Wired Interviews Brian Eno

Wired Interviews Brian Eno

Brian Eno is definitely one of my favorite Advanced artists. Here’s a nice excerpt from the beginning of the interview in regards to generative music:

Wired News: What drew you toward working with generative art and generative music?

Brian Eno: Well, part of it is that it’s an extremely good value (laughter) because it was possible to make a lot of work from a very small amount of original material. That was one thing I found very interesting, because once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music — not like a record that you’d put on and which would play for a while and finish. I like the idea of a kind of eternal music, but I didn’t want it to be eternally repetitive, either. I wanted it to be eternally changing. So I developed two ideas in that way. Discreet Music was like that and Music for Airports. What you hear on the recordings is a little part of one of those processes working itself out. Theoretically, the processes were infinite but unfortunately, recordings aren’t of infinite length. So you sort of had a diagram, or really you got a “still” from the piece. That was really the best way of explaining it.

(Via Advanced Theory.)