Maybe somebody here would appreciate this. Some of these sections are rather long, so it might be worth refreshing the page to enclose the sections you've read back into their spoiler tags. Autobiography (by Eno) [spoiler]I was educated by nuns and Brothers of the De La Salle order until I was sixteen years old. I then attended Ipswich Art School for two years and Winchester Art School for three years. While at Ipswich, I became interested in tape recorders and their potential as musical devices. It was also during this period that I began experimenting with phonetics and studying cybernetics, which latter interest has re-emerged in the last three years. At Winchester I studied Fine Arts (Painting and Sculpture) but spent much of my time there engaged in publishing concrete poetry and performing music. In 1967 I formed a group of shifting membership called Merchant Taylor's Simultaneous Cabinet. We performed works by myself and various contemporary composers such as Christian Wolff, Tom Phillips and George Brecht. Towards the end of my time there I helped form the first rock group I was to be involved in (The Maxwell Demon) and built a 1,000 cubic foot version of George Brecht's 'Drip Event'. The Maxweel Demon on played two concerts; the Drip Event was smashed by vandals. I moved to London after leaving Art School in 1969. In London I began working with a group of friends (most ex art students) who shared my interests in certain ideas regarding the possible futures of contemporary culture. I also joined the Scratch Orchestra briefly and built my first home studio. In January 1971 I joined Roxy Music. We rehearsed for nearly a year and released our first record in Spring 1972. We then toured almost continuously (stopping to record the second album 'For Your Pleasure') until I left in July 1973. Since that time I have released a number of albums started by my own label, Obscure Records and been involved in numerous collaborations which are detailed elsewhere. I have also lectured in several universities and Art Schools about the relationships between diverse aspects of contemporary culture and about the relevance of the science of cybernetics as a descriptive language for these. I have written music for seven films and two plays a selection of which music I shall soon be releasing music on record. I am presently engaged in writing a study of Autopoietic ("Self-making") Music for a book to be edited by the cybernetician Stafford Beer. When I listen to my previous albums I am surprised by my confidence in simplicity. I am also surprised to remember that what I was doing was at the time guided by another set of pretexts from those by which I now perceive it. The pretexts change as my historical view reframes and reshuffles itself to accomodate and rationalize this present. To make this clearer: when you bgin a piece of work you may have in mind a set of 'reasons' which supposedly motivate the work. They are useful because they provide a sense of direction and an initial push to overcome the inertia of habit. But when the work is finished these become alibis: mere realizations of a confused and complex series of trials and errors that actually made the piece, and, if the piece has answered certain questions, those are almost certainly not the questions that were being asked at its inception. Sometimes you discover the question after making the answer. Take 'The Big Ship' on 'Another Green World' as an example. I made this as a confirmation of the idea that a piece could be created from scratch in the studio out of 'what was around'. Of course this is possible, but 'Big Ship' became inadmissible evidence when i found a five-year-old tape version of the piece and an earlier notebook reference to the idea of "The Big Ship - moving like a star system". But it felt new at the time, and it is this feeling, not the 'absolute truth' of the matter, that is important. --------------- It should be interesting to be confronted by a logic not one’s own. But to carry information this logic must be credible - that is, it must be sufficiently familiar to create expectations in order that it may then surprise them. For me, this implies a tightness in the system at some level - there has to be a grid of expectations that can be modulated - such that change and novelty are seen as deviation from what was expected. Furthermore the anchorage that is provided by this grid must be physical as well as mental - to do with the ‘felt’ as well as the ‘thought’ aspects of the music. --------------- The problem with believing the alibis is that they will always let you down. They will lead you to believe everything will be clean and simple ‘if the system is right’. But if the system is really right, it will allow itself a controlled rate of exploratory error, for, since it shares with us the problem of survival, it must also hare our deviance (flexibility). [i]Brian Eno[/i][/spoiler] Discography (by Eno) [spoiler]SOLO ALBUMS Here Come The Warm Jets [size=50]Polydor 2302 063[/size] Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy) [size=50]Polydor 2302 068[/size] Another Green World [size=50]Polydor 2302 069[/size] Before and After Science [size=50]Polydor 2302 071[/size] Discreet Music [size=50]Obscure[/size] COLLABORATIONS No Pussyfooting (with Robert Fripp) Evening Star (with Robert Fripp) Roxy Music (with Roxy Music) For Your Pleasure (with Roxy Music) June 1 1974 (With Kevin Ayers, John Cale and Nico) 801 Live (with Phil Manzanera and others) Low (with David Bowie) Heroes (with David Bowie) PRODUCTIONS and CO-PRODUCTIONS The Obscure series of albums Fear (John Cale) Lucky Lief and the Longships (Robert Calvert) Ultravox! (Ultravox!) Portsmouth Sinfonia (Portsmouth Sinfonia) Hallelujah! (Portsmouth Sinfonia) OTHER APPEARANCES ON RECORD Slow Dazzle (John Cale) Helen of Troy (John Cale) Little Red Record (Marching Mole) Ruth is Stranger than Richard (John Wyatt) The End (Nico) Linguistic Leprosy (Lady June) Diamond Head (Phil Manzanera) Listen Now! (Phil Manzanera) SINGLES The Seven Deadly Finns The Lion Sleeps Tonight