.
So there's no narrative quality to the music. It just sort of starts, stays pretty much in one place and then ends.
He certainly coined the term, built out the philosophy, sort of has eaten a lot of the music we now listen to. But also he's just done so many other things. He's produced seminal albums by U2.
We're going to
David Bowie.
I'm so
The talking heads.
Lori Anderson
in our sweep.
As we speak. Listen to the drum speak. In our sleep cold place.
I know St. Peter won't call my name, never alone his word, but that was when I ruled the world.
Hell, Eno composed the sound that plays when you boot up Windows ninety-five. Do you remember that one? A lot of sound we just take for granted. A lot of the way sound is now made, Eno helped bring that into existence. A lot of his work on creating generative systems that make music can be seen as a forerunner to much of today's AI systems. And Eno is more than just a sonic technician or tinker. He's this wonderful thinker and philosopher of art and just being a human being. And he's got this really delightful new book out, What Art Does, an unfinished theory, as well as a new album with B.D. Wolf called Liminal.
I wanted to talk to him about all of it, or at least as much of it as I could. As always, my email as recline show at n vitimes dot com.
Brian Eno, welcome to the show.
Hello, Ezra. Nice to meet you.
So your new book is called What Art Does. And I guess tell me, what does art do?
Well, perhaps I should tell you first why I thought that question needed answering. Because um in education in England and in fact I think probably in most parts of the world, the budgets that always get cut are the arts budgets, because there are apparently more important things that we should be teaching people science, engineering, financial technology, that kind of thing. Um You should be making short trades. Exactly. Exactly. Are you really alive if you can't short a stock? So I've always thought that art is actually one of the most important things that humans do with their time. In my book there's a long list of things that I consider could come under the headline of art and it includes, of course, obvious things like symphonies and photographs and paintings, but it includes cardigans and jewelry and makeup and tattoos and
All the things that humans do that they don't have to do. None of those things have survival benefits in the obvious sense. They're things we do to do something in our mind, to change our mind in some way. So what does art do? Why do we like it? I have this phrase in the book that um children learn through play and adults play through art. And I think that's really what it does. When we look at children and we watch them playing, We don't think, oh, they're just wasting their time, they should do something more serious. We realise that when children play, they're learning. They're understanding about materials, about social relationships, about their own bodies, their own minds, about where they live, all of those things that are very important to understand.
And they do that infallibly and with a huge appetite. That's what children like doing. And we understand, all of us understand, that that's the way they learn things.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why did Ezra decide to give listeners a break from the news?
0:00–11:00
2
How does Brian Eno define what art actually does?
11:00–23:23
3
What role do feelings play in art according to Eno?
23:23–34:52
4
How did Eno create the ambient soundtrack for airports?
34:52–46:48
5
Why does Eno see music as a tool for shaping attention?
46:48–58:42
6
How does Eno compare his generative music systems to today’s AI?
58:42–1:10:26
7
What ethical concerns does Eno raise about AI‑generated art?
1:10:26–1:21:30
8
Which three books and three albums does Eno recommend for listeners?
1:21:30–1:32:22