Brian Eno: The Innovator

00:00:15 Speaker 1: Pushkin. Not many musicians cite design or architecture as their inspiration, but sitting in a beautifully designed German airport in nineteen seventy eight, Brian Eno was inspired to create atmospheric music to complement the space. His landmark album Music for Airports followed, and with it Eno created ambient music, an entirely new genre that still thrives today. Brian ENO's fifty year career is teaming with innovation. He started out playing since in the early seventies as a member of the UK glam rock band Roxy Music, went on to record a series of solo albums and eventually produced career defining albums for a host of bands, including YouTube Devo and Cold Playing. His latest project is a radio station through Sono's Radio HD. He'll be streaming three hundred unreleased songs from his decades in music, including some that he's still making today. The station is called the Lighthouse, and on today's episode, Rick Rubin talks to Brian Eno a bit about that station and also about his love for the musical space that exists between humans and machines. Eno also recalls predicting the birth of hip hop and the back of a Cab with David Byrne and explains why listening to Beyonce playing through a wall is strangely satisfying. This is broken record liner notes for the Digital Age. I'm justin Richmond. Here's Rick Rubin with Brian Eno. I'm gonna starting a funny place because just now, before we started, I was thinking about a lot of things, and the last thought that came up before I made notes this morning was to ask what was the last bit of technology to come along that has influenced the way you work? There have been a few. I've been working quite a lot with my friend Peter Chilvers, who's an musician and a coda and we've been working on ways of manipulating MIDI automatically and effectively. What we're doing is taking a MIDI signal and subjecting it to various probabilistic mutations. So, for instance, you have a stream of information going into the MIDI and you say leave out thirteen percent of that. So if you have a drum part, it sounds like the drummer's dropping a beat every so often, or we can say things like every one in twenty beats, double it or move it by a quarter beat. So we can take parts that are fairly fixed, or which are loops in fact, and we can suddenly bring them to life in some very very interesting and uncanny ways. It doesn't really sound like what humans would do, but it doesn't sound like what machines do either, so it's an interesting new zone. I think I've always liked those zones between the human and the mechanical. This is why I love all the voice treatments that are going on now so much, because that's always what I wanted to hear. One The one thing that used to be sacred you could never touch, was the voice, and I always thought, why not. You know, it's just another piece of electronic material, like anything else. We can do what we like with it. Do you ever feel like going the other way? Do you ever start with something that synthetical programmed and decide to create it with traditional instruments? Have you ever done that? I've done that, and it hasn't always been very successful. In fact, it's actually rather rarely being successful for me, and I think it's because what I enjoy about the use of the electronics and the computers is that they do things that humans can't do, and I really like that area just between what we can do and what machines can do. There's this sort of new area that is appearing. I mean, people are noticing it more and more, particularly with vocals. Suddenly there are these ways of singing that you've never heard before. And what's very interesting, of course, is that a new generation of people are learning to sing like that. I don't know if you've ever seen any of those wonderful things on YouTube where young people have clearly heard a Rihannah record or something like that and thought, oh, that's great, I'm going to sing like that, and they don't actually realize that it's done with an auto tune. Yes, that it was not possible to sing like that until somebody did it with a machine, and then somebody else thought, well, it's possible, so I'll do it. In the case of the first example, where you're removing bits of media information, would you say that the random aspect of the process is always at work for you? I like things when there's a layer of surprise, I suppose, and it's not because I have this John Cage and faith in randomness. For him, it was a sort of religious feeling that randomness tied you into the synchronicity of the world. Somehow, by using randomness, you allowed the state of things to affect your work. It's a nice idea, and I like it and I respect it in his work. For me, it's a way of searching a musical space that I wouldn't do using just my taste. I mean, one's taste tends to propel you into the same areas over and over again. The interesting thing about randomness is that sometimes you're taken somewhere that you didn't expect to go, and sometimes that turns out to be a really interesting new place. So randomness for me is really just a tool, just a way of taking me somewhere different. So it's not random for the sake of random. But through the random process, you find something new that you're looking for that you didn't know you were looking for. Essentially, that's exactly right. Yes, something happens and you kind of recognize that, you think, yes, that makes sense. The reason I think this is interesting