For the last 60 years, Brian Eno has been one of the world’s most creative and inspiring musicians, thinkers, and activists. At 77, he has no interest in stopping, even if he can sense the end.
Oh, no. I have lost Brian Eno.
Not literally, at least. He is sitting so close that my elbow occasionally grazes his yellow corduroy sleeve, our twin rolling chairs sidled alongside a pair of broad computer screens and between two bulky brown speakers he bought used from an elderly woman long ago. On a rainy Thursday morning in early June, we are dry inside his Notting Hill recording studio, a brick-lined space slightly bigger than a walk-in closet and as dim as one, too. A wall of shelves behind us holds eight decades of obsessions, curiosities, and memories—a crowded row of the tidy black diaries he’s kept since boyhood, an assortment of American gospel and Elvis Presley 45s, singing bowls, an Omnichord, two ukuleles, Polaroids, little pieces of art wedged into every corner, and a copy of the children’s book Walter the Worm. One of his Light Boxes hangs near his head, a circle of pink glowing from a square of green.
But Eno’s attention is, almost as ever, directed dead ahead. We’re nearly an hour into a discursive conversation about Piet Mondrian, Kraftwerk, and migraine headaches when he asks if he can show me a piece of musical software called Permut8. “Some people produce software that doesn’t really have a precedent,” he says, his eyes bright behind Prada glasses that made me think of a retired fighter pilot at the seashore. “This thing performs mathematical operations on strings of numbers, on data. Nobody knows what that does, sonically. It’s like finding a box of tools and you don’t know what they’re for, so you go looking for how to use them.”
Eno giggles often as he spins digital dials and clicks buttons, admitting that he doesn’t know what several of them do at all. That morning, he’d been working on a pulsing piece, “Naked in Army Boots,” commissioned by Britpop provocateurs Pulp to play before some upcoming concerts; the royalties would funnel into an environmental nonprofit he’d cofounded, EarthPercent.
Eno takes “Naked in Army Boots” on a test-drive for me, ripping apart its meter and frequencies to show me just how extreme something that had sounded so simple could become, laughing at the surprises along the way. “I like a day like this,” he says, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose and grinning.
He wants to show me one more thing. Several years ago, Peter Chilvers—the software engineer and musician who built Bloom, the quietly revolutionary iPhone app, with Eno—designed a usable Eno archive, a custom software interface loaded with almost everything he’d made since 1990. 10,807 tracks, or 45 days and 19 hours of sound, at least as of this morning. On days without a prohibitive to-do list, Eno picks an old track at random, listens, and plunders it for something interesting. He can even listen to three selections at the same time, hunting for serendipity among the stacks. “I don’t need to start from scratch,” he explains. “Nature never starts from scratch.”
As I watch, he sorts the archive by length and decides to play something that lasts three minutes and one second. The piece he picks is a bright but menacing thing, with a bouncy beat haunted by washes of guitar and nervous keyboards. It rings, he says, “not a single bell,” though it reminds me of a cheesy castoff from his tormented 1992 album, Nerve Net. He slows it until it’s a dubby death march, then smears a sample until it sounds like a muezzin leading a call to worship. He pushes back from the mouse, admits he’s not finding anything, and tells me what it’s like when a piece of music feels right—an unexpected combination of emotions, an image forming at the edge of his eye.
He decides to try again, and this is when I lose him. The high sample hisses and spits, and the bass moves in glacial peristalsis, so low the speakers wobble on their platforms. “That’s an amazing sound,” he exclaims as he disappears fully into the machine for several minutes, moving sliders and pressing keys and pulling the bass out only to restore a still more aggressive version of it. This is becoming one of the most caustic pieces of music I’ve ever heard. “Sorry, I’ll be back to normal soon,” he finally says, waving his hands. “I’ve got to catch it.”
The bass gets nastier, like a dram of battery acid has been added, and Eno squeals with delight. He takes it out again, nods approvingly, and then lets everything fall apart, ending on a note that sounds like an opera singer slipping upward through the cracks of hell. He laughs. “That will do for that. I will call it ‘Grayson Jam,’ then I shall remember when I did it,” he says, typing the title with the caps lock on. 10,807 tracks becomes 10,808. “Even when I am doing an interview, I actually managed to do a piece of work. The Grayson Jam!”
Three weeks earlier, Eno had turned 77. Across the last half-century, he has built one of the most impressive résumés of any musician, artist, or thinker since the arrival of rock and roll. If there are more fabled record producers, like George Martin or Quincy Jones or Rick Rubin, there may not be one who has accomplished so much groundbreaking work so consistently for so long.
How many times have you heard Eno in your life? Almost every time you’ve heard one of the best songs by U2 or Talking Heads, anytime you’ve dipped into David Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy, including the epochal “‘Heroes,’” every time you’ve listened to Coldplay reinvent itself as something other than a late Britpop arrival, you are listening to his work, consciously or not. And that is to say nothing of the records that Eno—a cerebral rock star who has insisted he is not really a musician since at least 1973—has made, whether as the outrageous and androgynous show stealer in Roxy Music or the studious and wounded sort who soon consecrated the idea of ambient music with the first in an extended streak of perfectly heartbreaking and healing records. Turn on rock radio or launch the meditation app on your phone: You will soon hear something Eno has made, touched, graced, or inspired.
But, really, he detests talking about any of this, about the work he’s already done or the life he’s already led. During a similar studio visit, in late 2016, he exploded on an outmatched journalist from The Guardian. “It’s just fucking boring. I have to keep myself awake,” he said in response to some queries about his history. “I’m thinking about something as we’re talking that we’re not talking about, and I don’t want to lose it.”
When the filmmaker Gary Hustwit first approached Eno about making what Hustwit calls “a normal documentary,” complete with talking heads and the like, Eno said no; the result of that rejection was, eventually, 2024’s revelatory Eno, which uses iterative software to make a film that changes every time it’s screened. It is, one suspects, the only movie about himself that Eno could endorse—one that mirrors his career, pressing forever forward. The night before Eno and I met, a group of journalists from the British music magazine MOJO dared me to ask him about the past, to see how he might treat an American freshly landed in London. “He has,” Coldplay’s Jonny Buckland tells me with a belly laugh, “an allergy to the past.”
“It’s all designed to reinforce the idea that artists are somehow otherworldly beings who exist on a different plane,” Eno eventually tells me, regarding talking about what he’s already done. “Admittedly, many artists play to this, but I want to try to avoid it.”
As tempting as it seemed, I had not flown to London to ask Eno about his past, to finally ask him about that mysterious “T” on the cover of Music for Airports, recording Devo inside a barn in the German countryside, or the ubiquitous question he might hate most of all: “So what was David Bowie really like?”
