Brian Eno on Exploring Creativity | Red Bull Music Academy

a very big welcome please for our guests you know thank you know you've just come back from putting the very final finishing touches to the New York edition of 77 million paintings I wanted to ask you because you've done this in a few different places now how does the location affect the way the piece plays out well it affects it in this case because it's a big place so this is actually the biggest indoor version of this piece that I've made none of you have seen this piece so we won't talk about it too much because it'll be completely mysterious to you what we're saying but essentially it's a large light work and this is the largest indoor version of it the largest outdoor version of it was on the sails of the Sydney Opera House which I did about three years ago and that was a very big piece indeed so but this is the largest one that's ever been inside a building so the for me the building has to be pretty quiet and this one even though it's on West 32nd Street is astonishingly quiet you just step off the road and you're into the show with with very little in between you and the work and it's as quiet as you can imagine you really can't hear anything from outside and the music that I'm using there is designed to make any sounds that you hear outside sound like they're part of the music so there's quite a lot of quasi musical material in the music which could sound a little bit like traffic or people leaning on car horns or breathing heavily or the sorts of things that people do in cities sneezing cursing each other knifing each other it's those those sorts of noises so in fact the the outside doesn't really sound like it's not part of the music and you go into this large dark room and you will possibly sit there for a few minutes some people sit there for several hours and have to be persuaded to leave by security guards would be a story I got chucked out of 77 million paintings that the story has been told several times cuz I had an opening in Italy a little while ago and there it was it had been well publicized so a lot of people turned up for the opening and there were about a thousand people standing along the side of the road in a typically unruly Italian queue and the first 60 people the place was only big enough to hold about 60 people the first 60 went in and never came out and the rest of the queue is getting more and more irate so after about an hour I had to go in and plead with them to leave so that other people could have a chance to see it it's quite hypnotic I would say is the word and was this something else about the history of the building particularly the fact that Glenn Miller used to play there when it was the hotel Pennsylvania that appealed to you I didn't know that though Glenn I am a Glenn Miller fan but I didn't know that story I heard you saying a few years ago I think you were saying we're talking about your artwork and you were saying I should stop thinking of this in the realm of art and I should start thinking about it in the realm of health and quite recently you've done a piece for a hospital in Brighton in England can you tell us a bit about the context of the music that you've made there okay so so I had a show in brightened a slightly smaller version of the show I have here now about three years ago and a surgeon came to the show bringing with him his mother in fact a mother-in-law who he describes as a woman who whose hair is constantly on fire she's she's highly nervous talkative a bully and active person and she came to the show with him and sat in a chair and was quiet for two hours which hasn't happened since before she could speak apparently and he was so impressed by the effect that this head and then she came back the next day apparently bringing some friends with him and spent more time there so he was at that time involved in the design of a new hospital in Brighton which has now opened and he thought that a space like this would be a very good idea for people who'd just had treatment or had chemo chemotherapy in particular he was thinking of so people whose nerves were a bit jangled and needed to reassemble themselves and quieten down so he approached me and this project went ahead so it's it's quite a small room but it's actually seems to be very successful surprisingly not only with the patients but also with the staff who find it very very nice to have a place to go where they can calm down so I did sort of know that there was this angle to this kind of work before because I had been I've been told by many mothers that they have had children listening to my records I don't know whether the records were the cause of this if this is now a replacement for IVF Brian Eno's records it's cheaper and it works but but I've met a lot of children who were born listening to one record in particular which was discreet music I should think by now I've met about 60 or 70 kids who came out of the womb listening to that record which of course is any marketing departments dream get it get in there right at the beginning you know but the kids look fairly healthy and they have unnaturally large eyes in many cases there's a small clip of the hospital piece on a website can we listen to a tiny bit of it yeah because I wanted to ask you some of the music so this is a piece of music that I made hello specifically for this situation it is released as a record what seems to be the case to me is that what one does as an artist can stimulate one or other of the nervous systems that we have sympathetic will the parasympathetic so sympathetic is basically the part of you that deals with fight and flight and redbull is a specialist in that area of the nervous system my work on the other hand seems to address the parasympathetic which deals with digest and rest and calm down and connect things together and so on and that's that's the part the nervous system that also processes the stuff which is pushed out by the nervous system isn't it yes parasympathetic say I had a bike accident once and I felt terrible afterwards not just because I bruised it looked like a map of the incident but because I felt very bleak afterwards and someone said to me oh you're having a parasympathetic nervous system response your body is processing yeah the chemicals that were kind of a thrown out by this experience yeah well that sounds right yes I I think processing is is what goes on there and it's it's the part of the it's part of our being that we actually don't address very much particularly in urban environments in urban environments we're mostly living off the sympathetic nervous system because we're mostly in situations which require speed alertness quick decisions possibly they're dangerous you know there are cars flying around and people with knives policemen and drug dealers and dangerous old people with Zimmer frames so we have to keep our eyes we have to be paying attention all the time basically and I think what happens in with this kind of music and these kinds of shows is that you can stop trying to be in control of things and you can allow yourself to surrender now I use this word surrender quite a lot and it doesn't immediately have the right connotation but there isn't another word for it so what I mean by surrender is a is a sort of active choice not to take control so it's an active choice to be part of the flow of something for instance I think the we certainly enjoy surrender situations and the ones we