ENO (B+) - Brian Eno, the man who invented ambient music, to the delight of crossword-puzzle constructors everywhere, gets the biographical treatment in a documentary that celebrates Eno's devotion to living a truly creative life. It makes for an uplifting 80 minutes or so of hanging out with the man who produced Bowie, Devo, Talking Heads, James and U2, not to mention dozens of his own influential albums, all after starting out as a founding member of Roxy Music.
I say "80 minutes or so," because the filmmakers, taking a cue from the master of "generative" music (in which computer programs are used to help create and manipulate sounds), made this a generative documentary. The gimmick here is that the film is never exactly the same from screening to screening. (Wikipedia: "The film uses a computer program to select footage and edit the film so that a different version is shown each time it is screened.")
Director Gary Hustwit does use a hectic editing style, with scenes appearing to be randomly assembled and sudden bursts of rapid-fire montages that flash by in a blink. It's a bit of a distraction but not enough to take away from the man who lives an intentional life. As he puts it, he indulges his intellect and passions, even though he engages in self-deprecation by referring to himself as a "failed glam rocker."
The documentary shares a kinship with "The Elephant 6 Recording Co.," the 2023 film that we called "a gleeful immersion into the DIY music and art scene" of millennial-era Athens, Ga. Eno has kept diaries his whole life, jotting down ideas (writings and drawings), and then translating them to the experimental sounds he turns into music. He describes how he changed his early-morning habits from "input" (eating breakfast and surfing the internet) to "output" (creating things), to the point that he gets pretty hangry by his first meal at noon. All in the service of generating art in its many forms.
It also reminded me of a film equivalent to The Artist's Way, Julia Cameron's DIY guide to unleashing one's inner spiritual bohemian. Eno developed prompt cards that he used to spark ideas in the music studio. He shows an unflagging interest in the world around him, whether it is studying a batch of baby spiders in his garden or taking a walk and marveling over the discovery of a rock that looks exactly like a potato. He lives and breathes an old-school devotion to natural innovation.
The music is impressive throughout. Eno is skilled at describing the process of producing songs and the random sounds that he turned into some familiar hits, whether it was Bowie in Berlin, the foundational early Talking Heads albums, or his deep collaboration with U2 during their prolific run in the '80s. He was not a traditional record producer, merely twirling knobs; he was more of a Fifth Beatle, noodling on the fringes in order to help achieve each band's fully realized vision. Bowie, in an archival clip, says he's not sure what exactly Eno does in the studio -- "I mix my own records" -- but he somehow creates a space for the songs to take shape.
Throughout, Eno on camera is charming and humble in a very British way. It is fun to see clips of his old long-haired gender-bending days in the early '70s. He despised touring, and so he ended up in studios, fiddling around with the latest technology in the nascent days of digital recording. The result is a half-century of output, mostly through collaboration, whether it was recording a New York street musician ("Ambient 3" with Laraaji) or some of the most iconic rock 'n' roll of our time (Bowie's "Heroes," Talking Heads' "Life During Wartime"), as he paved the way for the likes of Moby.
He has led an envious life. He doesn't lord it over us, but rather shows us the path to tapping into our own innate abilities.
BONUS TRACKS
One of my favorite albums of all time is "Wrong Way Up," a 1990 collaboration between Eno and John Cale. It features a lot of uncharacteristically giddy pop. It opens with "Lay My Love":
Eno talks about a collaboration with Daniel Lanois and brother Roger Eno on a soundtrack for a documentary about the Apollo program and moon landing. Riffing on the idea of space as the "final frontier," they wrote several frontier songs -- i.e., country-western -- with Lanois on pedal steel guitar. Here is "Silver Morning":
And "Weightless":
Here is "Moment of Surrender" (2009) by U2. Eno tells the story of how he came up with the opening galloping percussion sound, joined by Daniel Lanois on guitar, before Larry Mullen Jr. showed up to add drum parts and then the rest of the band completed the song.
Ho-hum. "Been There, Done That." Eno and Cale again:
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