I had flown to London to query Eno about something else he doesn’t particularly love to discuss: What in his past propelled him to become, to my mind, a contemporary paragon of creativity and humanity in the present? To be someone who has never really rested on their outsized laurels but who instead has put those very laurels at risk—by constantly making new work and by being an outspoken advocate for Gaza, against Trump and Brexit and the ilk, against the slow and steady tipping of international scales toward injustice?
This year alone, Eno has already released four albums, including two spellbinding collaborations with the conceptual artist Beatie Wolfe; they’ll announce a third in a matter of weeks, and there seems to be a half-dozen more in the pipeline of Eno’s closetlike studio. He’s released a fascinating little book, What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory, with Dutch writer Bette Adriaanse, condensing nearly 80 years of reflection into just over 100 smartly illustrated pages. He has led or spoken at a string of protests in support of Palestine, embattled Belfast rappers Kneecap, and carbon reduction while hosting a weekly community chorus in his studio and beginning to give away so much of his life’s earnings that, by the time he dies, there will be very little left.
“He’s branched out beyond music, more of a social and political activist than he ever was before,” David Byrne told me a few days after he, too, visited Eno in his studio. “But it’s a similar sensibility: Let’s try doing this in a way that hasn’t been done before and see what happens.”
Or, as the guitarist Robert Fripp, another of Eno’s longtime collaborators, put it: “Brian’s eyes are open, and he engages with the world.”
After Eno emerged from his reverie and saved what I will forever refer to as “our song” for posterity, he wanted to show me something else. We’d been talking about the diaries he kept for decades, all chockablock with ideas and diagrams and social impressions and reading lists. (You can and should read the bulk of his 1995 diary, published the following year as the playfully-titled A Year With Swollen Appendices.) He still takes notes some days, he said, but his growing musical archive has mostly replaced the practice. But he wanted to show me some stuff by the man who inspired the diaries—Tom Phillips, his art-school teacher and a prized English painter, one of the major influences on Eno’s life and work.
He bounded out of the studio and into the brightly lit main room, which has become a kind of community center for artists and activists, especially since the pandemic. Without missing a step, he spotted the spine of a collection of Phillips’s work and slid it from one set of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, split into sections like Cybernetics and Physics, The State, and Futures. (A half-dozen Grammys sat up top, so neglected and dusty I sneezed when I climbed a ladder to peek.) He glowed as he showed me several pages, explaining Phillips’s life work and how expansive and all-encompassing it had been.
He landed on a piece called Benches and pointed, spinning it around so that his niece, Cicely Eno, could see. A gregarious photographer, painter, and singer who seems to have inherited the family gene for defying the very concept of disciplines, she was spending a few days in the studio before maybe moving into a van so she could be more flexible in pursuing those interests.
“I painted these stripes,” Eno told us. “He hired me when I first came to London as his painting assistant, for 10 shillings an hour. Do you know that, Sis?”
Cicely joked that she’d change his Wikipedia page so that it would ID Eno as “Tom Phillips’s stripe painter.” He laughed. “I wish those sorts of things were in my Wiki page. My Wiki page is so bloody boring,” he said. “It’s full of shit, like ‘appeared on this album.’ It doesn’t tell any of the interesting things, like ‘painted the stripes for Tom Phillips.’”
I told Eno I’d be sure to mention the stripes, and he seemed delighted. It was just then that I saw my way into understanding a little bit about the man, about how his early habits shaped his current work, how they’ve rarely let him sit still in spite of the slow music that helped make him famous. What he’d done matters less to him than how what he’d done prepared him to make the next thing—and how it might prepare other people, too. Eno has often been called Captain Eno and Professor Eno, polite allusions to the image many have of him as some high-minded, eggheaded Buddha, sitting in his studio in lotus position waiting to decree My Next Big Idea. Few characterizations, I realized, could be less true.
“In a fast-changing world, experience is of less and less use,” he told me. “Perhaps the only type of experience that matters is: How do I deal with uncertainty, with novelty, with crisis?”
The first time Eno deliberately broke a rule, he was eight.
He was born in 1948 in Woodbridge, a town of a few thousand in Suffolk, not far from the North Sea. He came from a long line of workaday celebrities—local postmen. His great-grandfather, grandfather, father, and two uncles had all served in that role, and his father, William, was especially devoted. He began the job when he was 13 and took three days of sick leave in nearly 50 years. (Eno, too, “did the post” during a few holidays.) “He’d often pick up things for the old or sick people on his rounds, or use his post van as a way for farmers to exchange things between each other,” Eno told me. “He was doing a useful job, and his kindness and diligence were well-known.”
Eno should have known better, then, than to steal. He and his pal, David Whittaker, planned the heist at the local Woolworth’s. While David bantered with the shopkeeper, Eno would lean over the counter and slide a tobacco pipe, which he didn’t even want, into the oversized sleeves of his duffle coat. They got away with it, too, Eno burying the pipe in a little wooden box until they figured out how to use it. He tossed and turned all night, however, disinterring the pipe the next morning and trying to sneak it back into the shop. The shopkeeper spotted him.
“In my little town, he knew my parents, of course. I was breaking down, in tears, because I felt so bad having stolen something,” says Eno, taking his time to unpack the story, like something he hasn’t considered in decades. “He never told my parents. He must have been a decent man, because he could see I was in a terrible state.”
Eno was a dichotomous kid. He was the firstborn of William, a World War II veteran, and Maria, a Flemish woman who had built German bombers as a concentration-camp prisoner. He had a much older half-sister, Rita, who introduced him to rock and roll when it was still in its infancy. He became obsessed with the notion of taping sound. “I thought it was magic to be able to catch something identically on tape,” he once told Lester Bangs, “and then be able to play around with it, run it backwards.”
In school, he was a very smart prankster. He would study Pears’ Cyclopedia—a guide to “everything you need to know,” published by a soap company—and spout out what he’d read during class, impressing his teachers. He indulged his own curiosities. “The greatest gift his parents bestowed on him was to leave him almost entirely alone for long stretches of time,” David Sheppard wrote in his excellent Eno biography, On Some Faraway Beach.
An uncle, though, taught him two crucial lessons when he was 11. After an army accident, the uncle lived in India for a while, becoming engrossed in its culture and philosophy. Back home, he became a gardener and a fabulist, always telling stories that rode the edge of disbelief. “He said, ‘Brian, it is time I taught you how to lie,’” Eno recalled earlier this year, during an online lecture for the music-education platform School of Song. He said this was one of the most important things anyone ever said to him. “The sort of basic message was, if you want to lie, the way you do it is by imagining what the world would be like if what you were saying was true. Lying is a way of creating another world and then living in it.”
