The New Yorker Radio Hour - Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”

Episode Date: June 3, 2025

In the music business, Brian Eno is a name to conjure with. He’s been the producer of tremendous hits by U2, Talking Heads, David Bowie, Grace Jones, Coldplay, and many other top artists. But he’s also a conceptualist, nicknamed Professor Eno in the British music press, and a foundational figure in ambient music—a genre whose very name Eno coined. Amanda Petrusich speaks with Eno about his two new albums that just came out, “Luminal” and “Lateral,” and his new book, “What Art Does.” “One of the realizations I had when I was writing this book is that really the only product of art is feelings,”  Eno says. “Its main point is to make your feelings change—is to give you feelings that you perhaps didn’t have before or did have before and want to have again or want to experiment with. So it seems very simplistic to say, ‘Oh, it’s all about feelings.’ But actually I think it is. Feelings are overlooked by all of those people who think bright children shouldn’t do art.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. For decades, Brian Eno has been a hugely influential figure in the music business, particularly in the studio. He's produced hit after hit with U2, Talking Heads, David Bowie, Grace Jones, and many, many others. But he's also known as a kind of musical philosopher, a guru of the soundboard. Here's the New Yorker's music critic Amanda Petrusich. Brian Eno is an English musician and producer, whose career is so vast and adventurous

that really can't be easily encapsulated. But here's my best shot. After leaving the glam rock band Roxy Music in the early 70s, he released a series of extraordinary solo records. Somewhere along the way, he essentially invented, or at the very least named, ambient music, which is what we now call any minimalist electronic composition. but for me is really just kind of a thing that you feel in your body

in all the soft and tender places that go untouched by thought. That idea of tapping into something less thinky and more instinctive is present in everything Eno does. Eno's work has been a funny kind of North Star in my life. He's someone who's obviously thought quite deeply about art and love and culpability and desire and duty and risk and what it means to honor the very wild fact of your existence. Amanda Petrusich spoke with Brian Eno about two new records that have just come out

in his new book, What Art Does? I was an art student. I went to art school for five years, and in fact, I got my degree in fine art. And like many others of my generation, I then immediately joined a band. Of course. Funny, that's how it worked then. And I was always interested in this fundamental question of why do we make art? It's a completely universal human activity, but we don't seem to know very much about it at that fundamental level.

This question, I've been aware of it for ages that people think art is a luxury. We're very used to the idea that humans respond to pain and punishment. we avoid things that are going to hurt us. But I think we're also guided to a huge degree by the things that we find beautiful or awesome or striking or impressive or all the words we might use. I think we very much want to be guided by those things as to where to go. My friend John Hassel, who died unfortunately three years ago, I think now, used to have a great phrase. he said, one of the most important questions you can ask yourself is, what is it that I really like? And that seems like a trivial, self-indulgent sort of question.

Oh, what do you really like? Well, but it isn't actually because, you know, we live in a world now where 10,000 people a day are trying to tell us what we ought to like. be they advertisers, press barons, TV companies, politicians, influences. It's very, very important that you remember what it is that you actually really like. That's your guidance. That's your lodestone, as it were. Brian, you're giving me goosebumps. You're right.

It is, in many ways, the only question that matters. And it reminds me, it brings me back to love, which is an experience that requires. that requires surrender, which is another theme in the book. And you point out that a fixation on control ultimately makes a person's world very small. You write, the raw, wild world develops and leaves us behind playing solitaire on our phones. When I started to notice that nearly all of the things that humans regard as peak experiences, you know, being bowled over by a piece of music, being knocked out by a sculpture or a dance or something like that. So love, art, religion, sex, drugs, all of those things are situations where we willingly let something happen to us that is slightly beyond our ability to comprehend and control.

We surrender. I think a lot of the art experience is about surrendering. And that's the point, you know, the whole point is being moved, having feelings. One of the realizations I had when I was writing this book is that really the only product of art is feelings. Its main point is to make your feelings change, is to give you feelings that you perhaps didn't have before or did have before and want to have again or want to experiment with. So it seems very simplistic to say, oh, it's all about feelings. But actually I think it is. Feelings are overlooked by all of those people who think bright children shouldn't do art.

They're the same people who think that feelings are the sort of irrelevant part of life. Sort of simple-minded and inarticular and can't be quantified. Feelings are rather slippery, undefinable stuff. I think feelings are the beginning of everything. It's our first line of contact with the world. in in in 2020 you said I think

I think we're in for a hard ride for maybe half a century then it will either be the end of civilization or a reborn humanity And it seems to me so far that you are right. But I wanted to ask you a little bit about some of your advocacy and particularly your climate advocacy because I think the enormity of some of these problems can lead people to just panic and freeze. Although I think I sense something in the book

and in the new music and in some of the work you've been doing more recently. I feel like I sense a bit of optimism as well. I'm glad you did. There is some optimism. I mean, I am pessimistic in the short term. Things really are looking quite bad. And what I notice, though, that as things are getting worse, people are getting organized too. And what it seems to me now is needed is some kind of coalescence. I often quote this Russian writer, he's a Russian sort of social historian, I guess you'd say. His name is Sergei Yerchak. He says, revolutions happen in two phases. The first is when somebody realizes that everything is not working.