is because I think what makes any work of art interesting is or gripping or effective, is the feeling that somebody was living, somebody was living it, somebody was alert and alive and passionate in some way, and the way you get into that state is by being an unfamiliar territory. I think you're you're most alive when you're not quite sure what is going on, when you're you're slightly flying by the seat of your pants and you have to negotiate it somehow. That's that's why we love improvisation so much, because people are deliberately putting themselves at risk in a way, soaring out into the unknown, and somehow dealing with it. And that process of hearing someone dealing with it is the difference between life and death in a piece of work. I think. So I suppose all all of the strategies and techniques that I use, and they are quite a lot of them. Besides randomness, are really ways of trying to find myself in a new place, because I get excited when I'm in a new place. I like being in unfamiliar surroundings. I always used to say that artists are either cowboys or farmers, really, and they're both both ways of being an artist to find you know, the farmer wants to find a piece of territory and fully explore it and exploit it. You know. You could say the last twenty years of Mandrea and was like that. When Mondrea finally settled on the style that we all know him for, he just carried on doing it. But the other kind of artist is the one who just wants to find somewhere new. He just wants to find the next frontier, the next piece of territory, and that's what he gets turned on by. So I think I'm more in the second category, though, people listening to my work would say, but it all sounds exactly the same, Brian. Do you have that same approach in life beyond? Are you an explorer? Have you lived all over the world? Do you continue to put yourself in new situations as a human being as opposed to an artist. I have such an amazing amount of inertia, you wouldn't believe it. I wouldn't leave my studio if I had the choice. Probably, No, it's not that bad. But the only reason I ever go anywhere really is because I don't have a choice. For instance, I had to go to New York in nineteen seventy eight do something for a week, and it was a nice, lovely weather. When I arrived, it was this time of year. Somebody said, well, I've got a sublet if you want to stay, And I ended up spending five years there just because it was a nice day when I arrived. Yes, I didn't have any intention of living in New York. And then I left New York because I had to go to Tokyo to do something. And I was away in Tokyo and somebody robbed my studio and took everything. Actually everything was gone, and somebody rang me up and said, your whole studio has disappeared. And I suddenly had this feeling of relief. I thought, oh, I don't have to go back to New York then, So then I moved to Toronto after that for a little while. But I don't really move very much unless I have to for some reason, or unless I don't plan things very well. I'm pretty happy wherever I am. Actually, I think we have that income and it's funny. I'm wondering if the urge to adventure creatively is the balance for the fact that we lived such her metical lives. I think that's a very good theory. Yes, I know that whatever I'm doing in my work always seems to be balancing what is happening in the rest of my life. For instance, when I lived in New York. I lived on a very very very noisy corner. It was on the corner of Broom and Broadway, so Broadway very busy street, and then Broom was the cross street where all the big trucks used to go on their way to the tunnel. I lived at the top of the building, but it used to kind of rock with this sound. And it was whilst I lived there that I made the quietest music I've ever made. And I'm sure what I was trying to do was to make the place in the music that I needed to be able to get to sometimes as a relief from living in New York. And then I moved back to England about two years later, three years later, and I moved to the countryside, to the town that I grew up in, very quiet, small country town. And then I made the loudest music I'd ever made in my life. Again, I think I needed a bit of city, I needed some grit, some noise. So yes, I think I think that's kind of what artists do. They're always making worlds, and sometimes worlds that they would just like to visit and look at. Sometimes worlds they would like to spend time in earlier, you said we're born with a particular taste. Do you feel like your current taste is the taste you were born with and or has it evolved and changed over the course of your life. That's a very good question. I remember when I first started painting, because painting was the first artistic thing I did. I never learned to play an instrument, so I was a painter as a kid. And I remember I loved combinations of red and blue that produced the mo violet range of the spectrum, and I did loads of paintings just exploring that sort of what I felt was a melancholy, deep area of color, and certainly the melancholy of it was a big part of what attracted me, and I don't think that's ever gone. I still have that feeling for It's sort of a nostalgia for other futures that could have happened but didn't. If you see what I mean. How old were you at this time that you were painting. Oh, I started when I was about nine or ten, but I got into the purple area when I was about thirteen or fourteen. I was very, very impressed by Mondrea, and from early on I used