In the music business, Brian Eno is a name to conjure with. He’s been the producer of tremendous hits by U2, Talking Heads, David Bowie, Grace Jones, Coldplay, and many other top artists. But he’s also a conceptualist, nicknamed Professor Eno in the British music press, and a foundational figure in ambient music—a genre whose very name Eno coined. Amanda Petrusich speaks with Eno about his two new albums that just came out, “Luminal” and “Lateral,” and his new book, “What Art Does.” “One of the realizations I had when I was writing this book is that really the only product of art is feelings,” Eno says. “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 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.”
Chapter 1: Who is Brian Eno and what is his influence in music?
This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. For decades, Brian Eno has been a hugely influential figure in the music business, particularly in the studio. He's produced hit after hit with U2, Talking Heads, David Bowie, Grace Jones, and many, many others. But he's also known as a kind of musical philosopher, a guru of the soundboard.
Here's The New Yorker's music critic, Amanda Petrusich.
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.
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.
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.
Amanda Petrusich spoke with Brian Eno about two new records that have just come out and his new book, 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?
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Chapter 2: What fundamental questions does Brian Eno raise about art?
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.
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?
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.
That's your guidance. That's your lodestone, as it were.
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.
You write, the raw, wild world develops and leaves us behind playing solitaire on our phones.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 3: How does Brian Eno define the purpose of art?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Brian Eno, speaking with The New Yorker's Amanda Petrusich. More in a moment.
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Chapter 4: What are the themes explored in Brian Eno's new albums?
Chapter 5: What is the significance of surrendering in art according to Eno?
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.
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.
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.
Brian Eno, speaking with The New Yorker's Amanda Petrusich. More in a moment.
Chapter 6: How does Brian Eno connect art with human experiences?
It might be enticing to try and sleep through the next four years. But if you're wondering how to survive a second Trump term while staying fully conscious, Pod Save America is here to help you process what's happening now and what comes next.
I'm Jon Favreau and Tommy Vitor, Jon Lovett and Dan Pfeiffer and I wade hip deep into the week's political news and fish out some political analysis you can trust. Yes, Tommy's shoes get ruined. Yes, he'll do it again tomorrow because the endeavor is worth it. And so is your sanity. Tune into Pod Save America wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube.
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.
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.
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...
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
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?
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.
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.
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Chapter 7: What is the relationship between play and art as per Eno?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
This is, of course, ironic coming from the author of Music for Airports. Yes.
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.
I don't have to fly very often at all.
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