David Remnick: This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. For decades, Brian Eno has been a hugely influential figure in the music business, particularly in the studio. He's produced hit after hit with U2, Talking Heads, David Bowie, Grace Jones, and many, many others. He's also known as a kind of musical philosopher, a guru of the soundboard. Here's The New Yorker's music critic Amanda Petrusich.

Amanda Petrusich: Brian Eno is an English musician and producer whose career is so vast and adventurous it really can't be easily encapsulated. Here's my best shot: after leaving the glam rock band Roxy Music in the early '70s, he released a series of extraordinary solo records. Somewhere along the way, he essentially invented, or at the very least named, ambient music, which is what we now call any minimalist electronic composition. For me, is really just kind of a thing that you feel in your body, in all the soft and tender places that go untouched by thought.

That idea of tapping into something less thinky and more instinctive is present in everything Eno does. Eno's work has been a funny kind of North Star in my life. He's someone who's obviously thought quite deeply about art and love and culpability and desire and duty and risk and what it means to honor the very wild fact of your existence.

David Remnick: Amanda Petrusich spoke with Brian Eno about two new records that have just come out in his new book, What Art Does.

Brian Eno: I was an art student. I went to art school for five years, and in fact, I got my degree in fine art. Like many others of my generation, I then immediately joined a band.

[laughter]

Amanda Petrusich: Of course.

Brian Eno: Funny that that's how it worked then. I was always interested in this fundamental question of why do we make art? It's a completely universal human activity, but we don't seem to know very much about that fundamental level. This question, I've been aware of it for ages, that people think art is a luxury. We're very used to the idea that humans respond to pain and punishment. We avoid things that are going to hurt us.

I think we're also guided to a huge degree by the things that we find beautiful, or awesome, or striking, or impressive or all the words we might use. I think we very much want to be guided by those things as to where to go. My friend John Hassell, who died unfortunately three years ago, I think, now, used to have a great phrase. He said, "One of the most important questions you can ask yourself is, 'What is it that I really like?'" That seems like a trivial, self-indulgent sort of question. "Oh, what do you really like?" Well, but it isn't actually, because-

Amanda Petrusich: No.

Brian Eno: -we live in a world now where 10,000 people a day are trying to tell us what we ought to like, be they advertisers, press barons, TV companies, politicians, influencers. It's very, very important that you remember what it is that you actually really like. That's your guidance. That's your lodestone, as it were.

Amanda Petrusich: Brian, you're giving me goosebumps. You're right. It is in many ways the only question that matters. It reminds me, well, it brings me back to love, which is an experience that requires surrender, which is another theme in the book. You point out that a fixation on control ultimately makes a person's world very small. You write, "The raw, wild world develops and leaves us behind playing solitaire on our phones."

Brian Eno: When I started to notice that nearly all of the things that humans regard as peak experiences, being bowled over by a piece of music, being knocked out by a sculpture or a dance, or something like that, so love, art, religion, sex, drugs, all of those things are situations where we willingly let something happen to us that is slightly beyond our ability to comprehend and control. We surrender. I think a lot of the art experience is about surrendering. That's the point. The whole point is being moved, having feelings.

One of the realizations I had when I was writing this book is that, really, the only product of art is feelings. Its main point is to make your feelings change, is to give you feelings that you perhaps didn't have before or did have before and want to have again, or want to experiment with. It seems very simplistic to say, "Oh, it's all about feelings," but actually I think it is.

Feelings are overlooked by all of those people who think bright children shouldn't do art. They're the same people who think that feelings are the irrelevant part of life, sort of simple-minded and inarticulate, and can't be quantified. Feelings are rather slippery, undefinable stuff. I think feelings are the beginning of everything. It's our first line of contact with the world.

[MUSIC- Brian Eno & Beatie Wolfe: Suddenly ]

Suddenly, I feel so free again

Nothing but symphonies rushing in

With a warm touch and a soft blush

Waking the feeling within

Amanda Petrusich: In 2022, you said, "I think we're in for a hard ride for maybe half a century. Then it will either be the end of civilization or a reborn humanity." It seems to me so far that you are right. I wanted to ask you a little bit about some of your advocacy and particularly your climate advocacy, because I think the enormity of some of these problems can lead people to just panic and freeze. Although I think I sense something in the book and in the new music and in some of the work you've been doing more recently, I feel like I sense a bit of optimism as well.

Brian Eno: I'm glad you did. [chuckles] There is some optimism. I am pessimistic. In the short term, things really are looking quite bad. What I notice, though, that as things are getting worse, people are getting organized, too. What it seems to me now is needed is some kind of coalescence. I often quote this Russian writer. He's a Russian social historian, I guess you'd say. His name is Sergei Yurchak. He says revolutions happen in two phases.

