Album artwork for Lux
Today’s post focuses on a style of music that is drastically different from anything else featured here on Audio Intimacy. Today, we’re talking about Brian Eno. There’s a good chance you may have heard the name before. After all, he does happen to be one of the main proponents and principal innovators of experimental electronic music production. There is, quite literally, too much to say about the man to cover it all in a post here. When Eno first came onto the scene in the early ’70s, the music industry was undergoing an intense period of transition (isn’t it always, though?). More specifically, it was going through something of a technological Renaissance as multitrack recording became more and more expansive. Music recordings became subject to a continuously increasing amount of manipulation and editing. This set the stage for Eno to find inspiration in his innovative philosophy of “The Studio As a Compositional Tool.”
The main premise behind this philosophy is that the art of recording music is just that – an art. It is no longer simply a means of transmitting a single performance as accurately as possible. With the development of multitrack recording, producers to have the incredible ability to manipulate everything from the arrangement of the song to the individual timbres of the instruments. They can put an echo effect on the entire song, or just on the guitar track for two seconds on the bridge. This affects composition on both the macro level and the micro level. The infinite amount of unique combinations of sound that were made possible by this new approach is too awe-inspiring for words, yet it is something that we take for granted in the 21st century.
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