What do you think were the major influences on Brian Eno
and his pioneering of ambient and generative music?
There are a number of ways of talking about it.
I think in terms of names of musicians that influenced him,
there's people like John Cage, Steve Reich, you know,
people who set up processes, systems of creating music.
He's not terribly interested in sitting down
and writing notation.
I mean in fact he's completely uninterested in doing that.
What is interesting, and typical of quite a lot of musicians
who came out of Art schools, is that he would create
a system and then put audio within that system.
So, that's why the Steve Reichs and
the John Cages were a big influence.
There's one album of his and it was the first
sort of foray into generative music—sorry I don't remember,
I think it's Discreet music—where there is a version of
Pachelbel's Canon and each of the pieces of scored music
starts off obviously at the beginning, but they're played
at different speeds and what happens is the piece of music
starts separating and going out all over the place.
And he discovered this when he had an accident,
broke his leg and he was playing it and it started going
out of sync and he couldn't get off the chair
to actually put it back in sync and then he noticed
‘Actually I quite like this'.
So, like all approaches to art and like all approaches
to music, it's kind of a confluence rather than a
‘eureka' moment, it's about percolation.
And he started realising he was aesthetically drawn
to that and then, you know, looking at other musicians
who operate in different areas, it sort of gels together
but in a particular way that's particular to him.
.