typically enjoy our sex drugs art religion those are all surrender situations I'd say they're all situations where you stop where you deliberately let go of some control to be carried along on something and and for me the perfect analogy is surfing which I don't do by the way but I have watched with some interest I don't do anything really I just watch documentaries about about it and then make theories if I was Moses so what you see when you watch someone surfing is they take control momentarily to situate themselves on a wave and then they surrender they're carried along by it and then they take control again then they surrender now I think that's a very good analogy of what we do throughout our lives actually where we're constantly moving between the control phase and the surrender phase the only thing is that we tend to dignify the control side of the spectrum the repertoire of our behavior more than the surrender phase we we tend to dignify people who are good at control as well we we think those are the masters of the universe and we don't particularly pay attention to people who are good at surrender but if you think that the control part of our being is really quite recently evolved you know if you think of the 99.8% of human existence until 2,000 years ago most of the time one was surrendering gracefully and trying to stay afloat trying to use what a little bit of control you had in in a mostly surrendering environment so we're good at surrendering actually we we evolved to do it and and I think we like doing it is this why this is part of the reason why you think you enjoy singing in choirs so much yes definitely yes so as soon as you sing you know it's very interesting I have a little a cappella group in London which has a sort of open membership of people who largely can't sing or don't or didn't think of themselves as singers before they joined this group so it's it people weren't chosen on the basis of their competence but on the basis of their enthusiasm really we we now sound quite good but the membership is constantly shifting and some people join for a little while and then they move somewhere else and other people join in so it's a it's a changing entity but the most interesting thing that happens is that occasionally I'll have a friend droppin who's a a famous singer or other and they are the ones who find it most difficult to to join in because the point about being a choral singer is that you don't stand out you become part of the sand you don't try to stick out whenever we have classically trained singers come in they always have to hold the note a little bit longer than everyone else as if to show you that they can you know whenever we have good lead singers they always kind of wobble about all over the place and dive through the other singers and so honest by having an unruly parrot in the and so the the singers that really seem to work well are people who just want to be part of a sound they they don't want to present themselves in particular and that that's a kind of stepping back from individualism in favor of a community sound and it is different from the gospel choir you're involved with are you still involved do you still sing a gospel choir as well no I only sang in a gospel choir when I was in New York when I lived here actually I lived here until until almost exactly 30 years ago this month I lived here for five years and during that time I joined the Gospel Choir in Brooklyn and I was the only white atheist member in the choir so that was when gospel choirs some gospel choirs were embracing disco so like the New York Community gospel choir the shoe best singers was your choir was your gospel choir kind of feeling us or disco tip as well nope they were very fiercely resisting disco no I it was a it was a small church and a very normal and very exciting choir it was great to be part of it it's kind of this one thing that you've talked about in the past this idea of seniors which is a word that you coined to describe the kind of extreme genius that happens when a group of people come together around something that they all love so they might not all be doing the same thing but you're kind of this oscillation of enthusiasm and interest create something amazing it's so do you have anything to kind of is there anything at the moment that you see is kind of having seniors in it or anything to add about to that subject well actually I I'll explain the idea a little bit more because some I think there are quite a few things going on like that today so this this word came about when I I went to a painting exhibition at the Barbican about 25 years ago and it was an exhibition about a period of painting that I know more about than any other was my favorite era of painting which was the early 20th century in Russia so it was from about 1905 to 1928 was the period covered and as I said this was a period that I thought I knew a lot about I knew a lot of very obscure painters who few other people had heard of and of course I knew who the stars were Kandinsky being one of the early refugees from that period I would say and then you know Rodchenko and so on the other people so I went to this show and I saw work by about a hundred and fifty painters I'd never heard of now this was really a surprise to me because I really thought I knew that period quite well and the interesting thing about them was that there wasn't a huge distinction of quality it wasn't like Kandinsky right at the top there and then all these other people there was actually not much difference in quality between the work of some of the people I'd never heard of and the work of the people that everybody's heard of and so I suddenly started to have a different idea of art history so you know the word genius applies to people like Kandinsky and Mondrian and the big names Picasso but actually they don't sort of come out of nowhere they come out of a whole scene of people who support them in various ways and from whom they grab ideas actually you know if you look at Picasso look at the period that he was living in Paris and you look at what else was going on in Paris at that time Picasso was a brilliant thief and quite happy to acknowledge it like any pop musician is you know nobody works in a in a little cage they're always grabbing things and repackaging them in fact and and it isn't only from other artists it's not only other artists who are an important part of the what I called the seniors in the case of Picasso there's a very interesting thing so in the Hermitage in some Petersburg there's one room on the top floor which is the Picasso room and it's an amazing room there's about 20 paintings in it and they range from sort of late blue period to cubism to things that look like Fauvism to also all sorts of stuff it's all over the place and you think wow what an amazing guy he was that he was doing so many different things then if you walk around the room you realize that every picture in the room was painted in 1908 and that makes it even more amazing so then you think he was a bit confused wasn't li really and so I started looking into that period 1908 and actually it turns out that the story is at that time he was his primary collector Picasso was still quite young with his primary collector was a white russian prince who had come to Picasso's studio in Paris and he'd look around the studio and he'd say I want that one and Picasso would say that's not finished and he'd say no I want it just like that