Brian Eno
Appearances
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
whatever else you distract yourself with, you lose the possibility of your threshold of interest falling so low that you can notice a tiny thing.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
I try to do things because I want to do them, not because they're just a little tiny bit better than sitting looking at the wall. I really try to now just sit and look at the wall. If you don't provide input...
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
If you want things to come up from inside you, all of the accumulated knowledge and information and experience that you have, if you want that to manifest itself, you have to stop trying to stuff more stuff in at that moment. You have to give it space to come up. You can't do both things at once, I think.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
It wasn't an absolute choice. So since I made that decision, which was about seven years ago now, seven or eight years ago, I've taken four plane journeys. So I suddenly feel I've been liberated from ever having to go to airports again.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
I know. But more importantly, I feel that All of us could make a lot less flights. It's not such a hard decision to make in Europe. It would be harder in America, I think. I mean, it's a very personal decision. And I can't, in all honesty, say to everybody else, you should stop flying because people have different lives and different needs. But I can stop flying pretty much all of the time.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
Well, America. I mean, I lived in America for a while, and I have some good friends in America. And also, there are places I've never been. I've never been to India. So yeah, there's a lot of the world I'd like to see, but there's all sorts of things I've missed in my life, and I don't really worry too much about that fact.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
I was an art student. I went to art school for five years. And in fact, I got my degree in fine art. And like many others of my generation, I then immediately joined a band. Of course. Funny. That's how it worked then. And I was always interested in this fundamental question of why do we make art?
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
Well, one of the themes of my work, I think, is economy, is trying to see how much you can do with how little. And I really like that feeling. I've been working with BT Wolf and we've just used one guitar. And I always love that challenge of saying, let's just accept what is here at the moment and make the best of it.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
I'm not the kind of person who thinks I'm not going to work in any studio that doesn't have 16 ancient compressors and 14 fabulous old German microphones and so on. I just don't think like that. I always think that... Every moment in your life is a unique set of circumstances, unique both in what it has and in what it lacks.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
And if you make your work out of the moments in your life, then every piece of music will be different. Everything comes from a different place. I reject the idea that you have to standardize the working conditions before you can do any work. I often listen back to things that I've done in the past, and I think I have no idea how I did that.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
I listened to an old song of mine the other day, and I realized there was a quite complicated set of similar sounds that went through the song at a particular rhythm. Now, I know that I didn't consciously put them there, but somehow or other, those patterns appear. Now, I don't think they originated from God.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
I think they originated from somewhere in me, which led me to wonder, is it somewhere in me that people call God? You know, is God a name for those inaccessible or unknown parts of yourself that do things, that make decisions that you don't even know about, that the conscious part of your mind doesn't know about? Anyway, that's rather a long question for... a program like this.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
Thank you very much, Amanda. It's been a real pleasure meeting you as well. I hope there's another chance that we can do that sometime.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
It's a completely universal human activity, but we don't seem to know very much about it at that fundamental level. This question, I've been aware of it for ages, that people think art is a luxury. We're very used to the idea that humans respond to pain and punishment. We avoid things that are going to hurt us. But I think we're also guided to a huge degree by the things that we find beautiful.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
or awesome, or striking, or impressive, or all the words we might use. I think we very much want to be guided by those things as to where to go. My friend John Hassel, who died, unfortunately, three years ago, I think now, used to have a great phrase. He said, one of the most important questions you can ask yourself is, what is it that I really like?
