A Personal Playlist for Eno (the Documentary)

Where’d that sound come from?

The best I can do to make a case for Eno is to put my listening in a very personal context. Because what else do I have but a place and a time? So, bear with me for a moment. 

I was a music-obsessed kid whose first musical memories are based in Ohio, USA, of the mid-1970s. There was a lot of amazing music on the radio of my youth: I loved disco, I loved funk (Is Stevie Wonder his own genre?), I loved Philly soul, and I loved British Invasion. This was all wonderful, but I noticed a seismic shift in the radio soundscape around 1980–83. Suddenly predominantly electronic music flooded the airwaves, even in Ohio. The most prominent instruments in the mix of this music—from bands like The Human League, Thomas Dolby, Japan, New Order—was the synthesizer, not guitars.

There were synths in disco and funk (and prog, which I didn’t know about yet), but this was different. A bit more abstract, more dystopian. And I couldn’t get enough. Though these amazing sounds seemed to come from outer space, something in me knew they came from somewhere, from someone. As I became a musician, forming a synthpop band and learning about MIDI and oscillators, I dedicated myself to figuring out just where these sounds came from. I was obsessed. And this was before the Internet, and mind you, I was in Ohio.

A visionary synthesist

It didn’t take long to track down the UK portion of this sonic history to the revolutionary synth-heavy albums that David Bowie and Brian Eno made in the mid-1970s (Low, “Heroes”, and Lodger), and from there, to track down Bowie’s contemporaries Roxy Music, whose early records featured Eno on “synthesizer and tapes.” And from Eno’s playing I got, as Duran Duran’s synth player Nick Rhodes later described it, the “pure creative DNA” of postpunk/synthpop.

To put the sonic innovations of this period in some larger historical context, it helps to think about sonic evolution of popular music from 1945 to 1985, and then from 1985 to, say, 2015. While Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars’s “Uptown Funk” (2015) lives in the same sonic world as The Time/Prince’s “Jungle Love” (1984), and we thank them for that, Roxy Music’s “Virginia Plain” (1972) may as well come from a different planet as Bing Crosby’s “Don’t Fence Me In” (1945). I’d argue that Brian Eno has a lot to do with the vast sonic ground covered by pop in the 1970s and 1980s, and the sound of the 1980s is very much the sound of pop music today.

The playlist below tries to focus on just how innovative and adept Eno was at crafting sounds on various synthesizers as well as processing (or as he called it, “treating”) more conventional sounds with synthesizers and chains of effects like tape delay and reverb. Unlike many musicians in the early 1970s, he had no desire to make bands sound natural or authentic or “bluesy,” but rather embraced the spacy and the artificial. And he quickly became one of the best sound designers of the era, aided by Roxy Music engineer Rhett Davies. Records like his Music for Films (1976) have some of the most lush, organic, totally gorgeous synth sounds I’ve heard over decades of listening.

My hunch as a kid had been right: those synth sounds of the 1980s came from somewhere, from someone. You can hear many of them in the music below.

A philosopher of art and creative strategist

While his sonic innovations are important, what perhaps made him most valuable to fellow rock musicians like Bowie, Talking Heads, and U2 that were looking for a new perspective was his training as a fine artist. 

Eno enrolled in Ipswich Civic College in the UK in 1964 where he encountered educator Roy Ascott’s Groundcourse, which emphasized conceptual process, role playing, and creative strategy over product. And the benefit of this training was that Eno soon understood the way to make anything new was to 1) state the creative problem very clearly (e.g., “all this music sounds alike because the lyrics are cast in the first person and played in blues scales” and 2) have reliable methods to avoid common creative ruts. Both skills served him very well in this solo career, where he quite methodically (not unlike minimalist artists or iconoclasts like Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol) began to take apart the trappings of his artform to see what makes it tick. 

What if the lyrics for a pop song are set in the third person instead of the first: is it still expressive? What if we make a pop song an abstract landscape instead of a figurative portrait? What if we draw a card from a deck to determine the next chord? This article from the music magazine MOJO gives a nice summary of his general progression and approach, and Christopher Scoates’s book Brian Eno: Visual Music does a nice job framing his education and subsequent visual art career. 

My gateway to Krautrock

After discovering Eno (the flamboyant, radically creative musician of 1972–75), and Brian Eno for that matter (the more professional, producer he grew into), I soon had the same question I had about my synthpop heroes: where’d he get that sound?