The first is when somebody realizes that everything is not working. The second is when they realize that everybody else realizes the same thing. That's the important moment. The important moment is when you suddenly realize that you all agree that it's fucked. Sorry. I think we're reaching that point now.

Amanda Petrusich: I did want to just briefly return to the book before we move on, which for me exists in a lovely dialogue, I think, with Oblique Strategies, which is a set of cards you made with Peter Schmidt in 1975. It is quite literally a box of cards, each printed with an aphorism of some sort designed to help artists move through a creative challenge. I have found you can kind of use them almost as a Tarot deck. This morning I pulled the one that said, "Give way to your worst impulse," which I am doing. My worst impulse is to ask you very long questions that trail off at the end. I'm curious for you if you see the book and the cards as part of the same project, by which I mean the kind of project of setting people free.

Brian Eno: I think you're the first person who's connected the two projects, and they are connected in my mind. I think what I'm really interested in is doing something that helps people. I didn't want it to be technical or just another art book. If you want another art book, there's plenty of them. I wanted something that you could really internalize. For instance, this notion of play that runs through the book.

We all understand that children learn through playing. I thought, "What happens to the play impulse in people?" I suddenly had this flash. Play is how children learn. Art is how adults play. In fact, when we go to the theater, when we read a novel, when we go to a gallery, when we watch a dance, I think we're learning about important things when we do those things. We're still playing, actually, we just give that kind of playing a different name. We call it art.

It's a sort of simulator. The reason you have flight simulators is because you want to be able to crash. I think art is very often a simulator in that way. You can experience what an unhappy marriage is like by reading about it without having to have an unhappy marriage. You can experience the terror in revolutionary France without having to have your head chopped off. If you can do it first in art, and then give it a try in real life. [laughs]

Amanda Petrusich: Yes. Yes. That's maybe the best advice of all. I did want to talk to you about the two new records, Luminal and Lateral, that you made with Beatie Wolfe. You've described Luminal as dream music and Lateral as space. I was hoping you could talk a little bit more about that distinction.

Brian Eno: Okay, so I'll tell you, first of all, the kind of physical difference between the two records. The first one, Luminal, is a group of songs. The second one, Lateral, is a single long piece. It's more like a space, as I always think about with ambient music. It's a place that you go to. I like to think of these pieces of music as feelings that you go into. I noticed that when I wanted to sit down to write, for example, I wanted to listen to something, but nothing seemed to be right.

I wanted something that was just a nice sonic condition. In the same way, perhaps, that you might adjust the lighting in a room. What's the musical equivalent of that? What would a music be that was like that? On the first ambient record, or the first record that I called ambient, I said the music should be as ignorable as it is interesting. I want to make a kind of music that you could surrender to or ignore. When you ignored it, it shouldn't demand your attention.

Amanda Petrusich: When you're collaborating with someone else, when you're collaborating with Beatie on this record, you do this often, of course, in your career as a producer. Is there a way in which you can reliably create an environment that more effectively leads to or suggests surrender? That kind of accelerates intimacy in a way that makes it easier for people to open up to each other?

Brian Eno: I think there is, and I think it lies in the particular nature of sound that you're working with. From the 20th century onwards, we have a huge, huge palette, new ways of making sound that produce new types of sound that nobody ever, ever heard before. I think a lot of composition now is an experiment with trying to digest all of those new sonic possibilities.

If you think, for instance, about the other pole of ambient music, I always think is heavy metal. It's another form of immersive music. It's, of course, in terms of feeling, quite different from ambient music generally, but I still think it is a kind of ambient music. It's a bath of sound. I've seen heavy metal music being recorded, so I can tell you this. What really matters is the exact texture of sound, the exact type of distortion, the exact type of compression. I think that's very much what ambient music was built on the notion that there was this new way of composing.

Amanda Petrusich: When I received the records, they included a list of feelings that inspired you-

Brian Eno: Yes.

Amanda Petrusich: -and Beatie. Some of them were words I didn't know from languages I don't speak. I found many of them overwhelmingly beautiful, in part because they are complicated, like onsra, which is a Boro word for a kind of doomed love, or the Arabic word ya'aburnee, which you define as not wanting to live in a world without someone. These are words that do sort of attempt maybe to kind of contain the complexity of human experience.

Brian Eno: There's a nice German one, it's probably my favorite, and something I think I feel quite often, which is called torschlusspanik, which means door shutting panic. It's that feeling you've got that you're trying to get something done, and the door is closing, and you're not going to get there quite in time to ever do it. [laughs] That's a terrible feeling.

Amanda Petrusich: That's a good one. Brutal. [laughs] Well, this leads me to ask, are there some feelings that are more easily evoked by sound? We know anger is a big one. Are there any feelings that are maybe particularly difficult to tap into? On that end, I think, like, well, contentment or boredom are maybe a little bit harder to translate into sound than-

Brian Eno: Yes.