That same uncle, Carl, also owned an art book of modern and abstract paintings, and showed it to Eno with the caveat that he might not like it. And then the boy saw his first Mondrian. “I really, really thought that was beautiful, and then I thought, ‘Why do I think this is beautiful?’” he says, thumbing through a book of prints to show me 1921’s Composition With Red, Yellow, and Blue. “It was so simple, and I thought that I could have done that. Why was it so powerful for me?”
The question stuck with Eno until, soon after he turned 16, he arrived at the Ipswich School of Art, not far from his hometown. Phillips—the painter who became not only his art teacher but also his confidant and catalyst—showed up the same day. Eno had finally accessed a tape recorder the year before he left home, and Phillips encouraged him to consider tape as an instrument and recording as an art form.
Eno began exploring American minimalist composers like Steve Reich and La Monte Young (whose X for Henry Flynt was the first music he ever performed in public and whom he would much later call “the Daddy of us all”) and connecting with avant-garde British composers like Gavin Bryars and Cornelius Cardew. Their radical approach to sound mirrored his interest in painting. But Phillips couldn’t understand why Eno was also interested in pop music, what link he saw between the lessons he was learning in art school and the swill that sold lots of copies.
“I thought, ‘Are they the same thing? Is it the same kind of activity? Am I getting the same kind of thrill?’” he remembers. “They weren’t the same, but I wanted to know if there was a way of looking at this where they could cohabit. A lot of artists I knew thought there wasn’t a way they could intersect. Tom was very supportive of me, but he just couldn’t see it, either.”
Soon after Eno turned 17, he met Sarah Grenville. She took him home to meet her mother, Joan Harvey, an avowed socialist who led the local humanist society and once told Eno, “Children are like houseplants. They thrive on neglect.” Harvey lived in a ragtag commune and would often host dinners there, inviting cutting-edge scientists and thinkers. Eno remembers dining twice with Francis Crick, a dozen years after he began untangling the structure of DNA and soon after he won the Nobel Prize. One night, as Eno was washing the dishes, Harvey told him he was a pleasure to have around, but why, she wondered, was he intent on wasting such a good mind on art?
“It was like someone stuck a knife into me. I couldn’t answer that question. I just knew I wanted to do it,” he says, an unusual edge to his voice. “I knew I had to find out how art works, what’s it for, why I’m excited by it.”
Less than a year later, he married Grenville. And around that same time, he had an epiphany about paintings, the things he’d been studying for years: Exactly why did they need to be still? He drew a cube of nine cubes, with points of colored light emerging from the side. It would become his first Light Box.
“I had discovered rules that tacitly had come into existence, which needed to be exposed by being broken,” he tells me. “Art rules are made to be broken. That’s part of the fun of art.”
When he sits down for lunch at the round wooden table feet from his studio door on a Wednesday afternoon, the first day we meet, Eno is still sweating, the perspiration dripping down his brow and onto the collar of his magenta button-up. He’s just come from a protest.
“I really didn’t want to go. I felt like death before I went,” he says, shrugging as he finishes the last bites of a canned curry. “But I thought that, if people like me don’t show up for things like that, it’s really discouraging. People stand around and think, ‘Where is everybody? What’s happened?’”
For the last 10 days, one side of Eno’s head has ached ferociously, with slight swelling on the right side suggesting an egg gone cattywampus. He even made an urgent visit to the doctor yesterday after his assistant manager, Martina Connors, found him at the studio, sluggish and ashen. This morning, though, he and Wolfe took the Tube for half an hour, from Notting Hill to the Palace of Westminster and Parliament to join a Red Line for Palestine march, organized by Britain’s Stop the War Coalition. Eno has been the president since 2017.
“If the government won’t listen, the people have to shout at them, really,” Eno said as he stood outside the gates, holding a microphone emblazoned with a crossed-out bomb. “It’s called democracy. Not a lot of it is happening in that place, but a lot of it is happening outside here.”
Eno, as he tells it, came to support Palestine late. He was born the day after Israel signed its declaration of independence, in 1948; his birthday falls on Nakba Day, when Palestinians mark the destruction of their homes and their displacement. “I started out being a very strong supporter of Israel, which I saw as being this socialistic experiment in building a new state,” he says. “It took me about 45 years to realize that there were other people there as well, that it wasn’t a land with no people for a people with no land.”
Eno’s burgeoning awareness during the First Gaza War escalated quickly in 2011, during his first visit to Israel. He had two tour guides—the Palestinian husband of an Irish friend who worked for the United Nations and a former IDF officer who had been forced out of his role because, Eno says, “he refused to beat up Palestinian prisoners.” He saw Israeli settlements on the West Bank and met Palestinians who had escaped to caves, the walls black with soot from cooking in those tiny spaces. During a subsequent visit to Hebron in 2013, Eno says, he was walking with an elderly Palestinian man who was turned back from a checkpoint by two Israeli teens with machine guns and forced to walk to the other end of the street on a scorching day. “It was just an exercise in humiliation,” Eno says. “You don’t forget something like that.”
In 2014, he fully entered the fray. That summer, he sent old friend David Byrne a 1,000-word missive, telling him about a photograph of a Palestinian father toting the remains of his two-year-old son, Mohammed Khalaf al-Nawasra, in a plastic bag. He compared the United States’ support of Israel to funding the Ku Klux Klan and asked, “Do Americans really condone this? Do they really think this is OK? Or do they just not know about it?” Byrne published the letter, in full, on his website. Three years later, after the death of former UK cabinet member and Stop the War Coalition president Tony Benn, Eno took the post.
“Brian is an ambassador for the movement, which is important, because you get so many people saying, ‘Oh, it’s just lefties, hardline nutters who protest everything,’” Lindsey German, the British activist and writer who helped launch Stop the War, tells me. Eno is an expert listener, she adds, absorbing and considering what the people who know more on any given subject have to say—and often complimenting them on how they say it. “He doesn’t compromise on his politics,” she continues. “He just puts them across in a very accessible way.”
That approach, though, has made Eno a few famous enemies. Around the time he sent that letter to Byrne, he asked Nick Cave to join a group of musicians boycotting Israel. Cave not only demurred but opted, instead, to play two shows in Tel Aviv in 2017. “There was something that stunk to me about that list,” Cave told reporters. In a published exchange with Roger Waters, Thom Yorke seemed to mock Eno. (Yorke released a statement about Israel a few days before Eno and I met. “He made quite a clear statement about how awful he thought the Israeli government’s behavior had been,” Eno tells me, striking a conciliatory tone. “So that’s a start, I suppose?”)
“The only weapon artists have, really, is to withdraw their services,” Eno says. “A boycott isn’t shooting somebody. A boycott is saying, I don’t want anything to do with this.”
