Amanda Petrusich
Appearances
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
I love that. You know, and boredom feels like a kind of endangered resource. But I think you're right. It is such a generative experience if you can surrender to it.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
Speaking of restricting our inputs, I wanted to ask you about the decision to stop traveling by airplane as a form of climate protest. Can you talk a little bit more about that choice?
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
Is there a particular place or perhaps places that you miss or things that have maybe made the choice challenging to uphold?
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
I'm curious if you try to sort of keep, in terms of your climate activism, if it's a balance in terms of allowing it to kind of manifest in your creative work, it's present in the music you make, and then also present in your personal life and, you know, choices about travel or sort of how you live, how your house is set up. Do you try to keep those two things in balance?
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
Brian, I just want to thank you so much for speaking with me. It's been so wonderful talking with you. I appreciate it deeply.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
Brian, you're giving me goosebumps. You're right. It is in many ways the only question that matters. And it reminds me, it brings me back to love, which is an experience that requires surrender, which is another theme in the book. And you point out that a fixation on control ultimately makes a person's world very small.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
You write, the raw, wild world develops and leaves us behind playing solitaire on our phones.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
In 2022, you said, I think we're in for a hard ride for maybe half a century. Then it will either be the end of civilization or a reborn humanity. And it seems to me so far that you are right. But I wanted to ask you a little bit about some of your advocacy and particularly your climate advocacy, because I think the enormity of some of these problems can lead people to just panic and freeze.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
Although I think I sense something in the book and in the new music and in some of the work you've been doing. More recently, I feel like I sense a bit of optimism as well.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
Brian Eno is an English musician and producer whose career is so vast and adventurous it really can't be easily encapsulated. But here's my best shot. After leaving the glam rock band Roxy Music in the early 70s, he released a series of extraordinary solo records.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
I did want to just sort of briefly return to the book before we move on, which for me exists in kind of a lovely dialogue, I think, with Oblique Strategies, which is a set of cards you made with Peter Schmidt in 1975. And it is quite literally a box of cards. each printed with an aphorism of some sort designed to help artists move through a creative challenge.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
You know, I have found you can kind of use them almost as like a tarot deck. And, you know, this morning I pulled the one that said, give way to your worst impulse, which I am doing. My worst impulse is to ask you very long questions that sort of trail off at the end.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
And I'm curious for you if you see the book and the cards as part of the same project, by which I mean the kind of project of setting people free.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
Somewhere along the way, he essentially invented, or at the very least named, ambient music, which is what we now call any minimalist electronic composition. But for me, it's really just kind of a thing that you feel in your body, in all the soft and tender places that go untouched by thought. That idea of tapping into something less thinky and more instinctive is present in everything Eno does.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
I did want to talk to you about the two new records, Luminal and Lateral, that you made with Beatty Wolf. You've described Luminal as dream music and Lateral as space music. And I was hoping you could talk a little bit more about that distinction.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
When you're collaborating with someone else, you know, when you're collaborating with BD on this record, you do this often, of course, in your career as a producer. Is there a way in which you can kind of reliably create an environment that more effectively leads to or suggests surrender that kind of accelerates intimacy in a way that makes it easier for people to open up to each other?
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
You know, when I received the records, they included a list of feelings that inspired you and BD. And some of them were words I didn't know from languages I don't speak. And I found many of them overwhelmingly beautiful, in part because they are complicated.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
You know, like onzra, which is a borough word for a kind of doomed love, or the Arabic word ya'aberni, which you define as not wanting to live in a world without someone. Yeah. I mean, these are words that do sort of attempt maybe to kind of contain the complexity of human experience.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
Eno's work has been a funny kind of North Star in my life. He's someone who's obviously thought quite deeply about art and love and culpability and desire and duty and risk and what it means to honor the very wild fact of your existence.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
Well, this leads me to ask, are there some feelings that are more easily evoked by sound? I mean, we know anger is a big one. Are there any feelings that are maybe particularly difficult to tap into? On that end, I think contentment or boredom are maybe a little bit harder to translate into sound than rage or lust.