and I want that one Picasso - same with that I want it and he just walked around Picasso's studio taking everything that was going on every experiment and I think this was very important for Picasso because he suddenly stopped think of it thinking of himself as the person who knew best about his own art now this is this is what happened I think to Miles Davis as well he started to think actually I don't really know how to judge it it comes out of me it's probably good has been in the past why should I ask questions about it I'll let history decide and I think that's a way of being an artist to say I just do it you lot decide about it I think Prince is another example of that that kind of artist so so the the people who create the conversation around the work of art are actually very important as well it's not just the you know in the case of music DJ's for example they're incredibly important lubricant of the whole scene sorry I don't you didn't you didn't mean me to answer this question the question is going into a lovely direction so please continue okay um you shouldn't have said that no no I should have said that so so I started to think that because we come from a culture that wants to create heroes and champions which I of course have been added from benefited from but we tend to do that at the expense of realizing that nobody comes out of nothing that we're all born out of complicated scenes which of course in the music in the case of music involve technology a great deal you know the whoever invented and wrote the code for logic which I know is a lot of people is is their musical contribution less significant than than say Coldplay you know or or any other group you can mention so much music is made out of the possibilities of that that particular system so you can't you can't look at what is happening in music now without looking at the technology that gives rise to it and is that about is that about so so really to paraphrase you're saying the parameters are set by it now by coders or by other people is there something in there about making it easier and more difficult for people to do things wrong because doing things wrong using stuff as it's not meant to be used has been a really important part of the way that new musics always been made yes so so you have to find out how you can up new technologies and that usually takes a few years because technologies are always invented for a historical reason for instance if you think about multitrack recording that wasn't recorded so that Phil Spector could create walls of sound it wasn't invented so that myself and Shuggie Otis and Prince and so on could build up pieces of music over a series of months it wasn't invented so that any of you could sing 40 piece choir it was invented so that recording engineers could balance the voice against the rest of the music that was the modest and simple idea that gave rise to multitrack recording it was just a convenience for engineers it was a way of them not having to make a decision at the moment of recording about what the balance should be between the lead voice and all the other instruments which they had been stuck to before that moment so now they had two tracks the voice was on one track and everything else was another so they could later come back to it and say should we have a little bit louder there no I don't think so and all the endless tedious arguments of recording studios were born on that day and then then it wasn't until Les Paul came along and start to think hey I could play one guitar on there and I could play another one on top of it there then I could mix both of them down and then put another one on top so so that's that's the creative beginning of multitrack recording but like all technologies it wasn't made with that idea in mind so so what always happens I think is that technology appears it does something historical and historical can mean it does a job that we could already do but it does it quicker or cheaper or more portably or anything else but it's basically a job that we already knew about but as soon as the technology sits there then some person like somebody sitting in this room comes along and think you know you could do something else with that that nobody's ever done before so then they do that and then of course somebody else a technology designer says oh the tool they're using for that could be much better I'll redesign the tool and then this person says ok that's a new tool so it's a constant dance really between artists and technologists but the technologists are so important in that I've been working recently with a guy a coder he's also a musician called Peter Chilvers and we've done some apps together and that's been critical part of the processes that working always between technology and art of saying what's possible what can we do with it that you nobody thought of doing before what do we have to improve in it to make it better you know to make it work better and of course with modern technology one of the biggest difficulties is cutting our options so actually that's the problem of digital technology because options keep proliferating now I don't know how many of you and musicians how many are you actually players I mean and and how many of you play analog instruments primarily and how many of you played digital instruments primarily okay so so I'm actually in the latter camp because I can't play anything real but doesn't it strike you as interesting that here we are in the second decade of the 21st century and a lot of the most interesting music is still being made by people playing very primitive instruments like electric guitars and drums I mean what is a drum kit it could be a bunch of old chairs couldn't it or cans or anything it's really quite an arbitrary bunch of junk but why is it that people can still make interesting stuff and not only interesting but innovative stuff using those tools which buy in digital terms are hopelessly limited compared to all the fabulous possibilities of software synths and so on that we have in a program like logic well the reason is because it's hopelessly limited the reason is that you very quickly can understand what you can do with a electric guitar or a violin or a set of drums and you stop looking for more options and you start grappling with it you say okay this is what it does so what do I do the problem with software-based work is that you never know what it does you could never exhaust what it does basically so you can always cover the fact that you haven't got an idea by trying another option in the in the tools so if you have a lot of our options you don't usually have a lot of rapport with the instrument if you have a few options your rapport keeps increasing because you understand the options better and better and this is why people still make good music with crude instruments simple instruments because they understand them better than a software people understand our instruments I wonder is that the same for you when you're working with music by yourself then if you're collaborating with somebody else are working with somebody else when I'm working with other people one of the things I spend quite a lot of time doing is banning options so can you give us an example of like how that might work what you might ban on why well for instance one day in the studio I said today there will be no multiplication of any kind now if you think about that that cuts out most of the things you do in a studio