This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Lately, I have gotten email from a lot of you saying: Can we do a show that’s off the news? Can one show not be on the grim march of events?
So here it is. How do you introduce Brian Eno? Eno has a claim, as much as anyone does, to have invented the genre of ambient music.
Archived clip: So there’s no narrative quality to the music. It just sort of starts, stays pretty much in one place and then ends.
He certainly coined the term, built out the philosophy, sort of has eaten a lot of the music we now listen to.
But he has also done so many other things. He’s produced seminal albums by U2, David Bowie, the Talking Heads, Laurie Anderson and Coldplay. Hell, Eno composed the sound that plays when you boot up Windows 95. Do you remember that one?
A lot of sound we just take for granted. A lot of the way sound is now made, Eno helped bring into existence. A lot of his work on creating generative systems that make music can be seen as a forerunner to much of today’s artificial intelligence systems.
Eno is more than just a sonic technician or tinkerer. He’s this wonderful thinker and philosopher of art and just being a human being, and he’s got this really delightful new book out, “What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory,” as well as a new album with Beatie Wolfe called “Liminal.” I wanted to talk to him about all of it — or at least as much of it as I could.
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