This comprehensive monograph celebrates the visual art of renowned musician Brian Eno. Spanning more than 40 years, Brian Eno: Visual Music weaves a dialogue between Eno's museum and gallery installations and his musical endeavors—all illustrated with never-before-published archival materials such as sketchbook pages, installation views, screenshots, and more. Steve Dietz, Brian Dillon, Roy Ascott, and William R. Wright contextualize Eno's contribution to new media art, while Eno himself shares insights into his process. Also included is a download code for a previously unreleased piece of music created by Eno, making this ebook a requisite for fans and collectors.
The diary and essays of Brian Eno republished twenty-five years on with a new introduction by the artist in a beautiful hardback edition.'One of the seminal books about music . . . an invaluable insight into the mind and working practices of one of the industry's undeniable geniuses.'GUARDIANAt the end of 1994, Brian Eno resolved to keep a diary. His plans to go to the cinema, theatre and galleries fell quickly to the wayside. What he did do - and write - however, was astonishing: ruminations on his collaborative work with David Bowie, U2, James and Jah Wobble, interspersed with correspondence and essays dating back to 1978. These 'appendices' covered topics from the generative and ambient music Eno pioneered to what he believed the role of an artist and their art to be, alongside adroit commentary on quotidian tribulations and happenings around the world.This beautiful 25th-anniversary hardcover edition has been redesigned in the same size as the diary that eventually became this book. It features two ribbons, pink paper delineating the appendices (matching the original edition) and a two-tone paper-over-board cover, which pays homage to the original design.An intimate insight into one of the most influential creative artists of our time, A Year with Swollen Appendices is an essential classic.
Musician, composer, producer: Brian Eno is unique in contemporary music. Best known in recent years for producing U2's sensational albums, Eno began his career as a synthesizer player for Roxy Music. He has since released many solo albums, both rock and ambient, written music for film and television soundtracks, and collaborated with David Bowie, David Byrne, Robert Fripp, and classical and experimental composers. His pioneering ambient sound has been enormously influential, and without him today's rock would have a decidedly different sound. Drawing on Eno's own words to examine his influences and ideas, this book—featuring a new afterword and an updated discography and bibliography—will long remain provocative and definitive.
Brian Eno's seminal album Ambient 1: Music for Airports continues to fascinate and charm audiences, not only as a masterpiece of ambient music, but as a powerful and transformative work of art. Author John T. Lysaker situates this album in the context of twentieth-century art music, where its ambitions and contributions to avant garde music practice become even more apparent. To appreciate the album's multifaceted character, Lysaker advocates for "prismatic listening," an attentiveness that continually shifts registers in the knowledge that no single approach can grasp the work as a whole. Exploring each of the album's four tracks and their unique sonic arrangements, Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports argues that the album must be approached from at least three angles: as an ambient contribution to lived environments that draws upon cybernetics and the experiments of Erik Satie, as an exploration of what John Cage has termed the "activity of sounds," and as a work of conceptual art that asks us to think freshly about artistic creativity, listening, and the broad ecology of interactions that not only make art possible, but the full range of human meaning. If one listens in this way, Music for Airports becomes a sonic image that blurs the nature-culture distinction and rescues the most interesting concerns of avant-garde music from the social isolation of concert halls and performance spaces.
'I started playing with light as a medium at about the same time I started playing with sound when a teenager.' In 2016 Paul Stolper Gallery in London presented an installation of seven light music boxes by the artist, musician and composer Brian Eno. This new exhibition of lightbox works explores the themes that inform and inspire Eno's particular vision of light and time manipulation. As the artist puts it, 'I have been trying to slow music down so it becomes more like painting, and to animate paintings so they become more like music.' Brian Eno's 'Light Music' uses lightboxes to seamlessly phase through an infinite combination of seductive self-generated 'colourscapes' using a series of interwoven LED lights, each accompanied by a unique musical composition. By extending temporal boundaries with a work that seemingly has no beginning or end, no finality, Eno 'encourages people to stay in one place for a while.' Alongside the light works are two lenticular works, 'Center Decenter' and 'Tender Divisor', which use a medium by which lenses give his printed image the illusion of both depth and the sense of animation, giving movement to what would otherwise be a static abstract shape, re-enforcing Eno's notion of a work 'which one can look at and walk away from as one would a painting: it sits still and you move.' Here, for the first time, numerous variations of the light pieces and lenticulars are reproduced together to create an artwork in itself, published for the first time in volume form. The works are accompanied by two specially commissioned essays by the artist and renowned critic and writer, Michael Bracewell.
The serene, delicate songs on Another Green World sound practically meditative, but the album itself was an experiment fueled by adrenaline, panic, and pure faith. It was the first Brian Eno album to be composed almost completely in the confines of a recording studio, over a scant few months in the summer of 1975. The album was a proof of concept for Eno's budding ideas of "the studio as musical instrument," and a signpost for a bold new way of thinking about music. In this book, Geeta Dayal unravels Another Green World's abundant mysteries, venturing into its dense thickets of sound. How was an album this cohesive and refined formed in such a seemingly ad hoc way? How were electronics and layers of synthetic treatments used to create an album so redolent of the natural world? How did a deck of cards figure into all of this? Here, through interviews and archival research, she unearths the strange story of how Another Green World formed the link to Eno's future -- foreshadowing his metamorphosis from unlikely glam rocker to sonic painter and producer.
FOREWORD BY ALAN WARNER 'A book that sets new standards for rock biography' Guardian Reissued as part of White Rabbit's Deep Cuts series, On Some Faraway Beach is the first and only ever comprehensive and authoritative biography of Brian Eno, featuring interviews with many of his key collaborators over the years: from Bryan Ferry to David Byrne and Robert Wyatt. First published in 2008, it has been fully revised and updated to cover Eno's life and creative output since, with brand new material and a new introduction by Alan Warner. 'This exceptionally well-written biography duly celebrated [Eno's] great achievements with Roxy, Bowie, Talking Heads and his own solo work in compelling detail' Uncut '[An] honourable, authorised attempt to do justice to a mind-bogglingly restless and prolific subject' Sunday Times