Eno’s immediate reaction to Hamas’ attack on Israel in October 2023 was double-edged horror—first, that many Israelis had been killed or captured, and, second, that many more Palestinians who had nothing to do with those actions would suffer and die. “And my third thought,” he says, “is that suddenly people will notice them.”
During the last two years, Eno has tried to make sure that happens, from the marches he’s attended and sometimes led in Westminster to shoehorning Gaza into almost every interview he’s given. (Whenever he mentioned Gaza during his School of Song lectures, the class’s chat room would briefly devolve into an exchange of Israeli flags and watermelons. No one asked for a refund, School of Song’s cofounder, Blue Sheffer, told me.) He hosted a private event for One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This author Omar El Akkad in his studio, saying the book “shook me up.”
In late May this year, Eno’s activism made international headlines. Back in early 1995, a creative agency asked Eno, as he told San Francisco’s The Gate a year later, to produce “a piece of music that is inspiring, universal…optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional.” It needed to last about four seconds. Eno was struggling with his own music at the time, but he composed and handed over 84 extremely short pieces. The winner—a blossom of piano, bells, and hums that evokes the sun peeking from behind a storm cloud—became the Microsoft Windows 95 start-up chime. It was one of the decade’s most ubiquitous pieces of music, the soundtrack for dreams of a burgeoning tech utopia.
“[Microsoft] used to have an ad that said, ‘Where do you want to go today?’” Eno remembers. “There was this feeling like the future was wide open, that we have these new tools to explore it with, and it can only be good.”
On May 15, Microsoft acknowledged that Israel’s Ministry of Defense used its cloud and AI services through a commercial contract and that they’d been given “special access” after October 7. A week later, news broke that employees had accused Microsoft Outlook of blocking emails containing words like Palestine, Gaza, and genocide, and that protests at the company had been met with firings. The next day, Eno published a letter not only denouncing the company but also pledging to donate his full paycheck from a sound that had been inducted into the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry only a month before. “My new start-up chime is this,” he wrote. “Stand in solidarity with the brave Microsoft workers who have done something truly disruptive and refused to stay silent.”
Eno’s initial Microsoft fee had been $35,000. He adjusted that number for inflation to $80,000, then rounded up to $100,000, a sum he split between three nonprofits and coalitions supporting Palestine or peace, including Stop the War and medical services.
“That’s the most shattering thing about it—the disappointment of the utopianism I remember so well from the ’80s and ’90s,” says Eno, a large and glittering Palestinian flag pin dangling from his lapel. “These awful, dodgy companies seem to be only motivated by money. There is no other thought in their mind. I wish somebody would realize that, actually, money doesn’t make you very happy.”
Robert Fripp still doesn’t know why he took his guitar to Eno’s apartment.
It was September of 1972, and the King Crimson co-founder had seen Roxy Music just once before, not long after he returned from a brief American tour. “What I liked most about them was, before the band kicked in, there were all these very interesting sounds,” Fripp says, sporting a silver tie and gray wool vest for our Zoom call from his baroque library. “That was Eno on synthesizer.”
Eno, who was still in his early 20s, had been hustling to make ends meet, flipping cheap electronic equipment in South London and occasionally, he’s claimed, making porn. (He’s never specified if he was on-camera talent, but a half-century ago, he went long on his pornography collection for Chrissie Hynde, who hilariously made the exchange the core of her NME profile.) Now he was rapidly becoming a star with Roxy Music.
After a few run-ins at their mutual manager’s office, Eno invited Fripp to his place in Maida Vale to hang out, weeks before Roxy Music flew to its own American tour. But when Fripp inexplicably arrived with his guitar and pedalboard, Eno asked if he would like to see his studio—just a sitting room with two Revox tape machines, again only a little bigger than a closet. Eno pressed a few buttons and a reel of magnetic tape began passing from one machine to another. Fripp began to play as Eno twiddled knobs, his adjustments dictating how long each note would hang around. When the tape ran out, Eno asked Fripp if he’d like to improvise over what they’d just made.
“Eno’s background is art school, thinking conceptually. Mine is the background of a working musician whose aim was to play anything which someone asked me to play,” says Fripp. “Brian didn’t explain what was going to happen, nor was there any reason to.”
What happened, in turn, led to one of the most important breakups and breakthroughs in rock history, jumpstarting for Eno a decade so productive it arguably ranks with the ’60s heydays of the Beatles, Hendrix, or Dylan. When Melody Maker journalist Richard Williams visited Eno’s place to hear some King Crimson live tapes a few weeks later, the pair also played him recordings of their little experiment and told him of their plans to turn them into a duo album. “The listener is totally absorbed as the guitar wheels, spins, cries, bleeds, soars, turns back into itself, climaxes and dies away,” Williams proclaimed in print. “It is, without doubt, a complete triumph.”
Eno and Fripp’s collaboration was also a complete surprise to the rest of Roxy Music, ratcheting the tension between Bryan Ferry and Brian Eno until the latter simply walked offstage during a festival set in June 1973. Exactly a year after Williams’s rapturous report, Fripp and Eno released No Pussyfooting. “It was so obvious to me that the record company and management would try to squash this music, so I wrote out ‘No pussyfooting’ and put it on the recording console,” Fripp says. “Robert and Brian, you will not compromise.”
Eno did compromise, briefly. He made two very good solo records that mostly warped what he’d done in Roxy Music, attempting to fulfill expectations of him as a rock provocateur. The sudden spotlight did not suit him. “The obvious future was a kind of solo career fronting a band, and I even started trying to do that. But as soon as I’d started, I thought, ‘I hate this,’” he told Bangs. “I see myself often maneuvering to maintain mobility…. People are gonna say, ‘Well, what can you expect, he’s never been consistent.’ And it strikes me as a better position to be in.”
Fripp stopped by Eno’s apartment again in early May 1975, this time without his guitar. The pair were about to start a short European tour, and this, like that first meeting, was simply another social call. But when Fripp walked in, he noticed that Eno’s synthesizer was feeding a luscious little melody into those two tape machines. “As we were having tea in the back, Discreet Music was recording itself in the front,” Fripp says, pausing for a long laugh. “So I was there, in Brian Eno’s apartment in Maida Vale, when Discreet Music was recording itself.”
Eno had already flirted with what he would later call ambient music on Another Green World, a wonder of alien beauty and mutated rock where he finally began to elide pop expectations. But the real breakthrough was that first side of Discreet Music, originally intended (and, indeed, used) as a backing track for his duo tour with Fripp. Like the bubbles of a lava lamp expanding, shrinking, and settling back down, a series of idyllic melodies rise, fall, and float past one another, occasionally colliding with no rhyme or reason, creating an accidental half-hour symphony. Not everyone, Eno remembers, was impressed.
