Brian Eno
1970s

In 1969, after separating from his wife, Eno moved to London where his professional music career began. He became involved with the Scratch Orchestra and the Portsmouth Sinfonia; Eno's first appearance on a commercially released recording is the Deutsche Grammophon edition of The Great Learning (1971) by Cornelius Cardew and the Scratch Orchestra which features Eno as one of the voices on the track "Paragraph 7". Another early recording was the soundtrack to Berlin Horse (1970), a nine-minute avant-garde art film by Malcolm Le Grice. At one point, Eno had to earn money as paste-up assistant for the advertisement section of a local paper for three months. He quit and became an electronics dealer by buying old speakers and making new cabinets for them before selling them to friends.

In 1971, Eno co-formed the glam and art rock band Roxy Music. He had a chance meeting with saxophonist Andy Mackay at a train station, which led to him joining the band. Eno later said: "If I'd walked ten yards further on the platform, or missed that train, or been in the next carriage, I probably would have been an art teacher now". Eno played on their first two albums, Roxy Music (1972) and For Your Pleasure (1973), and is credited as " Eno ". On the records, Eno was noted as playing the VCS 3 synthesiser, whilst also being credited for tape effects, backing vocals, and production. Initially, Eno did not appear on stage at their live shows, but operated the group's mixing desk at the centre of the concert venue where he had a microphone to sing backup vocals. After the group secured a record deal, Eno joined them on stage playing the synthesiser and became known for his flamboyant costumes and makeup, partly stealing the spotlight from lead singer Bryan Ferry. After touring For Your Pleasure ended in mid-1973, Eno quit the band, citing disagreements with Ferry and his insistence on being in command of the group, which affected Eno's ability to incorporate his own ideas.

Almost immediately after his exit from Roxy Music, Eno embarked on his solo career. The first studio album that was released after Eno left Roxy Music was a 1973 collaboration with then- King Crimson guitarist and founder Robert Fripp, which was entitled No Pussyfooting, stylised as " (No Pussyfooting) ". The album had been worked on for over a year in the lead up to its release, particularly with the use of tape looping and delay systems, which would later be known as " frippertronics ". The record is hailed as being groundbreaking for future developments in experimental drone and ambient music, although the term "ambient music" wasn't coined yet and had been labelled as " electronic ". The pair followed their debut with a second album Evening Star (1975), and completed a European tour before splitting due to Fripp isolating himself from the public eye after the disbanding of King Crimson.

Eno's first solo studio album was Here Come the Warm Jets that same year, which was released with his mononymous name "Eno" still attached. The album notably features Fripp on several songs as a guitarist on the tracks " Baby's On Fire " and "Driving Me Backwards", and as a composer, corresponding to his guitar duties, on the song "Blank Frank". The album was critically acclaimed on initial reviews in the 1973-74 season, whilst later reviews touted the record as "timeless". No singles were released from the record.

In March 1974, he released the single "Seven Deadly Finns" with the B-side "Later On", his only top 40 hit in the UK. Eno and Kevin Ayers contributed music for the experimental/ spoken word album Lady June's Linguistic Leprosy (1974) by poet June Campbell Cramer, whilst also producing The Portsmouth Sinfonia 's 1974 albums Plays the Popular Classics and Hallelujah! The Portsmouth Sinfonia Live at the Royal Albert Hall, both of which feature Eno playing the clarinet. After recording it in September that year, Eno released his second solo studio album, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), in November 1974. Featuring fellow artists and collaborators such as Phil Collins, Phil Manzanera, Robert Wyatt and Andy Mackay, the album featured numerous efforts of artistic pop and rock, but distanced itself from the psychedelia and avant-pop qualities from Here Come the Warm Jets. Taking Tiger Mountain contains the track " Third Uncle ", which has been regarded as one of Eno's best-known songs of his pop and rock phase, owing in part to its later cover by Bauhaus and the Eno-collaborated cover with 801. Critic Dave Thompson writes that the song is "a near punk attack of riffing guitars and clattering percussion" and that it "could, in other hands, be a heavy metal anthem, albeit one whose lyrical content would tongue-tie the most slavish air guitarist." " Third Uncle " was released as a single in France that year, with the B-side of " The Fat Lady of Limbourg ", also from Taking Tiger Mountain.