Eno has been very open about his influences, which span everything from the doo-wop he heard as a kid to the minimalist composers he encountered in art school (La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich) to New York rock band The Velvet Underground, which emerged from the scenes of Young and Warhol. But sonically and synthetically, Eno’s most important influences were arguably from the German rock scene of the late 1960s–late 1970s often called Krautrock, and particularly from the bands Can and Cluster, who crop up in the list below. But that’s a story for another time. 

For now, I hope you enjoy these songs and sounds, particularly if you are listening to Eno for the first time. The sonics you enjoy today came from somewhere. The future of music has to start with someone. You never know: with a little inspiration, it could be you.

Disclaimer: I had to limit this list somehow, so I’m focusing on work released before 2000 and avoiding all the long-form ambient material because it’s cruel to try to entice people with hour-long tracks. Eno has become tamer with age, but he continues to put out good work, from the perfect pop song "Strange Overtones" to upbeat records with Underworld’s Karl Hyde.

1972 • Roxy Music • “Virginia Plain”

Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars came out in 1972, and borrowing from The Stooges and Velvet Underground, it telegraphs much of punk and postpunk while remaining traditionally rock. “Virginia Plain” is also from 1972, but the synth parts, particularly Eno’s chewy VCS3 synth bass line and a solo, could be from 1982.

1973 • Roxy Music • For Your Pleasure • “The Bogus Man”

OK, OK, I’m getting in two Roxy songs because I love them. But it’s worth noting that the band is far more conventional after Eno leaves out of boredom (he disliked touring). This song showcases some great Eno synth parts and some production choices I think he influenced: the wah pedal on the Wurlitzer electric piano, the chromatic clangs, and liberal use of delay. But this song also forecasts the kind of menacing character study Eno would revisit in his solo material. Kudos to Chris Thomas (Beatles, Pink Floyd, Pulp) for his outstanding production here. This is Roxy’s best record.

1973 • Eno • Here Comes the Warm Jets • “Baby’s on Fire”

Where does one start with this album? It’s lyrically unhinged, and it’s full of off-kilter production ideas like layering dozens of versions of the same simple guitar or drum parts until they become detuned storm clouds of sound. Though Eno claims to be a nonmusician in these days, he sure displays an instinct for melody and dynamics and rock-and-roll fun. This also starts the tradition of his friends/labelmates from Roxy Music and King Crimson playing on his solo records, especially guitarists Phil Manzanera and the virtuosic Robert Fripp. The guitar solo(s) on this song are devastating.

1974 • Eno • Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy • “The Great Pretender”

Another record where it’s almost impossible to highlight a single track. I’m picking this one to demonstrate the “menacing character study” typology of his early records and all the great synth sounds in play, especially for 1974. The drum machine is prominent, the guitars are wildly processed, and Eno shows off his sound design chops by making complex insect noise like a great chef showing off by cooking the perfect egg. Lyrically this record is a trip, with songs sung in the second person about failed expeditions, microcameras, certain ratios, and burning airlines.

1975 • Eno • Another Green World • “Golden Hours”

This is probably my favorite record of all time, with amazing guitar work from Fripp, synths and drum machines processed to set them within painterly landscapes, the limber rhythm section of Phil Collins (yes, that one) and Percy Jones, and even viola parts from The Velvet Underground’s John Cale. Half the songs are evocative, cinematic instrumentals and half have lyrics that seem to be preoccupied with aging, failing perception and memory, and heart-rending awareness of the passing of time. As innovative as this record is, I have to acknowledge that sonically it borrows a lot from Cluster’s Zuckerzeit (1974). But it borrows well. A thing of timeless beauty.

1975 • Fripp & Eno • Evening Star • “Evening Star”

Eno’s relationships with Bowie and Fripp are probably the most important and long-lasting of his career. Eno made a few records with Fripp that involve sound-on-sound looping, where tape machines are arranged to take a sound you play into them and keep repeating that sound as you input new sounds over the old sounds that slowly fade. All sorts of people use looping pedals to do this now, but Eno and Fripp were doing this from 1973 onwards. Fripp’s guitar playing here is astonishing; he is so adept at switching timbres so the loops build into a balanced arrangement. The scary thing is that Eno and Fripp could perform these pieces live with Fripp hitting the solos note for note, loops and all.

1976 • Brian Eno • Music for Films • “From the Same Hill”

Is there a prettier synth record? This collection of melancholy instrumentals finds Eno, now Brian Eno, at the top of his sound-design game, with each Minimoog and VCS3 synth patch more interesting and organic sounding than the last. Accompanied by acoustic flourishes from guitar and piano, the arrangements are never cluttered, and the atmospheres vary from introspective to pastoral to sinister. 