The second is when they realize that everybody else realizes the same thing. And that's the important moment. The important moment is when you suddenly realize that you all agree that it's fucked. Sorry. So I think we're reaching that point now. I did want to just sort of briefly return to the book before we move on, which for me exists in kind of a lovely dialogue, I think, with oblique strategies, which is a set of cards you made with Peter Schmidt in 1975. And it is quite literally a box of cards, each printed with an aphorism of some sort designed to help artists move through a creative challenge. You know, I have found you can kind of use them almost as like a tarot deck.

And, you know, this morning I pulled the one that said, give you. way to your worst impulse, which I am doing. My worst impulse is to ask you very long questions that sort of trail off at the end. And I'm curious for you if you see the book and the cards as part of the same project, by which I mean the kind of project of setting people free. You know, I think you're the first person who's connected to two projects, and they are connected in my mind. I think what I'm really interested in is doing something that helps people. And I didn't want it to be technical or just another art book. If you want another art book, there's plenty of them. I wanted something that you could really internalize. For instance, this notion of play

that runs through the book. We all understand that children learn through playing. So I thought, what happens to the play impulse in people? And I suddenly had this flash. Play is how children learn. art is how adults play. In fact, when we go to the theatre, when we read a novel, when we go to a gallery, when we watch a dance, I think we're learning about important things when we do those things. And we're still playing, actually.

We just give that kind of playing a different name. We call it art. It's a sort of simulator. You know, the reason you have flight simulators is because you want to be able to crash. And I think art is very often a simulator in that way. You can experience what an unhappy marriage is like by reading about it without having to have an unhappy marriage.

You can experience, you know, the terror in revolutionary France without having to have your head chopped off. If you can, do it first in art and then give it a try in real life. Yes, yes, that's maybe the best advice of all. Brian Eno, speaking with the New Yorker's Amanda Petrusich. More in a moment. I did want to talk to you about the two new records, luminal and lateral that you made with Beatty Wolf.

You've described luminal as dream music and lateral as space music. And I was hoping you could talk a little bit more about that distinction. Okay, so I'll tell you, first of all, the kind of physical difference between the two records. The first one, luminal, is a group of songs. The second one, lateral, is a single long piece. It's more like a space, as I always think about with ambient music. It's a place that you go to. I like to think of these pieces of music as feelings that you go into. I notice that when I want to sit down to write, for example, I wanted to listen to something, but nothing seemed to be right. I wanted something that was just a nice sonic condition.

In the same way, perhaps, that you might adjust the lighting in a room. What's the musical equivalent of that? What would a music be that was like that? And on the first ambient record, or the first record that I called ambient, I said the music should be as ignorable as it is interesting. So I wanted it, I want to make a kind of music that you could surrender to, or ignore. And when you ignored it, it shouldn't demand your attention. When you're collaborating with someone else, you know, when you're collaborating with

BD on this record, you do this often, of course, in your career as a producer. Is there a way in which you can kind of reliably create an environment that more effectively leads to or suggests surrender that kind of accelerates intimacy in a way that makes it easier for people to open up to each other? I think there is. And I think it. lies in the particular nature of sound that you're working with from the 20th century onwards. We have a huge, huge palette, new ways of making sound that produce new types of sound that nobody ever, ever heard before.

And so I think a lot of composition now is an experiment with trying to digest all of those new sonic possibilities. If you think, for instance, about the other pole. of ambient music, I always think, is heavy metal. So it's another form of immersive music. It's, of course, in terms of feeling quite different from ambient music generally. But I still think it is a kind of ambient music. It's a bath of sound.

You know, I've seen heavy metal music being recorded. So I can tell you this, what really matters is the exact texture of sound, the exact type of distortion, the exact type of compression, the exact type of compression. I think that's very much what ambient music was built on, the notion that there was this new way of composing. You know, when I received the records, they included a list of feelings that inspired you and Bidi. And some of them were words I didn't know from languages I don't speak. And I found many of them overwhelmingly beautiful, in part because they are complicated. You know, like Onsra, which is a borough word for a kind of doomed love or the Arabic word.

word, yeah, a burney, which you define as not wanting to live in a world without someone. I mean, these are words that do sort of attempt maybe to kind of contain the complexity of human experience. There's a nice German one. It's probably my favorite and something I think I feel quite often, which is called Turschlus panic, which means door shutting panic. So it's that feeling you've got that you're trying to. get something done and the door is closing and you're not going to get there quite in time to

ever do it. It's a terrible feeling. Brutal. Well, this leads me to ask, you know, are there some feelings that are more easily evoked by sound? I mean, we know, you know, anger is a big one. You know, are there any feelings that are maybe particularly difficult to tap into? You know, on that end, I think, like, well, contentment or are bored. or maybe a little bit harder to translate into sound than, you know, rage or lust. The feelings that I think are very, very easy to locate in sound are sort of melancholy and the sparkle of new life.

