Brian Eno is many things to many people: composer, producer, songwriter, painter, videographer, cultural theorist and more. But the self-confessed “non-musician” is perhaps best known for his role as an ambient pioneer, beginning with such 70s landmarks as Discreet Music and Music For Airports. Along the way, he’s rammed his CV with the great and the good of the past four decades, from Robert Fripp, Cluster and Genesis to David Bowie, Laurie Anderson and Harold Budd.
His propagation of generative music, a system that blends disparate tracks into an infinite set of combinations, has extended into his work as a visual artist. 2006’s 77 Million Paintings, for example, used video and music as a self-generative model for PCs. Eno has also applied his ambient aesthetic to software for video games and iPhone technology, as well as composing the start-up music for Microsoft’s Windows 95 operating system. Whether you’re aware of it or not, chances are that your life has some Eno in it somewhere.