it doesn't only mean no double-tracking it means no echo no repeats it means no process by which you synthetically duplicate things so if you if you want echo then you have to find some other way of doing it how else do you get it then how do you do it play the same thing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times and put them all at a different distance from each other so what other methods did you come up with then to replicate the things you needed under the kind of parameters that you'd set well we actually most at the time we didn't try to replicate anything we just said we won't go there so another kind of option is option cancelling device is to say let's not use anything on that side of the room or to one that I particularly favor is to take away all the symbols from the drums for example they're totally redundant things most of the time anyway so there were a couple of things that you've done recently in collaboration with people a Sebastien Roach furred thing you did on leaf a track on the James Blake album and something on the last Coldplay album and I wondered if you if we could listen to a bit of them and you could tell us where you are in it where a kind of banning or a thought or a moment if I can remember is identifiably you well we'll try I don't know I don't actually know whether I'll remember do you have a preference well I've never heard Sam's piece so let's hear that Oh perfect this is it's called dream nails this Seb Rushford is a fabulous English drummer [Music] so I just I just saw a very funny interview we have a very serious news interviewer in England called Jeremy Paxman mm-hmm you know him it does this thing called Newsnight he's serious on cross serious and cross yes and he was interviewing Ann Coulter who was being beamed in from over the Atlantic nieces and culture so you've got a new book here the publishers have only sent me the first chapter does it get any better that's Paxman okay then what about James Blake he works mostly by subtraction so he's he's always taking stuff out as much as he can and he ends up with these very skeletal pieces so but I can't remember what I did on that I know I co-wrote it yes it says on the cover but I did he did say he didn't mention something actually that I thought perhaps was very you although obviously not the only part of you was that he said that you came around and you had cups of tea together and I wondered too how important cups of tea were generally as a person who once had a cup of Earl Grey with Salvador Dali I did too well tea is just an excuse to sit there and it gives you you know when you've got something you can put in your mouth occasionally you don't have to keep talking oh so it's a counseling tool a kind of yeah that's right it's a work counseling maybe conversation cancellation so the input counseling device yeah I'll tell you what next time I make myself a cup of tea I'm gonna what it's better than saying which is what you do if you haven't got a something to put into your mouth and I thought I was just procrastinating every time I went to the kettle clearly not um okay so one Coldplay track that's from the last album I was when I was listening to it I was thinking about a specialist there's just so listen to it first I selected this one because it's the one that kind of noise kind of segues from track to track yeah that sounds like me in the back room there it's like two things I wanted to ask you better specifically what is about about like why people are afraid of popular music cuz people are on they they think popular music is kind of not as good as maybe niche music and I also wanted to ask you as well about the sound what makes something sound popular and what makes something sound nice yeah well that's a complicated question because one of the things that makes things sound popular isn't isn't a prerequisite of being popular and that's gloss Sheen finish you know so if you listen to Beyonce record or or any modern R&B record there's a lot of finish on it so what can you break down what finish is it's a lot of attention to a particular kind of sonic production you know the really perfect sounds on certain instruments hi-hats the Zenon sizzle voices that are perfectly in tune auto-tune perfectly in tune so so that's one side of the popular thing which is sort of flawless faultless and one side of niche in contrast to that is clumsy awkward crude unfinished things that actually we all like in the right context you know the reason we like the Velvet Underground is not for their gloss it's it's for their roughness for the for the feeling we have that this was really just breaking out and they didn't know how to make it better because when something is new you don't know how to make it better in fact you don't even consider that you could make it better you just think Jesus this is amazing is that just because the newness is enough the newness is kind of what it makes the excitement and enthusiasm that's exactly right I think the newness the newness is such a big thrill that you don't care about in fact that it's not even relevant to you to care about cleaning up all the edges and that slightly out have cheered on the g-string you know so so all the bureaucrats come into the process later on when everybody sort of understands it they look back and they say oh well Vaughn the girl you know they were great but a bit out of tune you know now we'll do that now we do the popular version of The Velvet Underground that the the commercial version will get everyone in tune get some decent sessions musicians in get a proper drummer instead of that woman from New Jersey so so that's a kind of professionalism which of course doesn't always produce bad results actually you know I remember when I was in my 20s or perhaps the biggest band in Europe was ABBA and nobody who was cool would admit to liking ever it's like people would slide to like like people with dirty magazines they would slide off into a corner to listen to our songs and hope that nobody ever saw their the Abba records in their collection but now you know everybody realizes that they were really great at what they did and it's the music still hangs around that still sounds good but they weren't cool because they were a professional not to say Swedish outfit who ever heard of Swedish why they're not kind of cultured people or people who think that they like music afraid of popular music are they afraid of well people in the art world in general are afraid of popular I think is to do it not liking the people so much I think it is a class thing really it's it's the fear that if you like what everybody else likes then you're no different from them you might just be like them and people are quite frightened of that I think I mean the kiss of death in the art world is when a artist becomes popular I've seen this in England with Antony Gormley I don't know if any of you know his work he's he's a very good sculptor and and everybody knew he was a very good sculptor until he became popular and suddenly he was not that good after all you know because because ordinary people liked his work this thing about the world I guess we're kind of moving into a something else I wanted to talk about which was you did a soundtrack recently for a channel for program called top boy oh yeah which was and so top boy was a program about an estate in Hackney in London it's kind of very beautifully made and kind of carefully and cleverly made depiction