him as an example earlier, but I loved the simplicity of his pictures because I kept thinking, how can something that is so simple objectively, you know, how can that have such an effect on me? It was the closest thing to magic that I had ever seen, And at the same time I was I loved duop music. Now you're probably probably a bit too young for duap, aren't you, But I'm a fan of duo up. I am too young for it, But there was a growing up in New York there was a radio show on the oldie station on Sundays. They played two or three hours of duop every weekend, dan Quae Reid and I listened to it religiously, and I absolutely love dua Yeah, well this that had the same sort of effect on me, because duop is a very simple music in many senses, you know, it's mainly about voices, not not about lots of instruments and lots of playing. And in fact, the closer it was to a cappella, the more I liked it. And I just loved the fact that four voices could produce such a range of colors and feelings that seemed to me like on a par with Mandrea and you know how. And I was always very drawn to this idea of doing as much as possible with as little as possible. I was never impressed by the kind of music that used you know, complicated time signatures and amazingly brilliant playing and so on. It's sort of impressive, but for me, there was not the same magic in that you could see the trick being done, you know, So that part of my taste hasn't changed. I really am always drawn to things that look like anybody could do them, where you think I could have made that, but I fucking didn't. Why didn't I part I don't know if you have this feeling that part of the feeling of one of the feelings I always have that tells me something is great is kind of anger that I didn't do it. I don't have that, but I understand it. I do. I'm so thankful when there's something that I like that I didn't make, because it's so exciting, it's like Wow. Often I make things more out of the need for them to exist. Yes, that's exactly right. I want this music to exist. Yeah. The only reason I make music, The reason I got into this line of work was because I was experiencing hip hop music and the records that were being made didn't reflect what it actually was. So my earliest work was really just documenting something that I was already a fan of and it just didn't exist in the world, so I didn't really have a choice. So when I do hear something that I like, I get very excited because I'm always looking for something that feels like a new way in Yes, what you said there is something that I've often thought that the things that influenced me most in terms of actually making things are the things that I hear that don't quite succeed where I listened to them. I think that's a brilliant idea, And do you know what if they had done this and that and this other thing and left that bit out, that would be even better. So quite often when I'm thinking like that about something, I realize that I'm I'm inventing something new which isn't that thing, but isn't something that I really had thought about before either. So it's it's quite often hearing something just missing the mark that makes me think that could be better. That's been an important thread for me. Do you find that if you look back, the most interesting things have hit you that way, like when you first hear something or see something, you don't know whether you like it or not, or maybe it makes you laugh, or it seems ridiculous or yes, but then you come around to loving it or maybe loving it the most. Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. I really admired the who I'd loved that, my generation and things like that, And then they released a song called Happy Jack. I thought they shouldn't release lightweight material like this. They are a serious, revolutionary, radical band. What are they doing releasing this kind of material? And I even wrote to Pete Townsend saying saying, you shouldn't be releasing stuff like this, You're much too important, or something to that effect. And it was about three or four months later that I suddenly got it that this was a kind of pop art. So that's one example of something where I had a real change of mind. And I've had more of those in painting than in music. In music, I kind of very often have a pretty good feeling of what is about to happen. I don't mean that I could make it, but I'm not incredibly prized by it. For instance, I remember saying to David Byrne, we were in a car in Los Angeles in nineteen eighty and I said, I think there is going to be a kind of music where people kind of shout poetry over beats. And indeed there was. It wasn't entirely an unscripted idea. I'd heard something on MPR. It was a poet, a black poet from somewhere in America, reading this poem called Cadillac. I spent years trying to find this thing. I never found it. I wrote to MPR and I phoned them up and everything. It was called Pink Cadillac. And he just did this amazing, very rhythmic poem about how he wanted a pink Cadillac and how cool it was and how it turned rounded the corner and things like that. And I thought, this is a new kind of music. I mean, I had I knew about the last poets. They they were sort of in the back of my mind as well. But I just suddenly had this vision of a popular music, not a music that would only be on NPR, but a popular music that people would want to hear, that had heavy beats and speech, not songs. Was the pink Cadillac piece that you heard, did it have a beat or was it a