Amanda Petrusich: -rage or lust.

Brian Eno: The feelings that I think are very, very easy to locate in sound are sort of melancholy and the sparkle of new life. I often hear those things in sound. I have never yet, I don't think, heard anything that captured the feeling of boredom. I'm disappointed in that because there's a great line in the Tibetan leader Chögyam Trungpa's book where he said, "We should rush forward into boredom and disappointment." I've tried to do that, but I don't think I've succeeded yet.

I like this idea that those might be places where you can learn something unique. I do think boredom is very important. If you keep getting boredom out of the way by distracting yourself with Wordle or whatever else you distract yourself with, you lose the possibility of your threshold of interest falling so low that you can notice a tiny thing.

Amanda Petrusich: I love that. Boredom feels like a kind of endangered resource, but I think you're right. It is such a generative experience if you can surrender to it.

Brian Eno: I try to do things because I want to do them, not because they're just a little tiny bit better than sitting looking at the wall. I really try to now just sit and look at the wall. If you don't provide input, what happens if you want things to come up from inside you, all of the accumulated knowledge and information and experience that you have, if you want that to manifest itself, you have to stop trying to stuff more stuff in at that moment. You have to give it space to come up. You can't do both things at once, I think.

Amanda Petrusich: Speaking of restricting our inputs, I wanted to ask you about the decision to stop traveling by airplane as a form of climate protest. Can you talk a little bit more about that choice?

Brian Eno: It wasn't an absolute choice. Since I made that decision, which was about seven years ago now, yes, seven or eight years ago, I've taken four plane journeys. I suddenly feel I've been liberated from ever having to go to airports again.

[laughter]

Amanda Petrusich: This is, of course, ironic coming from-

Brian Eno: Music for Airports. Yes.

Amanda Petrusich: -the author of Music for Airports. Yes.

Brian Eno: I know. More importantly, I feel that all of us could make a lot less flights. It's not such a hard decision to make in Europe. It would be harder in America, I think. It's a very personal decision, and I can't, in all honesty, say to everybody else, "You should stop flying," because people have different lives and different needs. I can stop flying pretty much all of the time. I don't have to fly very often at all.

Amanda Petrusich: Is there a particular place or perhaps places that you miss, or things that have maybe made the choice challenging to uphold?

Brian Eno: Well, America. I lived in America for a while, and I have some good friends in America. Also, there are places I've never been. I've never been to India. There's a lot of the world I'd like to see, but there's all sorts of things I've missed in my life. I don't really worry too much about that fact.

Amanda Petrusich: I'm curious if you try to keep-- in terms of your climate activism, if it's a balance in terms of allowing it to manifest in your creative work, it's present in the music you make and then also present in your personal life and choices about travel or how you live, how your house is set up. Do you try to keep those two things in balance?

Brian Eno: Well, one of the themes of my work, I think, is economy, is trying to see how much you can do with how little. I really like that feeling. I've been working with Beatie Wolfe, and we've just used one guitar. [chuckles]

[MUSIC - Brian Eno & Beatie Wolfe]

On a path running green

Brian Eno: I always love that challenge of saying, "let's just accept what is here at the moment and make the best of it." I'm not the kind of person who thinks, I'm not going to work in any studio that doesn't have 16 ancient compressors and 14 fabulous old German microphones and so on. I just don't think like that. I always think that every moment in your life is a unique set of circumstances. Unique both in what it has and in what it lacks. If you make your work out of the moments in your life, then every piece of music will be different. Everything comes from a different place. I reject the idea that you have to standardize the working conditions before you can do any work.

I often listen back to things that I've done in the past, and I think, "I have no idea how I did that." I listened to an old song of mine the other day, and I realized there was a quite complicated set of similar sounds that went through the song at a particular rhythm. Now, I know that I didn't consciously put them there, but somehow or other, those patterns appear.

Now, I don't think they originated from God. I think they [chuckles] originated from somewhere in me, which led me to wonder, is it somewhere in me that people call God? Is God a name for those inaccessible or unknown parts of yourself that do things, that make decisions that you don't even know about? The conscious part of your mind doesn't know about? Anyway, that's rather a long question for a program like this.

Amanda Petrusich: [chuckles] Brian, I just want to thank you so much for speaking with me. It's been so wonderful talking with you. I appreciate it deeply.

Brian Eno: Thank you very much, Amanda. It's been a real pleasure meeting you as well. I hope there's another chance that we can do that sometime.

David Remnick: The New Yorker's Amanda Petrusich speaking with Brian Eno. Eno's new records, in collaboration with Beatie Wolfe, are called Luminal and Lateral. If you're interested in Eno's work, a terrific documentary came out last year, simply called Eno.

[music]

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