“By the early ’70s, I was a pop musician, by the Trades Description Act. And the biggest sin you can commit in England is to rise above your station,” Eno explains, joking that it’s more acceptable to set up pension schemes to rip off grandmothers. “Discreet Music was a complete figure of fun for most people: ‘What a fucking joke! He thinks he can get away with this fucking thing?’”
But Discreet Music became a new cornerstone. It was one of the first releases on his new label, Obscure, whose output—10 titles in four years, including unassailable masterpieces like Gavin Bryars’ aching The Sinking of the Titanic and Harold Budd’s uncanny The Pavilion of Dreams— helped build a bridge between modern classical music and the pop world. Tom Phillips, the encouraging professor who nevertheless doubted Eno’s multiple enthusiasms, issued an opera on Obscure.
Another Obscure title included several compositions by John Cage, the patron saint of musical chance. Discreet Music was a successful exercise in setting up a system to let music make itself, an approach that would become a lodestar of Eno’s entire career, from the spools of tape that would soon shape his literally genre-defining album, Ambient 1: Music for Airports, to the slowly decaying sounds of “GRAYSON JAM.”
“Most of the negative comment was not about how it made anyone else feel. It was about ‘How dare you release a long, long record where not very much happens,’” he says. “I was so innocent about how people would react, because I’ve always thought I’m not that different from everybody else. Surely somebody else will like it. That’s generally been true.”
He was formalizing this love of chance outside of music itself, too, by working with Peter Schmidt, a friend and painter nearly two decades his senior. In letters and conversations, they began to realize that they’d had similar epiphanies in the recording and painting studios—that the best way out of a difficult situation was not always to power through it but, perhaps, to try something completely unexpected and even illogical, a creative non sequitur.
They began jotting such prompts on notecards: “Don’t be frightened to display your talents” or “Abandon normal instruments.” And most famously, on card number 17, in capital letters written with a blue wax pen, “Honour thy error as a hidden intention.” These became the Oblique Strategies, a card game of “over 100 worthwhile dilemmas” that gradually became less about music and more about the art of existing at all. The set is now in its fifth edition.
The point, Eno told the composer Charles Amirkhanian in 1980, was simple: “Don’t forget that you could adopt this attitude…or that attitude.”
A few hours into our first conversation, Eno looks up from a cobweb of speaker wires and power cords with a question. “Grayson, can I ask you a favor?” he says, his voice low and firm, the kind of tone that presupposes the answer. I nod. “Can you ask some questions tonight, questions like the ones you’ve been asking me all day?”
Eno is expecting a few dozen British journalists and industry types to visit his studio for a listening party tonight. In just two days, he and Beatie Wolfe—the conceptual artist and songwriter who has shuttled between the United States and England for many of her 37 years—will release their first two albums, Lateral, a generative ambient dream, and Luminal, elliptical astral country. The loose plan was to play Lateral as guests drifted into the studio’s main room, then greet them when it ended. Eno and Wolfe would say a few words, then go on a walk around Notting Hill as the little crowd listened to the songs of Luminal. And then there’d be a short question-and-answer session, which is where Eno hoped I could come in.
I took Eno’s request to mean one thing: He didn’t want to be asked about Bowie, Byrne, or Bono, but instead about Beatie and their work together. Of all the things Eno is, of all the things that make him tick, it’s his excitability that might matter most, that keeps him so productive. “I like working with bright, lively, enthusiastic open minds—and a lot of those happen to be young,” he tells me later. “I learn so much from younger people, which nowadays is most people.”
For years, Wolfe had tried to ignore the outsized legacy of Eno. So much of her work, like his, operated at the intersection of music, visual art, and science (as when she used the Holmdel Horn Antenna, which long ago provided evidence for the Big Bang Theory, to broadcast a song into space) that several people suggested they work together. “I didn’t want to be in any way influenced,” she tells me. “I thought, Okay, I’m just going to keep the shutters up.”
But in 2021, someone from Eno’s new environmental nonprofit, EarthPercent, introduced the two via email because of their intersecting interests. Wolfe had just premiered From Green to Red, a mesmerizing and devastating visualization of 800,000 years of increasing global CO2 levels, and they were both presenting work at the climate conference COP26. They began emailing one another, talking about the role of the artist, why society puts artists on celebrity pedestals, and their shared disdain for NFTs. A year later, South by Southwest presented the pair in a long-distance conversation called “Art & Climate.” Another year later, in June 2023, they both had art exhibitions opening in London, so they finally met in person.
Outside of Eno’s show of Light Boxes and loud speakers, his community chorus serenaded Wolfe with Sam Cooke’s “Bring It on Home to Me.” He told her to stop by his studio the next day. They played Toads in a Hole, a bar game where brass coins are tossed at a slanted platform with a hole in the center. He showed her a few of the 800 fragrances he keeps on hand, tucked into drawers and into one cube of his bookshelves. (There is some rare stuff; there is also a bottle of CK One.)
And then, as he demonstrated his latest software obsession, Native Instruments’ Playbox, she grabbed an out-of-tune ukulele, the nearest instrument she could find. By day’s end, they’d finished two pieces. During her return visit several months later, they made 30 more pieces in 10 days.
“We never start with any agenda, any sense of, ‘Oh, I have these words, and I need to fit them to something,’” Wolfe tells me while Eno is at the doctor, getting his head checked. “Most of the pieces happen very quickly, because it’s just a flow of ideas. And if anything was being a bit awkward, we just go and make something else. Nothing has been labored.”
I have heard some variation of this in almost all of the dozen conversations I have had about making music with Eno—that the fun-to-labor ratio is high, that heart outstrips head, that intuition weighs more than intellect. The producer Jon Hopkins was 23 when he first got the call to come to Eno’s studio. His childhood best friend, Leo Abrahams, had been working with Eno since the elder stumbled upon the young guitarist in a music shop, playing with the sort of restraint and taste not associated with such spaces. When Eno finally asked Abrahams if he knew anyone else who might join, Eno didn’t care that Hopkins had released one album to mediocre reviews, that he had no career to speak of. Hopkins, however, cared.
“I was, obviously, very nervous. The impression I’d built in my head was of someone mysterious and theoretical, that there’d be this professorial air,” Hopkins tells me one afternoon from his London patio. “But as soon as I went in, I realized he’s quite ridiculous—absolutely hilarious, swears very surprisingly and suddenly, enraged by technology in a way that I find so amusing.”
There were times, Hopkins says, when Eno would tape a pencil to his head so he could control three Kaoss Pads—a sampler and effects unit—at once. Other times, he would use his nose as the extra appendage. He once wrote a series of random keys on a whiteboard and pointed at them, encouraging Hopkins and Abrahams to respond. Because Eno doesn’t read music or know exactly how each key works, he didn’t know quite how the piece would sound. The result, “Emerald and Stone,” has been streamed on Spotify 82 million times, making it Hopkins’s most popular song there.