of one aspect of street life kids basically kind of getting into drug dealing and all the kind of traumas that that can bring and you did a soundtrack for it and I've got a clip here you can't see it but in a way it allows you to hear the music a bit better you can we play a little bit of it and talk to you yes what was interesting for me about that apart from the sound was and you want a BAFTA for it as well congratulations with the fact that I've not I know it might be my lack of knowledge but I wasn't really so aware of you doing work which connected with the kind of grittier aspect of street life whatever you might call it in the same way so this is the scene that you're seeing in what you're hearing just with some context ISM outside of school this little kid who's got in out of his depth is outside the school he's about to kind of get picked up by this kid who much older kid who he owes money to and and then he ends up kind of there's a kind of chase with the older guy chasing after the younger guy and so there's obviously okay well I'll tell you a little bit about yeah first of all I love doing film soundtracks because they they're a kind of alibi for stretching the music in in different ways if you if you're making a film soundtrack what you're really doing is making music - the subject because the subject is actually what's going to be on the screen so you're you're really working in the area of just creating an atmosphere which of course is what I like doing and in fact the the way I really got into what I called ambient music was by making imaginary film soundtracks so in the early 70s I was listening a lot to Fellini's sound the the Nino Rota soundtracks for the Fellini films and the Morricone soundtracks for the Sergio Leone cowboy films and I just loved the ambiguity of them when you hear the soundtrack without seeing the film and you have just this sort of atmosphere just an air you know and knowing that they were films made them very powerful somehow I was I would always find myself trying to imagine what the action was there what what was happening on the screen when this music was playing and I gradually found myself as I was working on my own records I found myself at the end of the day thinking oh no I think I'll do the soundtrack mix so I'd have been working on something all day in the way one does you know adding this taking that away and so on and then the end of the day I'd think okay time for the soundtrack mix and I'd changed the speed of the tape usually slowed it down quite a lot chuck out half the instruments and using whatever treatments and processes were available in the studio I'd do something dramatic to the others and almost inevitably that was what I liked so the rest of the day's work eight hours or ten hours of careful study didn't sound as interesting to me as that last 20 minutes so gradually I started thinking that this was actually what I like doing so I would always have in my mind the idea that I was working for a film I've actually been commissioned to do very few films or perhaps I should say I've accepted very few Commission's to do films but when I'm working I'm nearly always imagining that I'm actually doing film music even sitting at home you know in my studio at late at night I start playing around with something and I think that feels cold as soon as I get a sensation of some kind I'm on the way you know then I start I'm starting to make a picture it's all music has a kind of visual content for you yeah in your head yeah so tell me episode this one tree have a listen now yeah so the way I work accessible in fact the way I prefer to work with soundtracks is because I don't like being on the phone to directors much is I get the idea of what the thing is about and then I just produce a lot of music and say here it is they can cut your film to this music so you're giving them the kind of materials with which they can build what's in their head rather the new building something that's in your head in response to the images that you're seeing well I am working in response to the what I think is the atmosphere but you see this comes from the early days of watching Fellini and so on was those those Nino Rota pieces are not scored to the film they're pieces of music that sit sorry oh this bloody mic all the time I know this looks like sort of autofellatio but you know the the Hollywood idea of film soundtrack making is that you sort of tailor every moment because the audience must not be allowed to have any other ideas about what this is about and I hate that I really despise it so much when when you're led emotionally by the nose through every single scene and and you know there are so many bloody old tricks for doing it how do you make people feel a little bit sentimental oh we'll have that high piano and string stuff how do you make them feel a bit frightened let's have some low rumbly stuff it's just pathetic it really is a awful world and and so but what I always liked when I saw Fellini films was that there was one reality in the film and then another one in the music and they aren't really resolved so so it's sort of like there's two versions of the same story at once it's a little bit like having two different camera angles you know where you see the same thing from two different emotional perspectives and I thought that's what I like I don't want the music to just be bolted onto the film that way I want it to be another another part you know and I like that even within musics well I don't like it when things are too solidly one emotion I like it when they're confusing for instance bittersweet is always better for me than just bitter or just sweet it's it's when the thing is poised and you you you have a complex emotional response to it and do you think that's one of the reasons why that soundtrack worked so well because it was there in the background up against you know some quiets off forward sounding kind of grime tracks or other that what kind of on the soundtrack in that way yeah I think I think it worked because the temptation for a film like that if you'd been scoring it in the conventional Hollywood way would be too up the excitement factor up that danger factor all the time well the film is really about children actually children in a pretty bad situation and so my choices were always to do with what's the internal word world of the children not only what's the external world that they're in but what's the world they're in inside as well and so I was always choosing things because I thought this has something of the kids experience in it rather than our experience watching the kid and so so it was deliberately quite a lot of the stuff I made was deliberately sort of naive inside this hard this hard edge that it had but inside that it was sort of simple the melodies were simple they weren't sophisticated grown-up melodies you know I think I've got a couple more completely unrelated questions before we hand it out to you lot four questions about the national debt for example they're related broadly but they're not related to each other or what we were just talking about and I was going to ask you a few questions about lux about the last album that you've made but I know that there were a couple of people in there participants who had things they wanted to ask you about that but the thing that I wanted to ask was there was a remix of that by Nicholas Shaw for Record Store Day mm-hmm and I thought as a man who's full of good ideas