cappella? I think it was a cappella or just had a very I can't remember it very well now. In fact, I only heard it that once. It just stuck in my mind, and I can still remember the cadence of some of it. And there may have just been a you know, that pink callac that kind of feeling to it, you know, and I thought, yeah, that is definitely new. We'll be right back after a quick break with more from Brian Enow. We're back with more from Rick Rubin and Brian Eno. Can you remember any other forms of music that either do or don't yet exist that you've imagined. Yes, there's one that has just come into existence, I think, and it's something that I have been sort of playing around with. Do you know this listening practice? I don't really know what to call it exactly. I could call it music, but I'm not sure this is the right word for it. It's called as mr H. This is where people are listening very close up. Noisest like this, and there's lots of smacking lips and that kind of thing. And basically people tell quite long stories, but they're hardly stories. It's about that sound, and they often use stereo microphones so they can move their voices from one from one of your ears to the other and back and forth. It's very, very interesting because these are quite long pieces, and just go on YouTube and have a look. They've got millions and millions of listeners, so there's a lot of people doing this. So I heard these first of all, I think three or four years ago. I heard the first ones and thought, this is really interesting. This is like having somebody wandering around inside your head whispering to you. And I thought, this is kind of a night. It's like ambient music. Actually, there's a sort of diminution of content in favor of sound. So it's a kind of live of the moment sound experience that doesn't really have a past or a future. You know. It's not what philosophers called teleological. It doesn't doesn't go somewhere, it doesn't have a goal. It's a steady state experience. And this, of course is what I always wanted ambient music to be. Like a like a picture on the wall. You don't expect it to change all the time. What changes is you, the listener. The art stays relatively still. So I heard this as mr Stuff and thought, this is a kind of ambient music, And I thought, what about making music that is vocal music? But like that, I had never really thought about ambient music being vocal before then. In fact, it was for me specifically not vocal. It was a sort of deliberately personality free music. And putting a voice in there to me was to say to draw all the attention to the voice and say, oh, here's somebody with something to tell you, And I really didn't want that. But then when I heard this ASMR, I thought, this person clearly has nothing to tell me at all. They're talking about how they comb their hair and doing it for twenty five minutes. Clearly the message is not about combing hair. The message is about being inside a voice for a decent length of time. So I started to think, what would you do to existing music to make it occupy that same space, And then I started experimenting with my favorite tool of all in the studio, which is the low pass filter. Just taking off all the high frequency of things has an amazing psychological effect to me. It creates scale, distance, warmth, and a weird sort of intimacy, which is quite strange, I think because you know, missing a lot of detail. Your brain very actively engages with those kinds of sounds. That's my theory about why it's interesting anyway, So I started thinking, perhaps there could be a kind of music like that where we take existing songs, you know, a Rihannah record, or and we just put it through a low pass filter, but really a really radical low pass filter. So nothing above say two hundred and fifty hurts is audible. If you listen to a Beyonce record through a wall, it's not exhausting, it's warm. So about a week ago somebody said to me, oh, have you heard this new as Mr Music thing, and described exactly that same experiment. So it's like you're listening to records that are being played in another room. So you just have that sort of comforting. You can't really figure out what it is, but it's sociable somehow, it's friendly. It's like having other people around. It's like a daydream almost. Yes, yes, yes, that's a good way of saying it. Yeah, sounds fantastic. On the other side of that, are lyrics ever important to you? They're very rarely the thing I'm most listening to in music. I think the base requirement for me in lyrics is that they don't make the music stupid, which turns out to be quite a high bar in many cats Now people say do up lyrics are stupid, but I don't think they are at all. They serve the music absolutely. Do up lyrics are the way of making a voice become musical. What is always awkward to me is when somebody feels they have something to say and it's important and you get these clumsy pieces of scanning and the rhymes don't sound stupid, and so I can't bear that. I'd rather just leave out the voice completely than have that. But I mean, there are lyricists who I absolutely adore, like I always say Joni Mitchell, who's for me, one of the greatest songwriters of all time, and her lyrics are so clever and intricate and always worth returning to that I'm always hearing new things in her singing and new interpretations of what she's saying. And there are a few people like that, very very few whose work I actually do really want to know. The lyrics of where do you think