(2014-07-07) Ambient Genius

Ambient Genius. In January, 1975, the musician Brian Eno and the painter Peter Schmidt released a set of flash cards they called “Oblique Strategies.

Eno, who still uses the rules, says, “ ‘Oblique Strategies’ evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation—particularly in studios—tended to make me quickly forget that there were other ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach.”

Eno is widely known for coining the term “ambient music,”

The genius of Eno is in removing the idea of genius. His work is rooted in the power of collaboration within systems: instructions, rules, and self-imposed limits. His methods are a rebuke to the assumption that a project can be powered by one person’s intent, or that intent is even worth worrying about. To this end, Eno has come up with words like “scenius,” which describes the power generated by a group of artists who gather in one place at one time.

In 1970, Eno ran into the saxophonist Andy Mackay, a friend he’d met while at Winchester

The band began rehearsing in Eno’s house, with Eno acting as “sound manipulator,” a cross between a live-sound engineer and a band member. The outfit’s leader, Bryan Ferry, eventually chose the name Roxy Music.

The credits for “Another Green World” make it clear that Eno was almost as interested in changing the language of rock as he was in saying anything specific

Through friends, Eno heard about No Wave, then the dominant style for downtown bands who were taking punk to its logical extremes—abandoning song form, playing entirely outside of formal tunings, and foregrounding noise over signal.

Right around the release of “No New York,” Eno produced “Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!,” the début by Devo, the visionary band from Ohio. Producing DNA, Devo, and Talking Heads in the same year shows impeccable taste

Devo’s Jerry Casale told the Guardian, in 2009, that the band found Eno’s approach “wanky.” “We were into brute, nasty realism and industrial-strength sounds and beats,” Casale said. “We didn’t want pretty. Brian was trying to add beauty to our music.”

What became increasingly clear in the seventies was that Eno’s embrace of possibility and chance wasn’t as free-form as it seemed—it was a specific aesthetic

In fact, as Eno found more ways for technology to carry out his beloved generative rules, his music became less and less like rock music and closer to a soundtrack for meditation.

In the liner notes of “Ambient 1: Music for Airports” (1978), Eno wrote, “Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”

in some ways, history and technology have accomplished what Eno did not. With the disappearance of the central home stereo, and the rise of earbuds, MP3s, and the mobile, around-the-clock work cycle, music is now used, more often than not, as background music. Aggressive music can now be as forgettable as ambient music.

Eno brought an early version of the piece to a gallery in the Palace of Venaria, near Turin. He said that the gallery, a long space connecting two wings, is “all stone and glass, so it’s very echoey.” The first version of the piece didn’t work in the space, so Eno began reworking it. He used the “convolution reverb” feature of the popular music-programming software Logic Pro. It allows you to record a sound—like a handclap—in a space, and then produce a simulation of that space’s natural resonance. In the privacy of his London studio, Eno could play sounds “in” the Venaria gallery. He found a certain register, between three and five kilohertz, that “really seemed to sing in that space,” and directed the piece toward that range

“I have a trick that I used in my studio, because I have these twenty-eight-hundred-odd pieces of unreleased music, and I have them all stored in iTunes,” Eno said during his talk at Red Bull. “When I’m cleaning up the studio, which I do quite often—and it’s quite a big studio—I just have it playing on random shuffle. And so, suddenly, I hear something and often I can’t even remember doing it.