The University Art Museum, on the campus of CSULB, is having its opening reception for the exhibition of Brian Eno‘s 77 Million Paintings this Saturday at 6 PM. The exhibition, and his appearance at the Carpenter Center on September 20th, gave me pause, and inspired me to look back at Eno’s significance on my creative life.
It was 1983, and I remember the feeling of my head coming to a point as I listened, awestruck, to the 1977 album Before and After Science. Songs alternated between manic exhuberance and quiet reflection, yet no conflict arose between these seemingly disparate elements. Sounds as common as the human voice became transformed into otherworldly instruments, and words found their meaning not in language, but in sonority.
The recording studio was transformed, for me, from a place of technical application to a tool for creating art. Ever since then, I’ve been on a path that has led me to perform on stage as a musician, to work as a sound engineer, to work with artists as a producer, to write about music, and to create art that uses sound.
Eno worked closely with many artists but, for me, his work with King Crimson founder and guitarist Robert Fripp was most significant. Eno introduced Fripp to a ‘systems-based’ improvisational tool, eventually called Frippertronics. Basically, everything that’s played into the system repeats and, with each repetition, slowly fades out. With it, Fripp could build vast musical compositions simply by adding one note in front of, behind, or on top of a previous one.
Many artists have since used this basic system, and even expanded upon it. I, too, have used this system, both live and in the studio. The performance duo I’m currently in, Ain Soph Aur, uses this as a basis for all its performances.
For me, Brian Eno was a touch stone. He helped me to understand that, when working with sound, there were no right or wrong choices: Just esthetics.
In his 77 Million Paintings, Eno has taken this philosophy to its logical extreme: He created a set of esthetic rules, and a simple palette of elements, and leaves all the creative choices to a computer. The result is a very large yet finite number of images, each with a unique appearance, yet each sharing a kind of cohesion that arises not from the program, but from the initial choices of the artist.
As I’ve said previously, Eno’s contributions to modern culture are so profound that it is hard to imagine their absence. From establishing the ‘Ambient‘ music genre, to his work with U2 and Coldplay, his creation of the Windows 95 start-up music, and his enthusiasm for the music video as an art form, he has managed to stay at the forefront of creativity for decades.
That this great artist has chosen Long Beach to exhibit his work, and to make his only US public appearance this year, may force us all to step back and begin to rediscover our City as the World Class place it really is.
The exhibition runs through December 13th.