PUBLICATIONS Music for non-Musicians - 1969 Oblique Strategies (w. Peter Schmidt) - 1975 FORTHCOMING Music for films 2 Collaborative albums with 'Cluster' Collaborations with R. Fripp More Discreet Music[/spoiler] Questions (by Schmidt) [spoiler]Why is Eno's music interesting? Why is 'Before and After Science' the way it is? POSSIBLE ANSWERS It combines in unexpected combinations. Where the mixture of strange, strange and strange might be merely strange, the mixture of obvious, obvious and strange might be intriguing. The mixture of obvious, lonely and strange could even be beautiful. He is not afraid to exploit the obvious or to make the corny bite its own tail. He continually questions his activity. Intellect and senses question each other. He files in unexpected categories. He examines what he is taking for granted and stops. He refuses to stick labels. He questions the use of skill. He acquires skills when they are needed, discards skills when they begin to stifle. He undoes what he has done, throwing away as much as possible. He is committed to finding ways of making music, therefore he is not a snob. He does not belong to any club. He does what is not done, regards nothing as insufficiently important, turns even the smallest stone. He acts as an engineer, a servant to the music he is making. He uses himself as an orchestra, giving each element, even the least serious, a worthwhile part. He breaks down demarcations: sensual technology, mathematical lyricism, precise haziness, machine-like irregularity, moody arithmetic, surprising expectedness, exotic reasonableness. The record, after exhaustive questioning as to what it might have been like, returns to the song, the most multidimensional form. Rarified numerical procedures yield lush extrapolations; pelvic rhythms overlaid with slow smoke; melody based on research; rhymes from the dictionary; minimal phonetic changes giving maximal semantic changes; exquisite technological pruning; tracks carefully built up and casually thrown away, a heap of other tapes left on the floor; despair, abandonment, rethinking, reworking, reflowering; all leading to... a possible answer for a self-imposed question: "What record would I really like to listen to?" [i]Peter Schmidt[/i][/spoiler] About Peter Schmidt (by Eno) [spoiler]Peter Schmidt's work has never been a very marketable proposition. It lacks any longterm superficial consistently that could be called a style; it experiments constantly with aspects of many other styles, sometimes innovating and sometimes 'revaluing' - breathing new life into that which has been discarded or forgotten. Since his work does not proceed from a set of exclusions and negatives - from the sense that certain things can't or shouldn't be done - it exhibits neither a fear of the future nor a fear of the past. He uses painting as a system of self-knowledge and as a way of finding out about the world. Having utilized his intellect to occupy and account for as much of his experience as it can, he works in the space that is left - the limits of his intellect define the inner edge of his work. This is not to say that the intellect is thereafter abandoned: it still has the important function of designing and instigating procedures whereby the intuition can be allowed to operate. The important thing about such procedures is not that they produce the 'right results' and can therefore be dependably used and reused, but that occasionally, or once or twice, they server as devices which can concentrate the conscious attention sufficiently to allow other parts of the brain to work without too much interference from it. During the past two years Peter as restricted his work almost exclusively to water colours, that curious medium which seems to stand on the borderline between 'Sunday painting' and 'serious painting'. I believe that this ambiguity itself has been a major reason for his continued use of the medium, for it allows pictorial events which can be light-hearted and ephemeral and at the same time brooding and mysterious. The medium does not stipulate a particular emotional range, and presents itself to a perceiver in a kind of innocent and understated way - as if with a lowered voice. It seems that at a time when the currency of the day is to engage in productions that are in some way epic - be it in terms of scale, loudness or detail - that which is simple and quiet suddenly becomes especially relevant, it is talking in a new way. My decision to enclose these lithographs was motivated by a consideration other than that I like the work and feel it has affinities with my own. I was interested to probe the possibility of creating a market for visual works which avoided the usual exclusivty (and high prices) of the gallery world. Whereas in the world it is rarely feasible to work in edition sizes of more than 350 (because the forseeable market is so limited) the record market is far larger and has a highly efficient and culturally non-exclusive distribution system. Ordinary people (as well as 'art-lovers') go into record shops. Apart from giving the recording artists a freedom of manoevre that the painter does not often enjoy, this scale of production spreads the origination costs over a much larger number of buyers, who correspondingly pay lower prices for their original works than a print buyer buying through the art market will for his. I envisaged a future where visual work could be sold in the same way that records are at present - for standardized prices and over a large market. [i]Brian Eno[/i][/spoiler] The Prints (by Schmidt) (For context, these were included in the standard release) [spoiler]01. [url=http://i.imgur.com/vTqVuN1.jpg]The Road To The Crater[/url] 02. [url=http://i.imgur.com/YcHCgJe.jpg]Look At September, Look At October[/url] 03. [url=http://i.imgur.com/4hvxBos.jpg]The Other House[/url] 04. [url=http://i.imgur.com/btQjduc.jpg]Four Years[/url][/spoiler] Drawing From "Kurt's Rejoinder" by Russell Willis [spoiler][url=http://i.imgur.com/redOGc2.jpg]NSFW Warning. A woman's breasts are visible.[/url][/spoiler]