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
And that seems like a trivial, self-indulgent sort of question. Oh, what do you really like? Well, but it isn't actually because, you know, we live in a world now where 10,000 people a day are trying to tell us what we ought to like. Be they advertisers, press barons, TV companies, politicians, influencers. It's very, very important that you remember. what it is that you actually really like.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
That's your guidance. That's your lodestone, as it were.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
When I started to notice that nearly all of the things that humans regard as peak experiences – you know, being bowled over by a piece of music, being knocked out by a sculpture or a dance or something like that – so love, art, religion, sex, drugs – All of those things are situations where we willingly let something happen to us that is slightly beyond our ability to comprehend and control.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
We surrender. I think a lot of the art experience is about surrendering. And that's the point. The whole point is being moved, having feelings. One of the realizations I had... when I was writing this book, is that really the only product of art is feelings.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
Its main point is to make your feelings change, is to give you feelings that you perhaps didn't have before or did have before and want to have again or want to experiment with. So And it seems very simplistic to say, oh, it's all about feelings. But actually, I think it is. Feelings are overlooked by all of those people who think bright children shouldn't do art.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
They're the same people who think that feelings are the sort of irrelevant part of life. sort of simple-minded and inarticulate and can't be quantified. Feelings are rather slippery, undefinable stuff. I think feelings are the beginning of everything. It's our first line of contact with the world.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
I'm glad you did. There is some optimism. I mean, I am pessimistic in the short term. Things really are looking quite bad. And what I noticed, though, that as things are getting worse… People are getting organized too. And what it seems to me now is needed is some kind of coalescence. I often quote this Russian writer. He's a Russian sort of social historian, I guess you'd say.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
His name is Sergei Yurchak. He says, revolutions happen in two phases. The first is when somebody realizes that everything is not working. The second is when they realize that everybody else realizes the same thing. And that's the important moment. The important moment is when you suddenly realize that you all agree that it's fucked. Sorry. So I think we're reaching that point now.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
You know, I think you're the first person who's connected the two projects and they are connected in my mind. I think what I'm really interested in is doing something that helps people. And I didn't want it to be technical or just another art book. If you want another art book, there's plenty of them. I wanted something that you could really internalize.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
For instance, this notion of play that runs through the book. We all understand that children learn through playing. So I thought, what happens to the play impulse in people? And I suddenly had this flash. Play is how children learn. Art is how adults play.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
In fact, when we go to the theatre, when we read a novel, when we go to a gallery, when we watch a dance, I think we're learning about important things when we do those things. And We're still playing, actually. We just give that kind of playing a different name. We call it art. It's a sort of simulator. The reason you have flight simulators is because you want to be able to crash.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
And I think art is very often a simulator in that way. You can experience what an unhappy marriage is like. by reading about it, without having to have an unhappy marriage. You can experience the terror in revolutionary France without having to have your head chopped off. If you can, do it first in art and then give it a try in real life. Yes, yes. That's maybe the best advice of all.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
Okay, so I'll tell you first of all the kind of physical difference between the two records. The first one, Luminal, is a group of songs. The second one, Lateral, is a single long piece. It's more like a space, as I always think about with ambient music. It's a place that you go to. I like to think of these pieces of music as feelings that you go into.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
I notice that when I want to sit down to write, for example, I wanted to listen to something, but nothing seemed to be right. I wanted something that was just a nice sonic condition. In the same way, perhaps, that you might adjust the lighting in a room. What's the musical equivalent of that? What would a music be that was like that? And on the first ambient...
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
record that or the first record that i called ambient i said the music should be as ignorable as it is interesting so i wanted it i want to make a kind of music that you could surrender to or ignore and when you ignored it it shouldn't demand your attention
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
I think there is, and I think it lies in the particular nature of sound that you're working with. From the 20th century onwards, we have a huge, huge palette, new ways of making sound that produce new types of sound that nobody ever, ever heard before. And so I think a lot of composition now is an experiment with trying to digest all of those new sonic possibilities.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
If you think, for instance, about the other pole of ambient music, I always think is heavy metal. So it's another form of immersive music. It's, of course, in terms of feeling quite different from ambient music generally, but I still think it is a kind of ambient music. It's a bath of sound. I've seen heavy metal music being recorded, so I can tell you this.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
What really matters is the exact texture of sound, the exact type of distortion, the exact type of compression. I think that's very much what ambient music was built on, the notion that there was this new way of composing.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
There's a nice German one. It's probably my favorite and something I think I feel quite often, which is called Turchlusspanik, which means door-shutting panic. So it's that feeling you've got that you're trying to get something done and the door is closing and you're not going to get there quite in time to ever do it. It's a terrible feeling. Brutal.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
Yes. The feelings that I think are very, very easy to locate in sound are sort of melancholy and the sparkle of new life. I often hear those things in sound. I have never yet, I don't think, heard anything that captured the feeling of boredom. And I'm disappointed in that because there's a great line in the Tibetan... leader Chögyam Trungpa's book where he said we should
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”
rush forward into boredom and disappointment. And I've tried to do that, but I don't think I've succeeded yet. I like this idea that those might be places where you can learn something unique. I mean, I do think boredom is very important. If you keep throwing, getting boredom out of the way by distracting yourself with Wordle or