“I try to make each day a new adventure, which means I have to be open to going off in a new direction. I use my pleasure to guide me: If I like something I keep bashing away at it until I like it even more,” Eno tells me. “The feeling when something is not good is almost always the same—‘Oh, not this again.’ It’s like unearthing the same well-chewed bone.”
That restlessness, though, does mean he can have more trouble finishing than starting. Hopkins recalls, for instance, a round of very productive sessions two decades ago, with Herbie Hancock on keyboards and Squarepusher on bass. The music was electrifying, Hopkins says, but neither Eno nor Hancock wanted to spend time sorting through the mountain of material, making something to release. (Abrahams did make an edit, Hopkins says, that was “really cool,” but there are no current plans to issue it.) And Wolfe agrees that Eno will often get something to a place he feels is good enough, then let it go.
“I have heard the phrase, ‘If I die tomorrow, I would be happy releasing all of this’ many times. For fuck’s sake, Brian, you know?” Wolfe says, laughing. “That’s flippant, but it’s helpful for him, because it helps him determine what matters, what’s important, if he’s already there.”
As the listening party starts, every attendee is handed a slip of paper to write down a question for Eno and Wolfe, to be subsequently vetted and approved by his managers. No one actually writes anything. But, at the end, someone starts to ask a question, anyway.
They want to know about the studio, and how exactly Eno uses it, since there seemed to be so little musical equipment. Eno calls it a “center for social activism,” explaining that he worked mostly in one room so that other people could use it, as the organizers of a workshop on restorative practice had the day before. And then he smiles. “I have this sentence in my book—‘Play is how children learn, and art is how adults play,’” he says. “This is a play space for grown-ups. I’m very lucky to have it.”
Making music wasn’t always so carefree for Eno.
In early 1978, Eno was producing one of the first records he made that wasn’t his own, the debut of Ohio keyboard-punks Devo. Each night, the members would crawl under the covers in their unheated bed-and-breakfast in Germany and complain about the Englishman at the edge of 30 who was telling them what to do. Before Devo could even cut their debut, they’d been jerked around by the music industry plenty: becoming Neil Young’s muses before his Rust Never Sleeps moment, being offered a recording deal by Bowie that they didn’t love, being infuriated by a particularly heinous Hollywood type who compared rock bands to teenage girls and noted, grossly, that Devo wasn’t the sort of teenage girl he’d like to fuck.
When they settled into Conny Plank’s studio outside of Cologne with Eno, then, it was only because Bowie was too busy playing a Prussian military officer who had become a gigolo to produce them. They had been Roxy Music fans, at least, and assumed they were getting the glam-rocker; when they met a soft-spoken balding man in a knit sweater and flared corduroy pants, then in the middle of working on Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy, they knew they were in trouble. (By the way, I won’t say much about Bowie after this. As Eno told that guy from The Guardian, “You can find all this in other interviews I’ve done.”)
“We would get under the duvets and say, ‘We can’t have that line in there! That’s a terrible melody!’ It was snickering, kids talking shit,” remembers Devo’s Gerald Casale of Eno’s additions. “He had evolved from his past, and he was into beauty now. We were brutalist, industrial. We needed to keep it that way.”
Sure, they loved the monkey chants Eno brought in from his growing collection of Tibetan music, even embedding 10 distorted seconds inside the album’s centerpiece, “Jocko Homo,” the sound echoing the lyrics. But as they mixed the album, Mark Mothersbaugh subtly pulled down the faders on many of Eno’s parts. Eno noticed, Casale says, but he never protested. Neither party talked about making another record together. “He wasn’t threatening or imposing,” says Casale. “He was being an artist who was becoming a producer, whose aesthetic had evolved to beyond what Devo was trying to do.”
Eno seemed cowed by comparison when he rendezvoused with Talking Heads a month later in London. He’d met them in May 1977, during their sweaty London debut at what was then the city’s punk-rock nexus, the Rock Garden. Eno’s pal John Cale, himself a fellow refugee from a revered band and an accomplished producer, introduced them, seeming to know what would happen: Eno would produce them, and he wouldn’t.
“Brian’s really charming. He can talk about a million things, and he did, talking about all sorts of stuff. We hit it off right away,” Byrne tells me from his cluttered New York office. The topics ranged from cybernetics to Fela Kuti and Afrobeat, as both were already fans. “I liked what he was doing musically, but it was very important for me to be working with someone I enjoyed being with. That had equal weight to the person’s skills, talents, and experience.”
Eno, Byrne remembers, mostly stayed out of the way on More Songs About Buildings and Food, adding subtle flourishes but mostly rendering Talking Heads’ sound faithfully. Byrne says that’s what they needed, someone encouraging them to be themselves. By the time they reconvened for Fear of Music, though, the Berlin Trilogy was done. Eno was becoming a fixture of the New York scene, too, having moved there because, as he told Lester Bangs, “there are so many beautiful girls here.” He had also found a more receptive audience for his ambient experiments and video exhibitions amid the downtown enclave. He had installations in LaGuardia Airport and, crucially, met the New Age zither seer, Laraaji, then busking in Washington Square, and enlisted him for his crucial Ambient series. In New York, he says, he didn’t feel out of place, like someone who was trying to rise above his station by having so many interests, as he did back home.
“To be a good creative producer of records, rather than someone just faithfully recording what’s there, you have to be a salesman,” says Byrne. “You have to sell an idea to the artist, and he’s really good at that. His enthusiasm for an idea is infectious.”
Eno, Byrne says, convinced the band that they could write songs on top of the music they were making, letting the energy of a groove or melody open the latch to everything else. It was a leap of faith, says Byrne, and exhilarating. That approach intensified on Remain in Light and remains key to Byrne’s process. It didn’t work for everyone, of course. In his book Remain in Love, drummer Chris Frantz remembers Eno goading him out of his own sessions and squabbles over credits; bassist Tina Weymouth once attributed rumors that Talking Heads were breaking up to Eno, especially after his provocative sample-based partnership with Byrne, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. (That record, by the way, was far-reaching in its influence. Jiggs Chase and Duke Bootee listened to it repeatedly while producing “The Message” for Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, and it was a boon for Public Enemy and the Bomb Squad, too.)
“For the other Talking Heads, it sometimes seemed we were dismantling things and trying radical approaches just for the sake of doing it. Some members were more included in the process than others,” Byrne admits. “So faith really becomes important: ‘Do you believe something’s going to happen?’ Brian would make pretty big claims about what was going on. ‘This is revolutionary!’ was used more than once.”