I wondered if you could you know record store days what about celebrating the record shop and record shops have reinvented themselves as kind of niche places to go they are they've kind of done things to change how they operate in the world but I wondered if you were redesigning record shops or places where you go to purchase music or musical experience how would you reinvent them over and above just putting a kind of coffee shop in there well in the in my early life record shops used to have listening booths and that was really fantastic to be able to go into a little talent they were tiny little booths like this with that sort of stuff with holes in it on the soundproofing on the side and you'd sit in there and listen to something in a much better way than you ever could listen to it at home because nobody had headphones then headphones only existed in record shops and I think that wouldn't be a bad idea to to parcel out the territory so that there's lots and lots of little places where you can actually do some research because that's what it was effectively ood go in there and I talked to Sandy who I always fancied anyway and I'd I'd are sandy if I could hear the new Dionne Warwick b-side you know or something like that and Sandy would have a stack of things that she'd put on and just play them and I go like that then she'd put the next one on and that was how I listed a lot of music that I wouldn't have heard otherwise so that wouldn't be a bad thing to do it's a good point because often listening posts that they have in record stores often have very short wires on a headphone so you have to stand up and also you're kind of them it's not a very comfortable way no that's right that's right well this is the same as art galleries though you know art galleries never have decent seats in them because they want to get you through quickly and anyway you're not important MacDonald seating which I heard once was designed to make you leave after 17 minutes yes well they don't need just the seats to do that I [Laughter] persuaded by most of the things in there to leave unless 17 witness so my last question really was that you benefited from a kind of radical arts education under a gentleman Roy Ascott yeah it's which you know no I just think his he sounds like an amazing person like having Pythagoras is your math teacher or something yeah he sounded amazing and like for example in one of his classes he might do things like expose you to flashing lights and loads of darkness and then make you leave the room onto a floor that was covered in marbles that was his idea of a lesson yes he got fired from a lot of places yes he did yes I wanted to ask you he's still getting fired fantastic he sounds like someone else that should be running the world yep I wish he was so I wanted to ask you do you think kind of creativity can be taught and what should places that purport to teach be doing more of well first thing I think is that we are born endowed with a lot of creativity of course it's not the same for everyone some people seem to have more than others for various reasons but we then go through an education system that very carefully is designed to get rid of most of that creativity in England now we've got it down to a fine art we can educate people for twelve or fifteen years and they come out absolutely thick it's a triumph actually teachers no it's not it's actually not to do with teachers to do which is everything's teacher sports yeah it's the it's the ideologues fault in England you know this there's a sort of well I know you have it here in America as well there's a sort of ideological attitude to education which is that which is based on the idea that you have to educate people to fit into this society as it stands now which of course is stupid because they aren't functioning in the society as it stands now they're going to function in 112 or 20 years hence and that won't be the same society at all so well my girlfriend's son is currently going through the education system and two of my daughters are going through it as well so I'm quite aware of the horror of the whole thing and my feeling is that everybody should actually go to an English art school I really think that would be a very good idea for for a year or two because the the idea of art schools though of course they're getting constrained now as well but the idea of art school used to be and in some still is that you go to them to discover what parts of your creativity you want to explore and to enlarge in some way you don't go there to learn to be a flower painter or to learn to draw nudes or something like that you might do that on the way but what you really do is you go there to learn how you can apply yourself creatively to a situation how you can get the best out of it how you can think about it in a new way how you can approach it in a way that nobody has done before and how you can extract something from it that is valuable well this is exactly what we would all like to my girlfriend's son was who's a natural philosopher he's he's a thinking child you know he's studying philosophy now for what we call a levels which I know in America has a different meaning you don't read personal ads obviously sorry but he's he he's been reading philosophy and he he occasionally argues a point with the teacher who has to say don't try to interpret it please just read what it says in the book and learn it now this is philosophy right what is philosophy about except exactly that you know this is a tragedy that education has got to this point of telling you that you shouldn't try to have theories of your own about philosophy you should just learn what the philosophers did ii did so before we get kind of the microphone ready for questions from here is there anything you can tell us about that you're going to be working on in the near future that we may be interested in dark that's always a hard question i don't think too much about the near future distant future I think about quite a lot well I'm working on more Hospital things I'm very interested in that because it seems that at last I found a use for myself after after half a century of pissing around and that question what am i doing is it any good and what is it for exactly those questions now look like they could be briefly temporarily answered so looking forward to that excellent and I'm sure all the poorly people of Brighton and hopefully other places as well will be grateful to so questions and the microphone who's gonna go about a perfect hello mr. Anna about your your lecture today I can figure out how you with limitations and generate ideas I would like to know and what limitation or what process you use to finish and not develop but helped finish yeah once the time and we finish an idea well that's a very good question my daughter recently asked me the same thing because she would she was in my studio and she was looking at my archive where I have 2809 unreleased pieces of music and she said dad had you actually finish any of these and I said when there's a deadline and that that's really true but there's this I'll tell you why that's true when there's a deadline there's also a destination a context a reason for something and that's what makes me finish it up until that point it's an experiment sitting on my shelf and I can take it down again as I often do work on it again put it back on take out two years later work on it some more so everything's in progress until there's a