Brian Eno has become an iconic figure within international contemporary culture. As an artist, musician, ideologue and systems-maker, he has not only written, performed, recorded and produced some of the most intoxicating and original music of the last 30 years, but has also established a philosophy of cultural production which links the inquiring spirit of conceptual art to the broadest applications of popular culture and sociology.

Eno is best known in the field of music, his discography as a musician, producer and artistic collaborator including some of the most acclaimed recordings in the history of modern music. Artists as seminal yet varied as John Cale, David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, David Bowie, Bono, Peter Gabriel and Paul Simon have chosen to work with Eno, and he is one of the most sought-after figures working across the spectrum of contemporary music, from guitar-driven rock to film scores and electronica.

Yet music is only one strand of Eno’s creative output. As a lecturer, visual artist, writer, political activist and futurologist, he has opinions and ideas on subjects as disparate as concepts of time, urban futures, perfume making and the history of art, views which have been solicited by institutions and think-tanks. His diary for 1995, published (by Faber) under the title A Year with Swollen Appendices, proved a best-seller and gave some indication of the extraordinary range and diversity of Eno’s activities.

Eno’s roots are in the progressive art-education systems of the mid- to late 1960s. As a student at Winchester School of Art he was already regarded as a controversial figure for his determined questioning of how the role of artist might be dismantled and redefined. Combining a natural brilliance for numerical problem solving with a vivid literary and visual imagination, Eno came to recognize the unexplored potential of music-making as a valid new form for contemporary art. As early as 1969, Eno had refuted the distinctions between so-called ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, preferring to pursue a dialogue between the two that could give rise to wholly new works and, more important, new ways of working. His immediate involvement with such avant-gardists as Cornelius Cardew, the Scratch Orchestra and the Portsmouth Sinfonietta, can now be seen to establish the foundations of Eno’s career-long interest in self-generating systems of creativity — a form that he would refine nearly 25 years later, in 1996, through his creation of ‘Generative Music’ software.

Eno’s early dedication to the musical avant-garde was always steeped in wit and a passionate regard for the history of purely popular music — from black American doo-wop through the volatile lullabies of the Velvet Underground to the eerie soundscapes of Can. Speaking in 1997, Eno defined his relationship to pop in a characteristically succinct and aphoristic aside: ‘I have never thought that popular music was about making music in the traditional sense of the word’, he said; ‘it is about creating new, imaginary worlds and inviting people to join them’.

Eno’s role as a founder-member of the art-rock group Roxy Music, in 1971, may still be regarded as one of the most accomplished debuts in the history of pop music. By combining a highly stylized selection of popular music genres — from French chanson to surfer rockabilly by way of Johnnie Ray — with an uncompromising backdrop of atonal, electronically massaged atmospherics, Roxy Music were (and remain) the most eloquent and spectacular testimony to Eno’s definition of pop.

But Eno’s creativity required a broader laboratory and playground in which to renew itself, unrestricted by the specific demands of working within a rock group. He left Roxy Music after their second album, For Your Pleasure (1972), and a typically eclectic yet interconnected set of projects immediately followed. Two solo albums, Here Come the Warm Jets and Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), matched Eno’s exuberant surrealism as a lyricist to his warmly melodic vocal style. They also maintained his fusion of avant-garde freedoms with snarling rock theatricality and a near Beat Boom pop sensibility — as though Klaus Nomi had tutored the New Seekers to an original score by Mervyn Peake.

It is the honed and detailed musical texture of Eno’s songwriting that has granted this strand of his work its timeless modernity and renewed acclaim from successive generations. Heard now, they link glittered melodrama (one lyric memorably begins ‘Baby’s on fire — better throw her in the water…’) to the poignant meditations on time, place and love exemplified by Eno’s now legendary Another Green World and Before and after Science albums, released in 1975 and 1977 respectively. This meticulous crafting of songs has always run parallel to Eno’s instrumental recordings, the artistic starting-points of which are related to notions of time as much as instrumentation. Hence his creation of ‘ambient’ music (he first used the term in 1978) would provide the cultural lexicon with one of its principal epoch-defining concepts.

In the early and mid-1970s, Eno’s collaborations with the former King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp, No Pussyfooting and Evening Star, established a template for luxuriously minimalist recordings that contained within their sheer aesthetic gorgeousness a new approach to the way music might be made and — as important — how it might be heard and listened to.