the line is between sounds and music? It's where that line is is actually one of the things I've thought about most in thinking about music, I had an accident years and years ago where I was confined to bed for a while and one afternoon, a rainy afternoon, a friend of mine came over and I said, as she left, I said, can you just put a record on for me? This is I had a record player, but it wasn't close to the bed, so she put this record on. It was a record of Welsh harp music, and she just put the needle on. She left, and it was actually very quiet, but I couldn't get up to change the volume, and the rain was beating down outside, and I suddenly had this realization that I loved the fact that the music seemed to be arising out of the rain. It wasn't on top of the rain. Sometimes it was submerged by the rain. But these notes, the loudest notes, were appearing out of the rain, and I thought, how lovely to co opt the surroundings to become part of the music. So this was in nineteen seventy four, I think or five. So I started thinking, what about if you made a kind of music that didn't have a hard edge to it, that didn't have a hard boundary, that wasn't done so that you knew that that was a musical sound and that everything else was just random everyday noise. I thought, what about softening the edges of the music so that you include some things that could be noise outside of the music. That could be the street, or the rain, or the wind or something like that. So I started building in this sort of where ambient music started coming from, was this idea of making music that had a soft edge that blended into the rest of the world. So this idea of saying, let's make the edge soft so that the music can invite in more of the rest of the world. It draws it in and that becomes part of the composition as well. And I think this was at the time I was starting to think about messiness as well, that I didn't want the work to be sort of in a little capsule, tidily closed off from the rest of the world. I wanted it to feel like it was somehow connected to it that it bled into the rest of the world. What did you look like at the time at that point in time, how were you dressing. I think I still had long hair, I was still wearing makeup. I think then, yeah, mid seventies. I was, yes, and I wore a lot of unusual clothes. I'm just wondering, like, how the just the justa positions, you know, it's like the person who's dressed like that making the music that you don't look at or don't pay attention to. It's it's really interesting. Now, you're absolutely right, it's sort of inconsistent. And it became clearer to me that they were inconsistent that my physical appearance was saying look at me, but my musical output was saying it's nothing. It's just a tint. It's just an atmosphere, you know, no big deal, carry on with your life. And maybe that was again looking for the balance. Yes, yes, you know the art was looking for the balance, and yep, I never thought of that. That's very very likely true. From about the late seventies on, I started to not want to be a pop star, and really that was that was because I thought it was misleading people. You know, if if the whole thing is about me, that's actually not a very interesting subject. To be honest, I'm not a boring person or anything like that, but I didn't think that my personality was the thing that I had to offer the world. Yeah, that you saw larger issues, yes, exactly, like what is the edge? What is the edge of art? That was the issue that really interested me. I think, what do we call art? And why where do we draw the boundary? And what do we what do we mean by art anyway? You know, for me, the most interesting question for a long long time has been why do we want to make art at all? And why do we want to listen to it? I mean, it's an incredibly deep question. Why do we like music? Why? You know, if you think about it, what is music? It's a kind of arrangement of noises. But you know, we have incredibly strong feelings about them. If you said to a Martian who just landed on Earth, you played them four string quartets. You know, there's Shostakovich, there's a Brahms, there's whatever else, and then there's one done by a computer, and there's one played by a group of talentless fourteen year olds who've just got those instruments. And you said, what's the difference between those? They probably say, well, there's no difference. They all sound exactly the same. But we are hearing very very very fine distinctions between these things. We obviously care about and value these experiences in quite intense ways. And since I was about seventeen, I've been thinking about this question, what are we doing it for? What are we hearing? Why does it matter? We clearly can live without music, It's not like food. We can't live without food, and we can't live without clothes, and we can't live without communicating with other human beings. And there are all sorts of things we have to do. Music isn't one of them, Painting isn't one of them, Sculpture, none of those things that we call arts a thing that we have to do. So why are we doing them? And why is it so universal? We don't know of a culture that doesn't have music, Well, then then I'm not sure that we don't have to do it. If that's well, yes, yes, of course, I mean it's it's it's not functional in terms of survival. It doesn't seem we have never tried the experiment to take it away, but it seems to have some ability to allow us to feel or understand ourselves. The