By 1984, though, Eno was ready to go home. He was working in Tokyo when his manager, girlfriend, and subsequent second wife, Anthea Norman-Taylor, called to say someone had broken into his Broome Street apartment and studio. “My first feeling was relief: I didn’t have to go back there,” Eno remembers. “New York is both thrilling, because it’s intense, and wearing, because it’s so inward-looking. It wasn’t until the apartment looting that I allowed myself to realize I had no further reason to stay.”
There was another reason to head back across the Atlantic: In Ireland, U2 were rapidly becoming one of the world’s biggest rock bands, and they suddenly wanted more than faithful recordings. Drummer Larry Mullen Jr. loved Eno’s eccentricity in Roxy Music, while The Edge adored the Bowie and Talking Heads records. Against their record company’s wishes, U2 asked him to come to Dublin and hear some demos.
“He told us that he fully expected to say no to the offer,” The Edge tells me. “We talked a lot about our ambitions for the sonic identity of the album. Brian was taken by our intensity and curiosity.”
With Daniel Lanois, a Canadian musician who had rapidly become Eno’s indispensable collaborator, in tow, he helmed The Unforgettable Fire, U2’s breakthrough of romance and evangelism, mirrored by skywriting sounds. “We wanted our song ‘Pride’ to sound like the ideas it contained—a people desperate for nonviolence,” Bono says. “Who else at 24 would be gauche enough to sing beyond his range ‘In the name of love/What more in the name of love’ without a Brian Eno or a Daniel Lanois on the other side of the console?”
It has become one of the most enduring and popular creative relationships of Eno’s life, now spanning more than 40 years and 50 million records sold. When U2 played the first shows at Sphere in 2023, Eno programmed some of the lights, based on his Light Boxes and radiant turntables. He even worked with them late last year, when Bono hosted a dinner to honor Eno. (A funny thing: When I asked for a comment on Eno from at least one member of U2, all four gushed.) At least one secret to Eno and the band’s great success together, The Edge says, is the enduring mystery of how art happens.
“Brian approached music like a fan, looking to be mesmerized in a beautiful naive way,” The Edge says. “That amateur appreciation is something the members of U2 share. He didn’t really want to know how it was done. Like us, he saw it as magic.”
By the way, during the last 40 years, the members of Devo have sometimes wondered what their career might have been like had they listened to Eno more. They’ve even talked about revisiting those original tapes, finding his parts, and mixing them back in.
“We’ve reached out to him about that,” Casale tells me, pausing to take a sip of water. “We never got a reply.”
Eno knows that, for the next hour or so, anyone can ask him anything they want.
When our onstage interview ends, he announces that he’ll put Lateral, the ambient record with Wolfe, back on. “Just ignore it,” he says, and the little crowd erupts in laughter, presumably at the nod to the instructions he famously gave listeners in the liner notes to his inaugural ambient opus, Music for Airports. “It’s meant to be ignored.”
He goes to grab a beer, and little pools of journalists begin to surround him, their notebooks out or their recorders running. Rather than go for another walk or tuck himself in the darkroom that is now a storage room, he commits. “I have a flat in London, but I don’t ever sleep there. I sleep upstairs sometime,” he says by way of introduction to the space, which he bought in the mid-’90s with a briefcase stuffed with 285,000 pounds in cash. “This is where I belong.”
He demonstrates the Klaus Dinger beat—the foundational rhythm of krautrock and one of the greatest musical structures ever in rock and roll—by tapping out the rhythm with his black boots, then dancing. He leads a horde into his little studio, where he and Wolfe offer up a software demonstration and explain how their new albums were made with a Fernandes guitar he bought for the great Robert Quine in 1983. He admits that the strings had been changed just once in more than 40 years.
He tells a story about how Manic Street Preachers once pulled an Oblique Strategies card during a session—“Destroy the most important thing,” he thinks it must have been—and cut the cable to the recording console. (Both the band and the author of a new history about them later tell me this is not true, just a fable.) He seems to be having fun—or, at least, to have adopted the attitude of someone who is having fun.
His handlers aren’t handling it quite so well. Connors, the assistant manager, asks if she can pretend we’re having a conversation so she can listen in on an impromptu interview to which Eno has agreed, to make sure it stays in bounds. (It does.) And studio manager Jo Rendle paces nervously from behind her desk into the crowd and back, seeming to keep an eye on everything all at once. “I don’t like this,” she tells me, laughing nervously and tousling her own short blond hair. For her, as for Eno, this is a sacred space.
A decade or so ago, Rendle—an artist and mother who had been married to an Irish guitarist—told her accountant she was looking for work. He told her that the last client he’d seen, Eno, was looking for a worker. They soon met for a cup of tea; by the time Rendle got home, she had a to-do list, including changing the studio’s dingy gray carpet. She began helping him build Light Boxes and experiment with assorted materials and manufacturers, and she researched how he might get his sound-and-light installations, meant to be therapeutic for patients and fretting families, into hospitals.
“I’ve never really had a job description,” Rendle tells me a few weeks after the party. “And that’s important with Brian, because you don’t know what you’re going to do next. You have to be able to solder and use power tools but also be polite in meetings.”
Eno is indeed an avid meet-er, someone who will sit and listen to another’s experiences and ideas for an hour just so he might consider them for himself. Four years ago, two noted British activists—Jamie Kelsey-Fry, a key member of Occupy, and Clare Farrell, a founder of Extinction Rebellion—asked if they could drop by to talk about a plan. “Their agenda was ‘How can we use the cultural space to invoke change? How can we get artists and activists working together to make, discuss, and narrate social change?’” Rendle remembers.
In November 2022, they invited a hundred people or so to show up at Eno’s studio and talk about ways they might accomplish those lofty goals. Everyone there drew a blind portrait of the person sitting closest to them without looking at the page. (Eno’s former neighbor, Fred Gibson, known professionally as Fred Again, drew climate activist Ed Gillespie, and vice versa; Eno swapped portraits with economics advocate Cori Crider.) So many novel approaches poured out of that meeting that Rendle says she’s still parsing them.
This was the start of Hard Art, a confederation of more than 300 artists and activists that gathers several times a month and has also splintered into offshoots that discuss economics or perform comedy. Experts show at almost every meeting, talking about the climate crisis or the cost of living, giving what Rendle calls “some of the nation’s busiest artists” a window into the ways the world is changing and can still be salvaged. Hard Art has already published a half-dozen books and journals and helped spark work performed at major British theaters.
In early 2024, Hard Art hosted a four-day festival in Manchester called The Fête of Britain, tasked, per the event’s audacious program notes, with considering “How do we make the world safer, fairer and better for those we love and the place we call home?” Rendle helped run it. She still hasn’t changed the carpet in the studio, but her job is so much bigger than that now. Her job is, well, to make the world better.