In 1975, in collaboration with the artist Peter Schmidt, Eno also developed the ‘Oblique Strategies’ set of problem-solving cards for artists. Each card states an act or attitude that can make an immediate intervention into the creative process. In effect, this simple yet highly refined mechanism prefigures the current vogue for re-patterning creative thinking — as taught today through neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) — by nearly a quarter of a century.

It was in the 1970s that Eno also established the Obscure recording label. Audaciously harnessing his now extensive fame as a ‘rock’ musician to a progressive, curatorial role as a producer, Eno single-handedly brought some of the most interesting and important musicians from the musical avant-garde to the vast new audience commanded by rock. Thus Michael Nyman, John Cage, Gavin Bryars and the Penguin Café Orchestra, as well as many others, released albums on Obscure in a series of uniform (yet slightly differing) black sleeves and at a special cost lower than a mainstream pop or rock album. The series would also include Eno’s own Discreet Music, a recording of simple variants of musical notes, and a founding example of Eno’s creation of ambient music as a genre and a softly philosophical statement.

As Obscure records were a direct expression of Eno’s creative exploration of music as a fluid, physical, economic and conceptual form, so the releases brought him further recognition as a musician whose genius allowed the glamour of pop to have artistic and intellectual parity with conceptualism, theory and systems-making. Far from risking the earnest aridity of some ‘intellectual’ approaches to music-making, Eno adopted a role that was publicly perceived as a good-humoured and wholeheartedly generous combination of Noam Chomsky and Joe Meek, making him a favourite with the music press as well as a new folk hero for liberal humanism.

By the late 1970s, Eno’s legendary collaboration with David Bowie on the latter’s Low, Heroes and Lodger albums, combined with his own ambient series and Music for Films releases, enthroned Eno as a the presiding spirit of much immediately post-punk, industrial and electronic music. In his work with Talking Heads, Devo, Snatch, Ultravox, as well as his renewed curatorial role on the No New York compilation of New York New Wave groups, Eno was regarded as a Phil Spector-like figure for new groups influenced by punk.

A veteran pioneer of extreme forms of music-making, with a lifelong interest in working outside inherited or preconceived roles, Eno achieved brilliance as a producer through his ability to enable musicians to rekindle their creativity in new and dramatic ways. Thus his work with Talking Heads saw the group expand on their edgy, guitar-driven songs of alienation and domestic unease to achieve a soaring, epic version of themselves. His role as U2’s producer, on The Joshua Tree, Zooropa and Achtung Baby!, would transform the band from anthemic rockers into purveyors of multi-media spectacle — the anthemic rocking remained intact but was intensified into a hyper-stylized version of itself by the acuity of Eno’s production.

It is a testament to Eno’s standing as a musician that he has been cited as an inspiration by artists as varied in tone and temperament as Prince, Franz Ferdinand, Autechre and Public Enemy. His collaboration with David Byrne, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, released in 1981, is still regarded as one of the founding models for the use of sampling music, its pared-down, febrile energy and funk guitars coming across like some sci-fi reclamation of global media reaching critical mass.

On its remastered re-release in 2006, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts received unanimous critical acclaim as a record that could now be heard (like so much of Eno’s work) to be decades ahead of its time, not just in terms of its sound but in concept. Byrne and Eno also broke new ground by inviting listeners to create their own ‘remixes’ of the tracks, which could then be posted on to a website and shared by all. Such creative audacity in the face of record-company policies has always distinguished Eno’s fundamental interest in the pliability and potential of recording and distribution as artistic media in their own right.

Between 2004 and 2006, in addition to producing the hugely acclaimed new album by Paul Simon, Eno recorded two of his most eagerly awaited albums. The Equatorial Stars (2004) saw Eno working once more with the legendary guitarist Robert Fripp, with whom he had recorded No Pussyfooting and Evening Star nearly 30 years earlier. Then, in 2005, the release of what was being popularly described as Eno’s first album ‘of songs’ for over a decade, Another Day on Earth, marked a return to the lyrical and vocal richness of Before and after Science and Another Green World. At the album’s launch in St Petersburg, it was eloquent of Eno’s international reputation as a musician, avant-gardist and intellectual that he was questioned on a dizzying range of topics, from constructivism to randomness by way of backing vocals and Thai classical music.