1977 • Brian Eno • Before and After Science • “No One Receiving”

The last of Eno’s early period solo efforts to have songs with vocals as well as instrumentals. This intro track shows some of Eno’s funky side coming through, making good use of studio delay units and the rhythm section of Collins and Jones, who would play together in Brand X (which sounds nothing like this). This record has some gorgeous pieces like “Julie with…” featuring the massive sounding (and 200 pounds massive) Yamaha CS-80 synth. The band Japan were listening closely to this.

1977 • David Bowie • "Heroes" • “Heroes”

When Bowie wanted to turn his career around and extract himself from Los Angeles, rock stardom, and cocaine, he went to Eno, with whom he shared a love of the music coming from Germany, like Neu!, Can, and Cluster. While this song nearly featured Neu!’s guitarist Michael Rother (who played at the Wexner Center in 2010), Bowie ended up calling on Eno’s partner Fripp to assemble a dream team. Despite years of bad reporting to the contrary, including in recent pieces on Hustwit's documentary, Eno did not produce Bowie’s Low, “Heroes,” or Lodger. That credit goes to another of Bowie’s longtime collaborators, Tony Visconti. 

1978 • Cluster & Eno • After the Heat • “The Belldog”

Bowie helped to raise Eno’s stature in the recording industry, which lead to bands seeking him out when they needed reinvention. One benefit of this success, I think, was that Eno could afford to work with some of his heroes, including the band Cluster (also known as Harmonia when they played with Michael Rother; Eno then called them “the world’s most important rock band”). Eno borrowed heavily from their sonic palette, but on this record, 1977’s Cluster & Eno, and 1976’s Tracks and Traces with Harmonia, he got to pay them back and slotted in quite well with their communal way of working in rural Germany. Eno’s inspired lyrics here about being overcome by the beauty of both the natural and mechanical are a perfect fit for the music.

1980 • Brian Eno and David Byrne • My Life in the Bush of Ghosts • “Regiment”

One of Eno’s first major production partnerships started when he was tapped to produce Talking Heads’ More Songs about Buildings and Food (1978), which turned into a series of records that included the pivotal Remain in Light (1980) with its Eno-coauthored hit “Once in a Lifetime.” But perhaps the most innovative collaboration to come from the partnership was this record with Heads singer David Byrne that used sampled/found vocals on top of music informed by Afrobeat and funk just as hip-hop was starting to chart. You’re welcome, Moby.

1990 • Brian Eno and John Cale • Wrong Way Up • “Spinning Away”

Eno and Manzanera both jumped at the chance to work their hero Cale from The Velvet Underground when the latter recorded a series of albums for Island Records in 1974–75. But it wasn’t until this record that Eno got to write with Cale, with whom he shared a love for avant-garde music and, yes, menacing character studies. The suprising result is a breezy pop record with great singing and melodic writing from both parties. Eno carried the approach to his own My Squelchy Life, an unexpected return to making a conventional vocal record that he withdrew at the last second in 1991 (morphing it into 1992’s Nerve Net). Squelchy finally was released in 2014 and is a must-have.

1993 • Passengers • Original Soundtracks I • “Slug”

Having second thoughts about becoming global superstars after the release of the very direct and austere War (1983), U2 sought out Eno, who worked with coproducer Daniel Lanois to bring texture, mystery, and oceans of Lexicon reverb and Yamaha DX7 to The Unforgettable Fire (1984) and Joshua Tree (1987). Eno and Lanois continued to work magic with U2, and their partnership produced the thrillingly crunchy Achtung Baby (1991) and Zooropa (1993), then this deeply atmospheric record credited to Passengers. Eno develops a new sonic palette on this record that he ended up using well into the 2000s. It’s hard to imagine now that U2 was ever this good.

1998 • Brian Eno, Holger Czukay, J. Peter Schwalm • Sushi. Roti. Reibekuchen. • “Wasser”

Though he rarely played live after Roxy Music, Eno did short tours with Fripp in 1975 and with the Manzanera-led band 801, captured in the very rocking 1976 record of the same name. This just-released record was captured in 1998 when Eno joined German musicians Holger Czukay of Can and J. Peter Schwalm for an improvised session at an exhibition opening. The music is forward-looking with its digital sounds, understated playing, and vocal samples, but also a callback to Czukay’s projects using found vocals going back to 1969.