Transcript of a talk given by Brian Eno as part of the Long Now
Foundation’s series of Seminars About Long Term Thinking.

Fort Mason, San Francisco
14th November, 2003

By the mid 1970s I’d started to imagine a different kind of music
that I wanted to hear. This music really grew out of three separate threads
of interest. One of them is African music – I was listening to a lot
– particularly Fela Kuti the Nigerian bandleader. The second was the Velvet
Underground and the scene that constituted. The third was composers like
Steve Reich and Terry Riley. What I think interested me about all those
sorts of music was that they flattened out the shape of the music, the
hierarchical structure of the music was flatter. So the pop music I had
been listening to mostly had a voice sitting at the top then some rhythm
instruments, and then some drums. And the focus of the music, the shape
of the music was very pyramidal. What I found I was preferring to listen
to was music where that pyramid was squashed down, where no particular
instrument was featured as the lead instrument and instead you had a network
of interactions between lots of different sounds. In my own work this manifested
in an emphasis on making what would have been called the background more
interesting, and what would have been called the foreground, less and less
central, thus sinking foreground elements into the background.

    The other thing that I was interested in was in
losing the obvious boundaries of music, I wanted to make something that
didn’t sound like it had edges, sonic edges, or that it had a beginning
and an end. I wanted to make something that belonged to a big space and
you as the listener could hear some of that but not necessarily all of it,
and I wanted to make something that felt like it had always been going on
and would always be going on and you just happened to catch a part of it.
I guess the first piece I made which had a feeling of being a kind of eternal
present tense was a record called Discreet Music in 1975, which was a very
long record for a vinyl album. It was the longest I could possibly get on
to one side of a vinyl album – thirty minutes and thirty one seconds – and
I wanted to give the implication that this was not a piece of music in the
ordinary sense of something that had been composed with a beginning, a
middle and an end, but instead was a continuous endless place in time.
So I was developing this idea of place of music being not so much a sonic
narrative but more a sonic landscape – again with the feeling that this
was a landscape that was always in the present tense, a landscape that
was an extended present tense.
    So sometime in the late 70s a couple of things
happened to me that made a big difference to the way I thought about
music. One of them was in Germany, I was sitting in an airport, and listening
to the music that they play in airports the message of which is ‘don’t
worry you’re not going to die’ – music that is deliberately very lightweight,
with no threat, where everything’s got a nice smile and usually the most
disconcerting thing about it is that the tape player doesn’t work properly
and you think ‘if they can’t get that to work’…..

    But anyway I was listening to this music and I
thought this was exactly the wrong kind of music to play in an airport,
because it makes you really nervous, it makes you think ‘all they’re
saying to you is ‘Death? Don’t mention it! Don’t even think about it’.
So I started thinking ‘What would make you not think about death so much?’
and I started to think that what you really needed in airports was the
kind of music that would make you care less about your own life, that would
make you not be so concerned about the prospect of dying.
    So I wanted to make a kind of music that would
actually reduce your focus on this particular moment in time that you
happened to be in and make you settle into time a little bit better;
and I came up with the record Music for Airports – a record that was very
deliberately aimed at changing one’s sense of time. This was the point
where I realised that a lot of what I was thinking about musically was
to do with the experience of time.

    Shortly after making that record, I moved to New
York, I was living on 8th St and 5th Avenue. I was invited to a party
one evening, by a friend of mine, a singer, and she gave me the address.
I didn’t know New York very well, so I hailed a cab, and the cab driver
started driving south and the street lights got darker and darker and
the pot holes got bigger and bigger. The steam was coming out of the streets
and finally we ended up in a very dark gloomy medieval street at what
appeared to be the address on the card, and I thought it’s very strange
that she should live down here: this must be a joke of some kind. I rang
the bell and was buzzed in and got in the elevator and went up the stairs
to see a glitteringly expensive loft. This was in itself a surprise –
that someone had spent so much money in such a bad neighbourhood, so
I asked the hostess during the evening whether she liked living there,
and she said “oh yeah this is the best place I’ve ever lived” and I realised
that what she meant was within these four walls.
    So this was very New York to describe the ‘here’