“I suppose that’s 10 years with Eno for you, right?” she says, laughing. “Brian’s artwork is about making better spaces to inhabit. In a way, it’s like gardening; his philosophy is about sowing the seeds, taking care of the soil. It’s sowing seeds for the future, isn’t it?”
It’s getting late now, nearly 10 p.m. Wolfe has already left with a severe migraine, and there’s a gaggle of maybe 10 writers crowding around Eno and his computer screens in his cramped studio space. He starts to tell them about the rare speakers he recently found for free on the street, made by the computer-printer company Canon. They’re in the other room. “Come here, let me show you those speakers,” he says. “That way I can get you out of my fucking studio.”
Eno laughs the loudest.
Eno was a teenaged anarchist.
When he was in art school in Ipswich, he ordered copies of Anarchy—a short-lived British magazine with clever covers and text-rich innards—from the publishers on London’s Green Road. He sold them on the street. He didn’t move too many units, but he connected with lots of interesting people.
“It was both dangerously exciting and completely outside of what anyone in the political establishment was thinking was possible,” he says. “That was the first thing where I publicly endorsed a political issue.”
When Eno returned to the political fray nearly 30 years later, in the early ’90s, his circumstances were, of course, very different. He was no longer a curious kid selling magazines on the street but, instead, one of the world’s biggest record producers, having just finished three U2 blockbusters. People listened. He, in turn, listened to Norman-Taylor, his wife. Anthea had befriended the founders of War Child, a charity launched as a reaction to the human rights violations of the Bosnian War. “It was Anthea’s vision to make it into the British music business charity,” Eno says. “She largely succeeded, too.”
By the time War Child arrived in Bosnia, British composer Nigel Osborne had already been there for the better part of a year. Born a month after Eno, Osborne ran in some of the same avant-garde circles at the dawn of the ’70s, like the great Scratch Orchestra and Portsmouth Sinfonia. But Osborne followed a different path, becoming an actual professor and classical composer.
“The situation was awful—no food, and if you wanted water, you had to risk snipers,” Osborne remembers of his early days in Bosnia. “I said to my artist friends there, ‘Surely, we can do something.’ They were all skeletons and asked where the energy would come from. We started to work with the children.”
It was just supposed to be a distraction, a way to give kids something to think about other than war. But local officials started to notice and encouraged Osborne to expand his program. Right on time, War Child stepped up. “I had been on my own—no funding, no papers that people needed,” says Osborne, who had been ushered into the country through prior connections. “War Child was welcomed to me.”
In May 1995, Eno joined Osborne in Mostar, the first time they’d seen one another in a quarter-century. Other bands and celebrities had offered their support, but Eno, as best as Osborne remembers, was the first and only one to show up and work. He brought no press crew, no one to bolster his public image. Osborne had access to a bombed-out school building in Mostar, so they would lead classes with the children in the cellar and a small courtyard, unpacking boxes of percussion instruments and toys so they could improvise together.
“Brian immediately became the perfect children’s workshop leader. It’s just his manner, the gift of perfection,” Osborne remembers. They composed a piece with the kids about the exquisite Neretva River, which flows out of mountain springs and through the city. “This work happens in the doing, mostly by unpaid volunteers, so the doing is everything.”
Luciano Pavarotti called Eno to ask if he might be able to collaborate with U2 for one of his charity concerts. Pavarotti’s younger girlfriend and subsequent wife, Nicoletta Mantovani, was a big fan. “And Brian said, ‘Well, can it be for Mostar?’” Osborne says. “Those were magic words.” Bono, The Edge, and Eno played “Miss Sarajevo” with Pavarotti for a massive Italian crowd a few months later, Eno singing harmonies and tapping the same Omnichord that still sits in his office. The Pavarotti Music Centre, a project that cost nearly 4 million pounds, will soon commemorate its 30th year in Mostar, in the remnants of that once-ruined school.
“It made me realize that a small number of people can make something big happen,” Eno tells me. “In a world where every encouragement is to just be an obedient shopper and watch Netflix, somebody actually getting up and doing something is quite noticeable.”
In the last 30 years, Eno’s life has seemed a tizzy of getting up and doing something. There is The Long Now Foundation, an organization he helped build (in “01996,” as they put it) in order to think about how humans right now sit at the intersection of past and future. He christened “The Clock of the Long Now,” a timepiece under construction in West Texas that’s meant to function for the next 10 millennia. Perhaps it seems whimsical, but it represents a logical and emotional link to what’s next.
“Humans are capable of a unique trick: creating realities by first imagining them, by experiencing them in their minds,” he wrote. “The dream becomes an invisible force which pulls us forward.” His belief in the long timeline of human ideas stems, in some part, from anarchy’s non-hierarchal apparatus; it extends now into “scenius,” or his belief that true movements are the product of a scene and not a solitary genius—i.e., not an Eno-type figure.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic halted all touring, Eno was deep in discussions with a few music managers to figure out how to use concerts to fund climate science, despite the fact that he famously doesn’t tour or fly, with very rare exceptions. So their nascent nonprofit, EarthPercent, pivoted, developing ways artists can easily direct royalties to that work. Sounds Right acknowledges when the very sound of nature is used in a recording, with the royalties going to conservation funds. The Earth As Your Co-Writer is a different avenue to the same end, allowing artists to funnel money to environmental causes by sharing songwriting credit with the planet itself. And if you’re Pulp, maybe Eno will write a song specifically for you. “EarthPercent got the income from the airplay,” Jarvis Cocker tells me, “and we got a pre-show banger.”
Maybe the idea of cutting the Earth a royalty check sounds whimsical, but co-executive director Cathy Runciman says it has proven to be an easy way to draw artists into fast action. The likes of Big Thief, Finneas, and Michael Stipe have all participated, and EarthPercent expects to have distributed nearly $2.5 million in grants by the end of 2025. “When we were launching Sounds Right, we realized you never have to struggle with artists to find their nature story, because everybody has a place they love,” says Runciman, whose office is in the other half of Eno’s studio complex. “You don’t have to be an expert. There was a collective sigh that there was this great, big, welcoming leafy door that artists could walk through.”
I admit that I don’t know all the doors that Eno is currently opening, but I think he does? In recent years, he established a foundation to seed small organizations with noble causes but without the infrastructure to pursue major grants and donations. A few thousand dollars and the imprimatur of Eno are meant to help them get there. Wolfe tells me about The Ocean and Us, a women-driven environmental nonprofit based in The Hague that focuses on issues like deep-sea mining and overfishing. They’re both ambassadors.
“There are so many organizations that would not exist had he not been one of the first people to say, ‘Oh, I see what you want to do,’” says Wolfe. “He thinks, I am going to give you this money. I don’t know what you’re going to use it for, but I know you’re going to do some good.”
It’s a few hours before I’m supposed to leave London, and En
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