Brian Eno and the role of the producer

The meaning of the word “producer” has changed significantly over the history of recorded music. Before the 1960s, most record producers were businesspeople, responsible for signing checks and making sure the musicians and engineers did their jobs. Some producers took a creative role in choosing repertoire, arrangements and takes, but others were hands-off. As recording technologies and processes became more complex and further removed from documenting real-time performances, producers started to take on more creative importance. Consider George Martin’s role with the Beatles. For the first few albums, he simply supervised the recording process, but as time went on, he began to write and conduct orchestral arrangements, play instruments, and carry out technical experiments with the band and engineers.

In the 1970s, more artists started to think of the recording studio itself as an instrument, assembling tracks into collages that sometimes bore little resemblance to the original live performances. An album like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon was as much a creation of the producers and engineers as the songwriters and musicians. As they started “playing the studio,” album producers became less like film producers and more like film directors. (Meanwhile, recorded music became less like filmed stage plays and more like Pixar or Star Wars movies.)

Brian Eno is a crucial figure in this evolution. It’s significant that his background is in visual art, not music. (Many British rock and pop musicians got started in art school.) Eno has described himself as a “non-musician.” He initially thought of himself as a conceptual artist more than anything. As a student, he experimented with electronic music under the influence of John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, but he approached these projects as sound art, not as “music” necessarily.

Eno became a member of a band called Roxy Music, first as a behind-the-scenes studio musician, and then later as a performing member. He “played” synthesizers, but he used them to create soundscapes and drones rather than conventional melodic or harmonic parts. He also used electronic gear to manipulate the sound of the other band members. You can get a good sense of his role from this TV performance of “Ladytron” – Eno is the one in the leopard print shirt twiddling knobs on a giant synth.

Eno popularized the term “ambient music” to describe a kind of musical soundscape, functioning more like auditory wallpaper than “songs” or “pieces.” These soundscapes evolved slowly over long periods of time, and they were not intended to hold the listener’s complete attention. Ambient music is more experimental and unstructured than Muzak, but more pop-oriented than electroacoustic composition or musique concréte. Eno did not always “play” any instruments on his ambient recordings; sometimes he just manipulated and processed performances by other people, as he did with the guitarist Robert Fripp on their albums together.

Eno also popularized the concept of generative music, in which musicians set up complex technological systems that then output music without human intervention. For example, Eno used tape loops that played out of sync with each other to semi-randomly generate Music for Airports.

Eno has also produced more conventional rock and pop music, though even there, you can hear his interest in soundscapes and textural manipulation. For example, listen to the strange reverbs and droning guitars on David Bowie’s “Heroes.”

Hear fellow Bowie producer Tony Visconti breaking down the tracks in this song, including Robert Fripp’s hypnotic guitar drone.

Eno is famous for using experimental methods, like his Oblique Strategies cards. The idea is that, if you are working in the studio and you hit an impasse, you draw a card at random and follow whatever instruction it gives you. Eno particularly likes having musicians come into the studio without any prepared or planned material. Instead, he has them record improvisation, which they then edit and shape into songs. This is how he and Talking Heads created “Once in a Lifetime.”

Building songs from recorded improvisation was a strange and radical idea in the 1970s and 1980s, in part because editing tape was labor-intensive and difficult. But Eno turns out to have been prescient. Splicing together improvised performances is effortless with computers, and has become a dominant mainstream pop songwriting method. (Read The Song Machine by Jon Seabrook for a description of how this works.)

Eno was also prescient in his embrace of sampling. His track “Regiment,” created with David Byrne, combines a live funk recording with a sample of the Lebanese singer Dilma Yousef. Eno plays the keyboard parts that sound like distorted electric guitar, in a deliberate imitation of Robert Fripp.

Over the course of the 1980s, Eno started producing mainstream hits, including “With or Without You” by U2, co-produced with his frequent collaborator Daniel Lanois. You can hear Eno’s influence clearly on the sound of The Edge’s guitar, which barely sounds like a guitar at all. It functions more like an ambient synth pad, playing long tones and repetitive fragments rather than strummed chords. The shimmering octave-shifted digital reverb is key to the sound.

Eno’s most-heard piece of music is not a pop or rock song; it’s the Windows 95 startup sound. He tells the story behind it in this interview.

The Windows 95 sound is an F#7sus4 chord, tuned about a quarter tone sharp. It’s a more wistful and ambiguous sound than you’d expect, and Microsoft eventually switched to a more conventional major-key fanfare for the Windows XP sound.

More recently, Eno produced a remarkable Paul Simon album. You can hear his characteristic ambient textures on “Another Galaxy.”

Eno also produced “Viva La Vida” for Coldplay, which is not really to my taste, but it certainly had an impact on pop culture.

Some discussion questions:

• To what extent is Eno the “composer” or “performer” of this music, especially on the songs where he didn’t play any instruments or write any melodies or lyrics? Do the words “composer” or “performer” even apply to generative tape-loop or computer music?
• Is “producer” an adequate word for a person who plays the studio, or do we need some new vocabulary?
• Paul Théberge wrote: “Although there are certainly valid distinctions to be made between ‘songs’ and their realization in sound, for much popular music such distinctions have become increasingly difficult to make. … The term ‘sound’ has taken on a peculiar material character that cannot be separated either from the ‘music’ or, more importantly, from the sound recording as the dominant medium of reproduction.” Do you agree? Does a song like “Heroes” or “With or Without You” meaningfully exist separately from its recorded realization?
• Finally: if you are reading this for one of my classes, then you are have experienced electronic music production for yourself. Imagine using the approach you have been taking to loops, MIDI and found sounds on recordings of live performers. Are you attracted by the idea of producing recordings this way? Why or why not?