Between 1974 and 1975, Eno began to write new material for a third solo studio album. Within this time, in January 1975, Eno was hit by a taxi cab while crossing the street and spent several weeks recuperating and room-ridden at home. During this time, one of Eno's closest friends and fellow artist Judy Nylon had brought him a record of 18th century harp music. After she had left, he put on the record and lay down. He then realised that he had set the amplifier to a very low volume, and one channel of the stereo was not working, but he lacked the energy to get up and correct it. Immediately following a full recovery, he began to experiment with several instruments and tools in Island Studios (now known as Basing Street Studios). Between July and August 1975, he had recorded what would become Another Green World. The album was released on 14 November 1975 but did not chart in either the United Kingdom or the United States. The album predominantly featured instrumental tracks, with notable fragments of minimalism and avant-garde tensing throughout the 40 minute record. Those that had featured vocals, such as " Everything Merges With The Night ", " St. Elmo's Fire " and " Golden Hours " were met with praise. The track " Zawinul / Lava " is a homage and tribute to Austrian jazz fusion keyboardist and composer Joe Zawinul. The only song to have any single release was " I'll Come Running ", which became the B-side to Eno's cover of " The Lion Sleeps Tonight (Wimoweh) ". The album has been recognised by critics as a "universally acknowledged masterpiece" and "breathtakingly ahead of its time". The acclaimed music journalist Robert Christgau rated the album as an "A+", stating that it was "the aural equivalent of a park on the Moon; oneness with nature under conditions of artificial gravity ".

In 1975 Eno released the minimalist - electronic record Discreet Music (1975), created with an elaborate tape-delay methodology which he diagrammed on the back cover of the LP. Considered to be a landmark of the ambient music genre and the first record of Eno's to feature his full name, the album only features four tracks, one of which is the 30-minute long " Discreet Music ", which features synthesised tape delays by Eno on an echo configuration. Gavin Bryars and The Cockpit Ensemble co-arranged and performed the B-side of the record, which were three variations on Canon in D Major by Johann Pachelbel. The titles of the variations were of an inaccurate translation of the French cover notes for the “Erato” recording of the piece made by the orchestra of Jean Francois Paillard. The album was remarked as a favourite record of David Bowie and, as a result of the record and its recognition to Bowie, it had led to his collaboration with Eno on Bowie's Berlin Trilogy.

After Discreet Music Eno released two other experimental-electronic albums: the Fripp - collaborated Evening Star (1975) and the Roedelius - Moebius collaborated Cluster & Eno (1977). In December 1977 he released Before and After Science, which featured electronic and artistic rock compositions with vocals. It was touted, by Allmusic reviewer David Ross Smith, as "a study of "studio composition" whereby recordings are created by " deconstruction and elimination". Compared to Another Green World 's nine instrumental tracks, Before and After Science only features two instrumental tracks, " Energy Fools The Magician ", and " Through Hollow Lands ", a track dedicated to Harold Budd. Before and After Science is perhaps best known for its heavily acclaimed electric-keyboard based track " By This River " and the coincidentally- anagrammed track " King's Lead Hat ", a homage to Talking Heads.

In 1977 Eno assisted David Bowie and Tony Visconti for Bowie's album Low. It was during these sessions that he began work on his next solo project, released in 1978 as the first of his Ambient series, Ambient 1: Music for Airports. He coined the term "ambient music", which is designed to modify the listener's perception of the surrounding environment. In the liner notes accompanying the record, he wrote: "Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular, it must be as ignorable as it is interesting." The following records after the release of Ambient 1 and the subsequent series inclusions were The Plateaux of Mirror (Ambient 2) featuring Harold Budd, Day of Radiance (Ambient 3) with American composer Laraaji, and On Land (Ambient 4), a solo record.
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