Brian Eno

Brian Eno (b. 1948) studied painting and experimental music at Ipswich School of Art in the mid-1960s before completing a fine art diploma at Winchester School of Art in 1969. He joined Roxy Music as synthesizer player in 1971, appearing on their first two albums before leaving in 1973 over disagreements with Bryan Ferry. His 1975 album Discreet Music established the minimalist, slowly-evolving language he named on Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978), defining ambient music as sound that “must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular.” With painter Peter Schmidt he developed Oblique Strategies, a deck of aphorism cards for breaking creative deadlocks, and in 1995–96 worked with the software company Intermorphic on Koan, bringing his generative-music ideas — pieces that compose infinite, non-repeating variations from a set of rules — to home listeners for the first time. He improvised two albums directly with Cluster, Cluster & Eno (1977) and After the Heat (1978), having already sat in with their offshoot trio Harmonia in 1974.