Reading Mr. Eno: A Brief Booklover's Guide

It happened again.

In the course of something I recently wrote for the Cycling '74 newsletter, I had occasion to mention Brian Eno's name in passing. It's difficult to talk about what we talk about here and to not do so, I guess. And I got a nice note from a reader inquiring for a little more information about something I'd mentioned in passing.

My close friends have all learned to be very careful about talking to me about Brian Eno and his work, over the years. In case my bookcase or CD cabinet has not warned them off, the multiple copies of every edition known to humankind of the Oblique Strategies must surely suggest that I am a geek and - to the extent to which my budget allows - something of a completist when it comes to Mr. Eno. In response to my well-controlled response to her question (Well, I thought it was mercifully brief and to the point), she thanked me and asked if there were "any books out there about this." In that instant, I had the subject/Forum article: a short review/Brian Eno bookshelf guide!

A note: This brief list is missing two kinds of books - those that use Eno's work as a point of departure for works of their own (such as the long out-of-print and amazing edition of illustrations of Eno's pop songs More Dark Than Shark), as well as catalogs of Eno installations and exhibitions (of which Michael Bracewell’s Light Music is the most recent) in the interests of brevity and availability.

The first book here – appropriately enough – is one by Mr. Eno himself. A Year (With Swollen Appendices) is a diary. Yes, Brian Eno writing down what he did for a year (1995). He works on stuff, cooks, tries to figure out new software, chats with stratospheric celebrities, and does things. Then, he writes it all down. Although it’s a diary, you sure don’t need to read it in one sitting (I have an acquaintance who kept a copy in their bathroom), and you sure don’t need to read it in order.

Even if you’re not a huge diary fan, the “swollen appendices” which make up the last third of the text are worth the price of the book alone. They’re a variety of longer written pieces on all kinds of stuff. Sorry – I won’t spoil the fun, but here's the kind of thing you'll find:

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.

Reading the actual diary was – for me, anyway – inspiring. One of the overwhelming sense you get from reading the book has to do with some simple and straightforward observations that appear over the course of the days delineated: Eno plays with things, often not finding his initial encounters with a given tool to be either pleasant or straightforward. He works on multiple things at once. Some days, very little of interest occurs. This isn’t the diary imagined as reality television – for all intents and purposes, it honestly seems to be the cocktail of epiphany and tedium that we all know - we’re accustomed to the endpoint things available to us: online talks, recordings, installations, and so on (in the case of this book, we’re talking David Bowie’s “Outside” and the Passengers recording, for example). Regardless of whether or not you find spectating on his process day by day to be fascinating or not, you can take heart: it’s very difficult not to notice that he probably putters around and may, in fact, waste as much time as you do quite often. I find that heartening.

Oh, and the price – well, the book’s out of print. So you can spend a large amount for a copy of your own (if you’re buying the French edition, make sure the original owner left in the CD of unique material….), or you can go and snag a free PDF copy. You’re welcome.

If you're the sort of person for whom chronologies and biographical details help to throw works of art into more satisfying relief, then David Sheppard's On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno is a must-have. While it may not be on par with Anthony Caro's magisterial <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00WTILZEQ/ref=series_rw_dp_sw">N-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, it is miles above the usual rock star biography. The choice to include lots of interviews with Eno's contemporaries (some of which are pretty amusing and surprising) alongside a well-sketched out section that describes Eno's origins in Suffolk, his family, and the circumstances of his youth and education to creates a fascinating portrait that's mercifully short on hagiography. His sections on his collaboration with the Talking Heads is a particular high point of the book, for me. If I have any personal quibbles, it's a little short on the last several decades of Brian's life in comparision to the early stuff (although the revised edition cleans this up a bit), and - for whatever reason - Mr. Sheppard seems to be a bit briefer than I'd hoped about Eno's work with U2. That said, it's a great read.

