Brian Eno: Oblique Music
Abstract
On the back of his published diary Brian Eno describes himself variously as: a mammal, a father, an artist, a celebrity, a pragmatist, a computer-user, an interviewee, and a 'drifting clarifier'. To this list we might add rock star (on the first two Roxy Music albums); the creator of lastingly influential music (Another Green World; Music for Airports); a trusted producer (for Talking Heads, U2, Coldplay and a host of other artists); the maker of large-scale video and installation artworks; a maker of apps and interactive software; and so on. He is one of the most feted and influential musical figures of the past forty years, even though he has described himself on more than one occasion as a non-musician.
This volume examines Eno's work as a musician, as a theoretician, as a collaborator, and as a producer. Brian Eno is one of the most influential figures in popular music; an updated examination of his work on this scale is long overdue.
Since the 1980s, the uptake of digital hard disk recording has replaced analogue tape as the primary medium on which popular music is recorded. This change sparked a fierce and ongoing debate between producers about aesthetics and musicianship within pop music production. It is possible to understand this debate as part of an extended history of sceptical attitudes towards new technologies. In this article, I examine the ways in which the capacity to express and articulate sceptical attitudes towards new technologies also function as cultural capital. In order to develop this argument, I analyse Brian Eno’s published critical attitudes toward digital recording technologies, and draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital as a conceptual tool for understanding the cultural dimensions of the perceived divide between digital and analogue. Against the backdrop of emergent cheaper and user-friendly digital technologies, this article argues that aesthetic attitudes towards analogue media can consecrate an agent’s position – and in the case of artists, their oeuvre – within the social order of pop music.
A psychogeographical understanding offers a contemporary view that can be concerned with finding personal connections with place; an expression of political dissent; an expression of spirituality; or a documentation and consideration of a journey. It could also be an amalgamation of any of these to greater or lesser degrees. This understanding considers the historical significance of the flâneur, the dérive, psychogeography, from the urban to the rural, and how it has and will have, significant impact on self-efficacy, self-esteem, community, identity, landscape, and above all sustainability today and tomorrow.
A psychogeographical understanding offers a contemporary view that can be concerned with finding personal connections with place; an expression of political dissent; an expression of spirituality; or a documentation and consideration of a journey. It could also be an amalgamation of any of these to greater or lesser degrees. This understanding considers the historical significance of the flâneur, the dérive, psychogeography, from the urban to the rural, and how it has and will have, significant impact on self-efficacy, self-esteem, community, identity, landscape, and above all sustainability today and tomorrow.
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