reason to finish it for me now when something like top boy comes along I don't actually start from scratch what I do is I think okay top boy what's that East End Hackney to kill children drunks bomb okay and I think oh yes okay that I think that's something that might be relevant so I take out a piece and I start then now I know what it's for I know where it's going to go so then I can finish it and also I have a you know they want it by the end of next week as well which helps so so I've always thought that two things that really make for good records are deadlines and small budgets the things that make for bad records are no deadlines and endless budgets because you can piss around forever with that you know and I remember with working with them one famous band I I had heard something that they had done in the past and I thought they just spent too much time on it you know it sounded you all know what that sounds like when something has been sort of beaten to death basically and every detail has been finished so many times that there's no life left in it it's a little bit like British cooking before 1970 wasn't cooking that was just spaghetti in tins spaghetti yes and and yeah that's right and so so anyway I took this band to an a very good Italian restaurant in London and I had already arranged with the manager that I could take them into the kitchen so this is a fantastic restaurant very very famous very very cool with impeccably dressed waiters and good service all very chic and you go into the kitchen it's like a scene from hell there's people dashing around and swearing and food flying everywhere and it's incredible watching something being cooked there it's like great ingredients as little as possible time spent in the pan and then it's on the plate and this food tastes like it's fresh and is exciting and through you can feel the speed of the preparation actually you can feel the life in the whole thing and so so I said this is how we should make records it worked for a few days I saw a bit about technology maybe and you came from a long enough long line of helping musicians being with apps or narrowing possibilities I myself am a big fan of oblique strategies it's kind of a machine for musicians for me in a way so it's very helpful I just wonder nowadays with so much possibilities and so much ways of programming and coding things your iPad or iOS apps are amazing kids love it and you know you can really make good music with so few possibilities sonically speaking and I'm just wondering if you intend to work on something new with the digital domain that helps musicians to create or to solve some concepts and I don't have a specific next app in mind at the moment the the last one we did which was called escape I think it's gonna take a couple of years for that to really sink in that it's a very powerful idea and I really made it to try to make film soundtrack writers redundant I was I was trying to think is there a way I could automatically generate film soundtracks so that when you know someone calls up from Hollywood I don't have to say I'm God I couldn't face speaking to him on the phone again so I won't do the job but I could say yes I can do that in no time at all just send the check and here it is so so the idea was to make a program that could could generate really really interesting soundscapes and that's that's what scape is but I don't think well it's it's so quite well but nowhere near as well as bloom bloom is a much simpler thing to understand scape is a little bit more complicated but I think that's a great tool for musicians see if I were if I were a young musician now I had and I was trying to do something interesting with my instrument I would take scape I'd get a piece going and then I would play over it because it's it's unpredictable enough to lead you somewhere that you wouldn't expect to go musically it has to do a bit with logic is stochastic in algorithm so clearly on logic yeah so so all the processes of stochastic processes in that they don't have they have a margin of randomness you'd say so they're not they're not entirely random but they're on the cusp they're indeterminate is is another word another way of saying it an indeterminacy is is a nice world to work in if you're working in most with most sequences you're really working in a completely determinate world because you've built it all the thing about scape is that you can build the world but then it has its own rules for how it behaves within scape there are a lot of internal rules which tell different elements in scape to pay attention to each other so one of the elements might say you're only playing if she's playing another element might only play in the evenings another element might own play when there are three other things playing or for other things playing otherwise you will never hear it so so there's a lot of internal logic which you might become familiar with eventually but it's it's surprising it it does things that don't seem to be that you wouldn't expect from something in an iPad it's really great yeah thank you see that it's really great you said why do the rest of you know this okay here we are again hi my question is uh you do films like scores and stuff like that right I was watching this like documentary about a basket basket I'm I try to pronounce it the okay panting faint yeah about his process when he was like painting and he had like the TV on he'd have a record playing yeah I have the radio on yeah and I found myself doing that too cuz I I mean I'm I was gonna be an illustrator before I decided that I wanted to like stick with music but like I'll find myself like having the TV on with no music on and I'm like I have my music playing and just have me writing and make drawing just trying to figure out this that will like produce the best music possible like does that kind of stuff go on when you're like deciding how you want things to sound when you're pretty producing or you know your process well one of the things I've noticed is that when one used to use studios years and years ago you'd shut all the doors the studio would be very much a sealed closet you know you you were inside the music and you didn't want to hear anything else but what I've noticed now with most of the young musicians I work with is that they are constantly listening to other things so for instance you're in the middle of with James Blake for example that when we were working on that piece there a little thing came out and I said to Mary you have heard peace be still by James Cleveland has anyone ever heard that oh god you've got a thrill coming you've heard it yeah just just write this down and go in here peace be still by the Reverend James Cleveland and the is at the Shiloh Baptist choir I can't remember someone like that it's it's an amazing experience and that I we listen to that and we didn't then go and copy it but it changed what we did afterwards because it it has this amazing moment in it which I won't describe because I'll give the game away but it's such an incredible it's there's nothing else like it in music as far as I know this moment where an absence is incredibly powerful there's suddenly a huge hole that the music falls into anyway you gotta hear so we we listen to that and we thought yeah we get that that's an idea that's a good idea so the idea not not the way of doing it but the idea became and I noticed this a lot with when we're playing we're working on something in the