Of course, the other books on our short Eno reading list are about... well... his work. I'm sure that at least a few of you went rooting about after my pointer to the amazing 33 1/3 series of short works on great recordings and came across Geeta Dayal's lovely short book on Eno's Another Green World album, and that you may find yourself hungry for something more than merely listening or looking. You're in luck.

The most recently published of the books I’ll mention here is Sean Albiez and David Pattie’s edited volume Oblique Music. Interestingly, it is a volume in the Arden Critical Companions series - yes, that's right. Arden Companion as in "those books on Shakespeare." To quote the Bard himself,

Is this a jest to you? The world is not as I thought!

The book takes the approach you might expect from a book published by Bloomsbury, in that its genesis lies with the academic enterprise. As a collection of articles that consider Eno's work as a musician, producer, collaborator, and theoretician, its insights extend well beyond the minutiae of scholarship, however. What made the book an interesting read for me concerned the sense in which it focused on what I'd consider to be scholarly territory off the beaten track. While it's enjoyable to read more on the subject of the Oblique Strategies and "the recording studio as a compositional tool" (which this volume provides), we're also treated to discussions on his appropriation of African sources and his body of work with U2 (remarkably devoid of the usual damning with faint praise that the U2 work usually receives), along with the most thorough investigation of Eno's work with Devo and the ill-fated No New York recordings I've seen anywhere. As a side note for fans of the rabbit-hole, the copious notes for each of the contributed articles to Oblique Music is worth the price of admission.

The first major book on Eno's music to appear cannot go unmentioned here, as it remains a must-have for any Enophile library: Eric Tamm's Brian Eno: His Music And The Vertical Color Of Sound. The book began its life as a dissertation back in the 1990s, when many of us were astounded to happen upon any scholarly writing on Brian Eno's work, much less a full dissertation. It remains a good read by virtue of making a great case for why Eno's work should matter, and doing so by focusing on his ear for timbre (or "vertical color") in addition to the intellectual history that informs his methods and practices. Then, as now, I don't find it a dry academic defense of Enossifications, despite the presence of "real music theory" in the text. This is the most thoroughgoing "musicological" commentary on Brian Eno's corpus on this list, and an instructive read. It's still on the bookshelf because no one's done it better.

Of course, In the present age, we are far less likely to think of Brian Eno as an artist whose work is exclusively audio-based at all. If anything, he's now a creator of installations, experiences, generative video-based artwork, and generative apps. And we also know that Brian began his life as a visual artist. For a thorough accounting of his visual work and a remarkable study of his very early works and how they inform the present, we have Christopher Scoats' Brian Eno: Visual Music ; the go-to gold-standard monograph on the whole of Brian Eno's visual work. The book covers everything that Brian Eno's done that doesn't fall neatly into the music bins (from his school years to his first experiments with video through his recent installations and apps) with depth and thoroughness, and - along with contributors that include Mr. Eno himself - provides a great account about their development and how they fit into the context of Eno's process, aesthetic, and the corpus of his other work.

I'm sure that there will be some of you out there who - like me - have all of these books snugged up on your "Eno shelf." Just in case you're new to the party or a little curious, these are great places to begin. Heck, maybe I've forgotten something - if so, let me know!

Addendum: Shortly after this article appeared, Jeff Blanding mentioned a source of something that I left out of the original article, but is just too good not to add: a series of semi-regular publications from Eno's Opal music label that discussed the on-going work of Brian Eno and other artists released by the label. There were 27 issues produced between 1986 and 1996, each around 16 to 20 pages. I didn't really list them because I, myself, only had a subset of the full set (issues 3 - 19), and also because they were ridiculously priced when you could find them. Jeff pointed out that there was a copy of one of these issues on the Eno article archive/site www.moredarkthanshark.org (another great rabbit-hole), so I went hunting around on the site. It turns out that all of the Opal Information issues are there. So here's some amazing further reading in the Eno orbit (and we all owe Jeff a beer).

Opal Information Numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27