Brian Eno first came to prominence in the music scene as the keyboard player to lead singer Bryan Ferry in the band "Roxy Music". He then went on to a wide variety of roles in the music business, including the role of producer for David Bowie and the band U2. As a composer, he has worked extensively in the field of synthesiser and experimental music using computers. His connections with experimental music have spanned a number of years, where he has followed in the footsteps of composers such as John Cage. He also provided the foreward to Michael Nyman's book on "Experimental Music", which featured the work of such early pioneers in this field. One of his more recent associations with such principles has been with "generative music" which involves setting up patterns and rules introducing variation and random factors to the performance. He has been associated with the software product "Koan" from SSEYO which allows composers to create generative music.
As a composer, Eno has created solo synthesiser albums (with his music often described as "ambient") and has also collaborated on several more. If you are a PC user you may well have come across one example of Eno's work because he also composed the start-up sound for Windows 95! One association with film music is that Eno contributed a track called the "Prophecy Theme" to the film version of "Dune". Several of the themes from "Dune" have frequently appeared in albums of synthesiser music. His songs have also been used in various films such as "Castaway", "Cool World", "Se7en", "Trainspotting", "Traffic" and Moulin Rouge (in this case just fragments of the song "Heroes").
Continuing his associations with modern technology, Eno has been commissioned to compose a series of 20 Ring Tones for Nokia. Nokia and other mobile phone producers have been criticised in the past for producing annoying ring tones, and Eno's new ring tones are designed to attract the attention of the phone owner without annoying other people nearby.
|
TOP
BACK