2006 would also see Eno pursuing his interest in spoken, word-based projects: he collaborated with the author Michael Faber, providing a soundtrack to his novella The Fahrenheit Twins. Similarly, Eno made a very rare ‘live’ appearance, joining Joanna MacGregor to create new work at two concerts for the Bath Music Festival.

Eno’s standing in the often closed and conservative world of contemporary art was demonstrated by the fact that he was asked by the Tate Gallery to present the Turner Prize, the winner that year being the young Damien Hirst. To many young visual artists, Eno has been as much an art-historical reference-point or inspiration as Andy Warhol or Jeff Koons. He blurred the boundaries between artistic media and between ‘pop’ and ‘art’ systems of belief long before such an approach was the norm.

As Eno’s tireless creativity seems always to have been empowered by his balancing of opposites — systems and glamour, science and aesthetics, conceptualism and politics — so his continued work in the musical field has been matched by his site-specific and environmental media projects, notably in the form of audio-visual installation. In 2006, with the release of his DVD-ROM, 77 Million Paintings, Eno would combine his career-long interest in generative creative systems with his work as an installation artist. A seemingly endless succession of recombining and configuring images, dictated by their own randomness, 77 Million Paintings would take 9000 years to watch at its fastest speed and several million years at its slowest. Thus 77 Million Paintings is a pivotal work in the Eno canon, linking his constant research into technology with his approach to conceptualism and the broadest possible ramifications of that thinking. This is defined by Eno’s co-founding of the Long Now Foundation, a creative organization dedicated to exploring the contemporary social and individual relationship with time, acceleration and experience.

Eno’s audio-visual work (shown internationally in such venues as the Venice Biennale, the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the Hayward Gallery, White Cube/Jay Jopling and the Science Museum in London, and the Marble Palace at the Russian Museum in St Petersburg) expresses the social philosophy that seems to lie at the core of his thinking as an artist. In 2005 Eno was invited to create a new work for the Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art; he responded with an audiovisual installation called ‘The Quiet Club’, a classic work for Eno that defined the ways in which his created environments ask the visitor to leave aside their preconceptions of what ‘looking at art’ might involve and instead attempt to experience the present moment, in the present moment.

Installations of 77 Million Paintings have subsequently been created in Venice, Tokyo, Milan, Naples and Brussels, in Selfridges department store in central London and at the prestigious Baltic Gallery in Gateshead. The diversity of these locations — the work being as suited to a department store as to a major gallery — was eloquent of the broader intentions behind Eno’s creative philosophy. As an installation, 77 Million Paintings was less concerned with contributing to a discussion about art-making and more directed — like much of Eno’s ambient and generative work — to creating a reflective, meditational but compellingly engaging environment. In 2007, 77 Million Paintings was set up as a permanent installation at the Sarowski Museum in Wattens, Austria. Eno also collaborated again with Mimmo Palladino, creating a sound installation to Palladino’s sculptures as Ara Pacis, Rome.

Eno has spoken of how such environments might become a part of civic architecture, providing space for people to take refuge from their hectic, short-term thinking — rather like public parks for the spirit. It is at such a point, perhaps, between art, science, futurology and politics, that all Brian Eno’s remarkable achievements are ultimately combined.

Few artists move with as much ease and constancy as Eno across the continuum of fine art and pop music: 2008 saw the release of new albums by two of the biggest bands in the world, Coldplay (Viva La Vida) and U2 (No Line on the Horizon), both of which were produced and overseen by Eno. It is typical of Eno’s unwavering commitment to exploring new possibilities for creativity that he wrote the score for Will Wright’s latest computer game, Spore, released in 2008. In many ways the game logic of Spore, based on evolution theory, is perfectly matched to Eno’s own interest in generative systems and time-scale. The mass-market appeal of computer games also chimes perfectly with Eno’s long-held belief that intellectual imagination at its most inventive can thrive on the frontlines of popular culture just as well as it might in a gallery or seminar.

In 2008 Eno and David Byrne released the eagerly awaited Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. The following year Eno wrote the music for Peter Jackson’s film The Lovely Bones and in June 2009 he curated the Luminous Festival at Sydney Opera House.

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