music isn't what's important. It's the reaction that's important. Yes, exactly, it's what is happening to us. Yeah, I imagine it when we tap into that in art, it makes us also feel less alone, not even that someone made it. But there's something out there that resonates with me, even if it's the paint. Yes, I'm not this this thing that doesn't understand itself. Here's something that is being reflected back that resonates with me. I feel a connections that it's maybe it's like love, might be like love. Now, I think this is such an important point that the thing that binds communities together is shared culture, and it's for exactly that reason. I think it's the knowledge that there are a group of other people who have these same feelings. You might not even be able to articulate them. But you know, I can remember this so strongly from when I was young, that you defined yourself almost by the set of feelings that you responded to. So, for instance, I remember it there was a time when you were either a Beatles fan or a Rolling Stones fan, and they were fundamentally different. They talked about a different kind of person. You know, doesn't matter that in the end day all in it up millionaires and it doesn't matter, it's not important. What was important was that they presented these two different pictures of the kinds of feelings that were appropriate to have about the world, and crossing over from one to the other was a big decision. I can remember people having real sort of identity crises about they were finding starting to find the Stones more exciting than the Beatles, and in fact they were starting to find the Beatles a bit sort of whimpy, or vice versa. Actually as well, it happened both ways. So I think you're right that you you tap into a sort of community of feelings and the sense that there are other people who value the same feelings that I value. That's sort of what it's about. Really, It's about saying these feelings have value for me, and there's a lot of others that don't. Yeah, there's also a great feeling in finding a new piece of art and sharing it with someone and enjoying it together is different than enjoying it yourself. There's a real sense of community in enjoying something that you know, we enjoy this, but maybe maybe many people don't, and that's fine. Yes, it's a great feeling of connection, and maybe that's maybe that's the greatest feeling of connection, is the feeling of these shared responses to stimuli. Yes, and incidentally, I think that's the that's the power of religion as well. The power of religion is not the connection with God, but the connection with the rest of the congregation. I think the connection with all of the people who also believe in that particular story. I'm not really religious myself, but I really respond to that idea. You know, I got into gospel music very young. In fact, when I came to America, I was by then a big gospel fan. And what surprised me was that all my hip friends thought it was quite embarrassing if they found a little bit a quaint or something that I liked gospel music. To me, it was just like Dooop had been. It was this amazing, exotic foreign music, and it really came straight through to me. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with more from Briany. Now we're back with the rest of Rick Rubin's conversation with Briany. Now, I've heard the story before of the moment of recognition or the need for what became ambient music based on the Cologne airport. Sitting in the Colone airport, how might it have been different if it would have happened in a natural space as opposed to a man made space. Well, the question really is would it have even occurred to me if I was in a natural space. I'm not sure that it would have done. It was because I was in an incredibly carefully manufactured space, beautiful airport where the architects had really looked at every detail, and the light was beautiful and the lines of the place were beautiful, and somebody in the cafe had put on a cassette of German disco music which was ringing through the airport. I mean, I wasn't postmodern enough at the time to accept that. I just thought, that's not right. That part hasn't been thought about. Everything else has been thought about, but nobody's thought about that. Now. It was a beautiful day and the airport was nearly empty, and I was sitting there bathe in light, and it was one of those cases like we were talking about earlier, where you think I wish there was another kind of music for this situation, and I started thinking, so what would that be? Like? You know, it's an airport, so you can't be too loud. Obviously, people have to hear announcements. It has to be interruptible for the same reason it shouldn't dominate the vocal register, because people need to communicate. So I just was sort of thinking this out, and quite soon I thought, right, I think I know what I could make that music. I know how I could do that. And that's how that first ambient record came about. I mean, it wasn't unprecedented. I had been working on music a little bit like that before, but I suddenly realized what its role in life could be. If you like, what the place of this music could be. I knew it wasn't dance music. I knew it wasn't radio music. It was functional, but I hadn't yet discovered the function. It was then that I thought, I know what this music could be for. Might there be other forms of ambient music for different use cases? Yes, I did a record called Narrowly. The subtitle was Music