Zane Lowe meets with Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Brian Eno at his home studio to explore the fresh and unconventional artistic theories in his latest book, What Art Does. Eno reflects on his early days with the English rock band Roxy Music and its influence on generative art. The acclaimed composer also delves into the sweeping effects of AI on society and what the future holds for technology in creative spaces.
Additionally, Today Eno released a new digital album called Aurum – a collection of ten incredible compositions all available in immersive Spatial Audio exclusively on Apple Music. The Zane Lowe Show on Apple Music 1 shared the following excepts:
Brian Eno tells Apple Music about his early years with Roxy Music: Brian Eno: I was thinking the other day that when Roxy started, rock and roll was about 16 years old. If you think of it, 1955 is probably when you can say it started with Bill Haley, and rhythm and blues just becoming rock and roll, Little Richard, that kind of thing. 1955, ’56. So that seemed like ancient history to us when we started Roxy Music, and now, what is that, that’s 70 years ago. I suppose what I remember most was people saying, “Well, of course it won’t last. It’s a fad.” And I was surprised that it lasted actually. I didn’t expect to still be doing something like this at my age. I didn’t expect to ever reach my age actually.
Zane Lowe: Wow, and yet here you are busier than ever, and so much that I want to talk about. Thanks so much for doing the radio show with us on [Apple Music] Chill and such a beautiful experience this week… It was lovely to hear this beautiful framework, for lack of a better term, that you’ve created in order to create generative music. But it’s by design, but it also I’m sure creates surprise for you.
Brian Eno: Yeah. I think the misconceptions people have about artists is that artists walk around with unrealized things in their head, and the process of being an artist is making those become real. But I don’t really know any artists who work that way. You might have an idea of where you want to start, but the process of making something is the process of you starting to understand it as well. You find your way through making it, not you’ve got it all in your head. We are not architects, essentially. Architects have to plan it all in advance because otherwise the things fall down. But in art, it doesn’t matter if it all falls down.
Brian Eno tells Apple Music about the impact AI has made on society and the future of technology:
The biggest problem for me about AI is not intrinsic to AI. It’s to do with the fact that it’s owned by the same few people, and I have less and less interest in what those people think, and more and more criticisms of what the effect of their work has been. I think social media has been a catastrophe and mildly useful at the same time. It’s possible for both things to coexist, but I think in terms of what it’s done to societies, it’s been a catastrophe. What it’s done to politics has been completely toxic. Again, that could have been avoided, I think. If it had started out in a not-for-profit regime, it would’ve been different, because maximize engagement wouldn’t have been the headline of the whole project. Maximizing engagement is just another word for maximize profit. If that’s your intention, then you get what we got, just like in the American food industry is maximize profit, which is why you have a lot of very, very unhealthy people.
Talking about AI itself, I’ve always been happy to welcome new technologies and to see what you could do with them that nobody else thought of doing with them, and what things they could do, other than those that they were designed for, because with all music technology, it’s always very interesting that stuff is designed for one reason, and then people start to find new things they could do that are completely beyond what the designer was thinking about. Distortion is a good example. Distortion is, in a way, the sound of popular music, a lot of the things that we find uniquely exciting to do with equipment kind of going wrong. That’s quite a bizarre thought, isn’t it? That you design equipment to do this. Then, you start using it to do something else, which it doesn’t do very well, and you get to like the sound of the not very wellness.
Brian Eno tells Apple Music about overcoming “writer’s block”:
Brian Eno: Picasso once said that inspiration does come, but it has to find you working… So, I think if you think you’ve got writer’s block-
Zane Lowe: Get to work.
Brian Eno: Just get to work and try doing something mundane maybe. Don’t try to write the Great American novel. Try to write a nice letter to a friend or something like that. Just get something going. You have to get the thing running again. It’s like, if you’re an athlete, you have to practice every day. You don’t just wait until the day of the race and think, “Oh. I better get limbered up.” You are in shape the whole time, so a lot of this is me staying in shape, but it means that I have, let me see, how many pieces do I now have in here?
10,550 tracks equates to a listening time of 44 days, 8 hours, 38 minutes, and 28 seconds, starting now. The first thing I thought was, “Well, I need an archive that can take me through those in interesting ways, because I wouldn’t remember the name of anything. The first thing we made was quite a simple idea. Imagine that I was tidying up or something in that room or writing to somebody or something like that, but I want my archive to be flashing past all the time, so now I’ve set it so that every two seconds it’s going to change to another piece.
Brian Eno tells Apple Music about the core principle in his latest book “What Art Does”
Zane Lowe: That gets back to the principle of what you talk about in the book, which is, what do you like?
Brian Eno: Yeah. What is it you really like?
Zane Lowe: The quote that kind of, I guess, has guided you all the way through.
Brian Eno: I think that is such an important question. And people think it’s about self-indulgence, or selfishness, or something like that. But it isn’t really. It’s about, where is your attention? Where does your attention want to be?
As I said earlier, in a world where everything is trying to claim your attention to sell you something, or to get you to vote for something, or to believe in something, what your attention wants to do is very important. And it just is constantly being bombarded by other demands. You know? “No, no, you should look at this.” “Hey, this is really interesting.” “Hey, you’d like this.”
And to sort of say, “Okay, hold on. What was it that I liked? What was the thing that really mattered to me?” And the things that really matter to you can be even quite trivial things. You know? Like, I like cooking my eggs in a certain way. Or it can be, “I really care about what’s going on in Gaza now, even though the newspapers don’t think of it as a story any longer.”
But you really ought to be the shepherd of your own attention. You can’t let that be stolen from you. And I think this is one of the, I was saying that one of the primary qualities of an artist, I think, is stubbornness. And that’s what the stubbornness is about. It’s about refusing to have your attention stolen from you.
Tune in and listen to the full episode this Thursday, March 20, at 10am PT / 1pm ET or anytime on demand with an Apple Music subscription here