I often hear those things in sand. I have never yet, I don't think, heard anything that captured the feeling of boredom. And I'm disappointed in that because there's. there's a great line in the Tibetan leader, Chugam Trunkpur's book, where he said, we should rush forward into boredom and disappointment. And I've tried to do that, but I don't think I've succeeded yet. I like this idea that those might be places where you can learn something unique. I mean, I do think boredom is very important.

If you keep getting boredom out of the way by distracting yourself with wordle or whatever else you distract yourself with, you lose the possibility of your threshold of interest falling so low that you can notice a tiny thing. I love that. And suddenly...

You know, and boredom feels like a kind of endangered resource. But I think you're right, it is such a generative experience if you can surrender to it. I try to do things because I want to do them, not because they're just a little tiny bit better than sitting looking at the wall. I really try to now just sit and look at the wall. If you don't provide input, what happens? If you want things to come up from inside you,

all of the accumulated knowledge and information and experience, that you have. If you want that to manifest itself, you have to stop trying to stuff more stuff in at that moment. You have to give it space to come up. You can't do both things at once, I think. Speaking of restricting our inputs, I wanted to ask you about the decision to stop traveling by airplane as a form of climate protest. Can you talk a little bit more about that choice? It wasn't an absolute choice. So since I made that decision, which was about seven years ago now, yes, seven or eight years ago, I've taken four plane journeys. So I suddenly feel I've been liberated from ever having to go to airports again.

This is, of course, ironic coming from the author of Music for Airports, yes. I know, but more importantly, I feel that all of us could make a lot less flights. It's not such a hard decision to make in Europe. It would be harder in America, I think. I mean, it's a very personal decision, and I can't, in all honesty, say to everybody else, you should stop flying because people have different lives and different needs. But I can stop flying pretty much all of the time. I don't have to fly very often at all.

Is there a particular place or perhaps places that you miss or things that have maybe made the choice challenging to uphold? Well, America. I mean, I lived in America for a while and I have some good friends in America. And also there are places I've never been. I've never been to India. So, yeah, there's a lot of the world I'd like to see. But there's all sorts of things I've made. missed in my life. And I don't really worry too much about that fact. I'm curious if you try to

sort of keep, in terms of your climate activism, if it's a balance in terms of allowing it to kind of manifest in your creative work, it's present in the music you make, and then also present in your personal life and choices about travel or sort of how you live, how your house is set up, do you try to keep those two things in balance? Well, one of the themes of my work, I think is economy, is trying to see how much you can do with how little. And I really like that feeling. I've been working with Beatty Wolf and we've just used one guitar. And I always love that challenge of saying, let's just accept what is here at the moment and make the best of it.

I'm not the kind of person who thinks I'm not going to work in any studio that doesn't have 16 ancient compressors and 14 fabulous old German microphones and so on. I just don't think like that. I always think that every moment in your life is a unique set of circumstances, unique both in what it has and in what it lacks. and if you make your work out of the moments in your life, then every piece of music will be different. Everything comes from a different place. I reject the idea that you have to standardise the working conditions before you can do any work.

I often listen back to things that I've done in the past, and I think I have no idea how I did that. I've listened to an old song of mine, the other day and I realized there was a quite complicated set of similar sounds that went through the song at a particular rhythm. Now, I know that I didn't consciously put them there, but somehow or other, those patterns appear. Now, I don't think they originated from God. I think they originated from somewhere in me, which led me to wonder, is it somewhere in me that people call God.

You know, is God a name for those inaccessible or unknown parts of yourself that do things that make decisions that you don't even know about? And the conscious part of your mind doesn't know about. Anyway, that's rather a long question for a program like this. Brian, I just want to thank you so much for speaking with me. It's been so wonderful talking with you. I appreciate it deeply. Thank you very much, Amanda. It's been a real pleasure meeting you as well.

I hope there's another chance that we can do that sometime. The New Yorker's Amanda Petrusich speaking with Brian Eno. Eno's new records in collaboration with Beattie Wolf are called Luminol and Lateral. And if you're interested in Eno's work, a terrific documentary came out last year, simply called Eno. I'm David Remnick. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for listening. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-refer radio hour is a co-exam. production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Summer. With guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Gwan, and Alejandra Deccett. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Churrower. Endowment Fund.