for Thinking. That really came out of a response. Well, first of all, hearing from a lot of particularly artists and graphic designers that they liked having my music playing when they were working. They didn't want conventional records which kept stopping and starting and the mood changing, and they were there was lyrics and they were kind of annoying. They didn't want classical music because it sort of felt too old. They liked this music that had this sort of directionless, atmospheric quality. So I thought, oh, good, so it's working. It's working functionally. So I thought, so what about when you want to sit and concentrate on something, You want to have something that kind of calms the world down a little bit around you, that softens, as Eric Sati said, softens the clink of fork against dinner plate or something like that. I forget the quote exactly, but you want something that is sort of a slight barrier to the noises of the world, and it becomes a barrier by sucking them into itself. And so that I came up with this piece Coordinarily, which is an hour long piece, which at that time was the longest I could make it. And I started thinking then about the idea of music that doesn't have a beginning or end, that just is theoretically infinite. Well, that didn't become possible until the nineties when I started working with computer and it was possible to make the kinds of programs I make now where where the music effectively never repeats. And my ambition always then was to try to make an experience a little bit like sitting by a river. So you're sitting by the river. It's always the same river, but as you know, it's never the same river twice, So every time you look up at the river, it's doing something a little bit different. Now, it's not like watching a film where suddenly the river turns blood red or gets much bigger or something like that. I didn't want drama. I just wanted something like nature, subtle variations. Subtle variations, yes, and variations that stay within a kind of range of possibilities and explore that range rather randomly. I just wanted the thing to be what Harold Bud used to call eternally pretty. That was his wif seting it. Dear Harold. He died about two months ago from COVID, very sad. So I dedicate this thought to Harold. So. Yes, So when Harold and I met, we were both pretty much on this groove of thinking, what about making music that isn't designed to upset anybody? Now, of course that sounds pretty uncontroversial now, but in the mid to late seventies that was considered to be the biggest sell out of all time. You know, music was supposed to shake the world and create revolutions and upset your parents and all sorts of things like that. And we thought, what about making music that is just really comfortable? Comfortable was probably the most controversial word you could use. Then what about music that makes you feel warm and friendly and open and able to surrender? When I realized that surrender was really the thing that I was interested in for that kind of music. Obviously, I don't only make that kind of music, but for that I wanted to make something that would make you think I can let something happen to me. I don't have to defend against everything. I can get out of that posture of self defense. If you think of the things that where we achieve transcendence. If you like or ecstasy, it's sex, drugs, art, and religion. Those are all the places where we say, I'm going to let go and just let this thing happen to me. I'm not going to control it. I'm going to be taken somewhere. Now, it's interesting to me that although we are constant trying to control, our biggest thrills come from letting go of control. And so what becomes obvious that is that it's the combination of those two that we should really be specializing in. We should and we should not forget the surrender part. We should not think that surrendering is passivity or cowardice or incompetence. We should say it's one of the ways we deal with the world. So I think art is the place where we go to have this feeling again, to remember that feeling of going with the flow, of letting something happen to us in real life. In the rest of life, I should say, we are still able to do that, we can remember that feeling. For me, there are certain I can see a film that has an energy in it that could affect me for months. Yes, and I'm very open to the energies contained in things, So I'm protective of what I watch for that reasons. I don't want to have a bad time. A lot of the time, I don't choose that. I just want to ask how sensitive you are in that respect. Yes, I think I'm very sensitive in that respect, and to the extent that certain experiences I don't want to have them very often because I don't want them to lose their power. So just about the single album that probably influenced me more than almost any other was the third Valve Underground album. That was a really, really important record in my life because so many things I had been wondering if they were possible suddenly appeared on that album, and also a lot of things I hadn't even conceived of. For that reason, I've never owned the album. I haven't even listened to it that many times because I really wanted it to retain that power. I didn't want it to become commonplace. Another piece like that is the Steve Ripe piece It's going to Rain, that tape piece from I think nineteen sixty four. That absolutely devastated me. The first time I heard it. I understood so many things about music that I