studio and somebody says no no no I don't I don't want that kind of sound this look I want more like that and and so we listened to that and we say so what is that exactly what do you like to write it's a thin sort of sand I see yeah okay so we'll do that so people never used to do that in studios it was it was the the old idea of the artist who's working entirely from his own mind and it all comes out of there and you're nothing else in the world is relevant so so of course that's never been true with pop music but now it's more often acknowledged in the studio that you're working in a in a senior's basically thank you so where's a microphone traveling Tino I hope it's not gonna travel too much further because I need to go to the toilet if you don't mind me and talking about such matters I do have bowels just like everybody else not too long from their own lest you want an embarrassing incident on your sofa - Oh question is we're saying to my questions yeah mine is kind of quick first is for me it's like a true highlight and there's so much stuff you have done you said you don't look like - the new future what about like the always through I mean society as this thing about pinpointing an artist to a specific kind of work how do you see we'll look at your work what's that thing will mostly remind you remind remind us on you well of course my reputation in this hemisphere at least is mostly to do with music but I wouldn't be surprised if it's the light work that is turns out to be more interesting in the long term because I think it's less like anything else I I hope you'll go and see my show not because I want your admission fee or anything like that but because then you'll have an idea of what I'm talking about but that to me that is less like I I don't know what what else is like it it's it's a completely saying it's special it's you along is that it's just me right nobody else does anything like it and so I think in the long run I think that will stand as a sort of at the beginning of something I don't know what it's the beginning of thank you okay so one more hi hello you were talking earlier about being a scenic wire and being an atheist as well and I found I'm not a religious person at all but a lot of my other music I really really love is religious music yes I find levels of intensity and passion that I don't hear and other things to the point that I'm making music myself and wondering wishing I was religious almost them so that I could make something like that what should I do well this you you could find Jesus that's just never gonna work with my mind I'm looking for an alternative and I well this is a very interesting question and it's one I've thought about a lot because a lot of the music that I'm most moved by is religious music and so this is why I started to think about this idea of surrender I started thinking what is it I'm liking about that music but I'm not hearing in other music and I think it's the fact that the people doing it are completely engaged with it in the sense and not in an egotistical way they're not there to present themselves they're there to receive something they think it comes from outside I think it comes from inside but nonetheless they are there to open themselves up to something so what you like is the sound of someone being opened up being in a receptive and trusting and vulnerable condition basically and so that's your choice you can you can try to be in that condition as well I mean I I get that feeling from singing you know I'm not a good singer in any classic sense I don't have a great voice but I have a voice that can be that mixes well with other voices you might say so I I do backing vocals with practically everyone I work with it's me singing at the back there quite often in fact recently I was on three different stages on one night I was singing with you to Coldplay and James on the same night in three different continents because they sample music and they take me with them until but but what you have to do is to find the moments when that happens to you when you get that feeling and it might be the most embarrassing part of what you do for instance I don't know what what do you play I make it like trying to meet it okay so so the I think the thing is sort of admitting to yourself when that feeling is happening to you and it it might not be the part of yourself that you want to admit to as I said it happens to me when I'm singing well I stopped thinking singing was cool about thirty five years ago and started getting into much more intellectual pursuits but actually it's singing that does it for me and I have to admit that that's when I am that person that I want to be if I want to feel and with you it might be you know you're you're an electronic musician it might be playing blues on a rusty old guitar or something it is actually what you should be doing if you want to have that feeling okay but but I think you should think about this control and surrender think because that's that's where I think this that's what I think this question is about it's it's about where where am i allowing myself to be on this spectrum you know us electronic musicians a lot of our time is spent in control that's what it's all about it's about fiddling with software and code and plugins and what-have-you and not a lot of our time is spent listening to what we're doing so I have a trick that I use in my studio because I have these two thousand eight hundred odd pieces of unreleased music and I have them all stored in iTunes file you know and so when I'm cleaning up the studio which I do quite often and it's quite a big studio I just have it playing on random shuffle and so suddenly I hear something and often I can't even remember doing it or I have a very vague memory of it you know because a lot of these pieces they're just something I started at half-past eight one evening and then finished at quarter past ten gave some kind of funny name to that doesn't describe anything and completely forgot about and then years later on the random shuffle this thing comes up and I think wow I didn't even hear it while I was doing it and I think that's sort of that often happens we don't actually hear what we're doing we're in we're so in control mode that we don't go into that other mode which is listener mode surrender mode let it happen to me he mode and so I think you should try to find ways of letting that happen to you more often and then you'll find the places where you're you're getting that feeling it may all be there already you just haven't noticed it that often happens I mean I I often find pieces and I think this is genius which me did that who was the me that did that whichever me it was we're very grateful to all your Me's thank you very much [Applause] you

Channel: Red Bull Music Academy

Views: 124,015

Rating: 4.9474039 out of 5

Keywords: “red bull music academy”, “red bull”, “RBMA lecture couch”, Brian Eno, Brian Eno Lecture, Brian Eno Red Bull Interview, Brian Eno on Creativity, Brian Eno on the Human League, Brian Eno talks Microsoft, Brian Eno on Electronic music, Brian Eno synth-pop, Brain Eno talks Music, Brain Eno on Genesis, Brain Eno talks Film soundtracks, Brain Eno talks to Red Bull, Brain Eno talk, Brain Eno discussion

Id: JUL8kNYmgsA

Length: 75min 40sec (4540 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 04 2018

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[u/crazytonyi]

But one of many across the United States.