had not even dreamed of before that piece, and I still regard it as a key moment in my life. And I think I've probably listened to it four times. It turned a switch, and the switch stayed turned. Yes, I didn't have to keep turning it again, you know, it stayed turned. In your evolution up to ambient music, it's fascinating to me that you could ever do anything different than that. Do you know what I'm saying? It's like it almost feels like that's the end of the line in terms of the minimalist approach. You you got there, so it's interesting that you do other things like you didn't do the Mandrean staying in the same language only. Yes, perhaps if I had carried on living in New York, I would have done because I would have always wanted more of that kind of music. But I've just had the very interesting experience of do you know about this Sonas project that I'm doing. I don't really tell me. Okay, Well, Sonas asked me to curate a channel for them. Basically it's like my own radio station, and I like the idea of that, but I thought, what I'd really like to do is to curate a station that plays only my music because I've got so much unreleased stuff. You know. I work in the studio every day pretty much, and some of it is just experiments where I try something out just to see what it would do if you tried to make a piece of music like that. And I have thousands of thousands of recordings like that. I just mix everything, you know. When I finished the day, I mix whatever I've done that day. Sometimes it can be five or six different pieces. Even so I have this vast library of stuff. Some of it is really quite interesting, and I thought, how nice would it be to have a radio channel where you just switch it on and outcome pieces of music that you've never heard before, will probably never hear again. And they're all quite different from one another. There's quite a range of stuff. Some of it is very ambient, some of it is very hard beat stuff, some of it's really electronic. Some of it is touchingly human, which is how you describe something that is rather amateur. So for the first time in my life, I thought, well, I'll just start listening through to those things. And so they play on random shuffle out of my computer, and I have to say, I so like the collisions, the strange combinations of things. You know, something from nineteen ninety one next to something I did last year next to something from twenty five, and no rationale to the choices that they're randomly selected. And although some of the music is pretty challenging, a lot of it is quite easy to listen to. And as I would say to people, you'll probably only hear at once, So if you don't like it, just wait, something else will come along soon. Yeah, I have one last question to ask, just because I'm really curious, what's your relationship to spirituality? Well, as you can tell from the way I talk too much, I think about this kind of thing quite a lot. What I always want to do is to cut away as much of the shit as possible and see what's left. So I don't want to be a believer. I want to be somebody who, as far as possible, understands and knows things. Believing things leaves me a little bit unsatisfied. If I find myself believing something, I want to test the belief. I want to say, how do I find out how valid this is? How true this is? Now? In real belief, in proper faith, you're not supposed to do that. Faith is supposed to be, by definition, the acceptance of something that you cannot find evidence for. If you can find evidence for, it's not faith anymore. It's called knowledge. Then. So this is a long way round of saying that I'm not anti spiritual, I'm not anti religion. Actually, in fact, I can see how religion really cements some communities together and really helps people in their lives. But I'm not by nature a believer, So it's difficult for me to use that kind of cement. My cement has to come from trying to understand things and to see how they work, and to share those ideas with other people. Yeah so, I think one one of the other things that surrendering prepares you for is the experience of uncertainty, the experience of not knowing the answer but still having to do something. You know, the fact that you don't know the answer can't cripple you. And of course a lot of people are crippled by not knowing the answer, and so they just choose an inappropriate answer just for the want of an answer. Yes, so, you just have to accept that you don't know the answers, and you will make mistakes, and you will need to change your values and your tools, and some of them might last you a lifetime. But you're lucky if that happens. I haven't got any that lasted me a lifetime. Thank you so much for doing this amazing pleasure speaking with you. Yes you too, I must say I really enjoyed that. Thanks to Brian Eno for sharing as artistic philosophy for us to hear a favorite Brian Eno tracks. Head to Broken Record podcast at part. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, a YouTube dot com slash a Broken Record podcast we can find all of our new episodes. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is produced a help from Lea Rose, Jason Gambrel, Martin Gonzalez, Eric Sandler, and Jennifer Sanchez, with engineering help from Nick Chaffee. Our executive producer is Mio Labella. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries and if you like the show, please remember to share. Rate interviewers coming a podcast. Our theme music's by Kenny Beats. I'm Justin Richard.