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Brian Eno (born 15 May 1948 in Woodbridge, SuffolkBrian Eno is a British electronic musician, music theorist and record producer. As a solo artist, he is probably best known as the father of ambient music.

Eno first came to prominence as the keyboard and synthesiser player and general sonic wizard of the 1970's Glam Rock and Art Rock band Roxy Music (see 1970s in music). After leaving the group, Eno recorded two highly idiosyncratic and original rock albums, before turning to more abstract soundscapes on subsequent albums such as (1978). Since then, he has produced dozens of albums (many with similarly-minded collaborators such as Harold Budd and Robert Fripp) which have demonstrated his unique approach to music. He has also occasionally returned to the pop song format.

His production credits include some of the most respected albums by Talking Heads and U2.

Contrary to popular belief, Brian Eno did not produce David Bowie's popular Berlin Trilogy (). He performed and co-wrote tracks on all three albums, but they were produced by Tony Visconti. He did, however, co-produce Bowie's 1995 .

Eno has pursued several artistic ventures parallel to his music career, including visual art installations, a regular column in the newspaper and, with artist Peter Schmidt, Oblique Strategies, a deck of cards recommending various artistic strategies.

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Eno was educated at the Ipswich Art School and the Winchester School of Art, graduating from the latter in 1969. While at art school, he developed an interest in using tape recorders as musical instruments, and he experimented with his first (sometimes improvisational) bands.

Eno started his professional musical career in London, co-founding the highly-successful glamart-rock band Roxy Music, working with them from 1971 to 1973. As a self-professed "non-musician", at the band's early live shows Eno was to be found not on stage, but behind the mixing desk, where his efforts went way beyond the usual balancing of the volume levels: he would process the instrument sounds through his VCS3 synthesizer, tape recorders and other electronic devices, frequently singing backing vocals as well. Eno soon graduated to join the rest of Roxy on stage however, where his bizarre costumes contributed to a large part of the band's visual appeal. Public interest in Eno fuelled a rivalry between him and Roxy's leader, Bryan Ferry, who sacked him from the band on completion of the tour for their second album, while expecting Eno to keep his share of the band's considerable debts.

Eno embarked on a solo career almost immediately. Between 1973 and 1977 he created four influential solo albums of electronically inflected pop songs – contains the galloping "Third Uncle", one of Eno's best-known songs. Critic Dave Thompson writes that the song is "a near punk attack of riffing guitars and clattering percussion, "Third Uncle" could, in other hands, be a heavy metal anthem, albeit one whose lyrical content would tongue-tie the most slavish air guitarist."[1] He played with Phil Manzanera in the band 801.

He was a prominent member of the performance art-classical orchestra the Portsmouth Sinfonia - having started playing with them in 1972. In 1973 he produced the orchestra's first album of their infamous May 1974 concert (released in October 1974.) In addition to producing both albums, Eno perfomed in the orchestra on both recordings - playing the clarinet. Eno also deployed the orchestra's famously dissonant string section on his second solo album . The orchestra at this time included other musicians whose solo work he would subsequently release on his Obscure label including Gavin Bryars and Michael Nyman.

Eno continued his career by producing a larger number of highly eclectic and increasingly ambient electronic and acoustic albums. He is widely cited as coining the term "ambient music," low-volume music designed to modify one's perception of a surrounding environment, producing his ). Eno describes himself as a "non-musician" and coined the term "treatments" to describe his modification of the sound of musical instruments, and to separate his role from that of the traditional instrumentalist. His skill at using "The Studio as a Compositional Tool" (the title of an essay by Eno) led in part to his career as a producer. His methods were recognized at the time (mid-70s) as unique, so much so that on Genesis's , he is credited with "Enossification."

Eno started the Obscure label in Britain in 1975 to release works by less-known composers. The first group of three releases included his own composition, consisted of several versions of Pachelbel's canon to which various algorithmic transformations have been applied, rendering it almost unrecognizable. Side 1 consisted of a tape loop system for generating music from relative sparse input. These tapes had previously been used as backgrounds in some of his collaborations with Robert Fripp of King Crimson, most notably ) was later used by Robert Fripp, among other artists, on future albums. Only ten Obscure albums were released, including works by John Adams, Michael Nyman, and John Cage. At this time he was also affiliating with artists in the Fluxus movement.

In 1979, which was built around sampling recordings and radio broadcasts from around the world. Eno collaborated with David Bowie as a writer and musician on Bowie's influential "Berlin trilogy" of albums, , and on the song "I'm Afraid of Americans". Eno has also collaborated with John Cale, former member of Velvet Underground, on his trilogy CD, with Jon Hassell, with the German duo Cluster, with composer Harold Budd and others. In 1992, Eno released his take on 'club electronica' titled (with John Cale) to prominently feature vocals. The album is different from his 70's solo work, as musical production has changed since then, as is evident in its semi-electronic production.

From the very beginning of his solo career in 1973, Eno has been much in demand as a producer. His lengthly string of producer credits includes albums for Talking Heads, U2, Devo, Ultravox and James. He also produced part of the 1993 album by Jane Siberry. This album is widely regarded as a masterpiece and is, in the opinion of many, Siberry's finest hour. He won the best producer award at the 1994 and 1996 BRIT awards.

Despite being a self-professed "non-musician", Eno has contributed to recordings by a huge number of artists as varied as Nico, Robert Calvert, Genesis, Edikanfo, and Zvuki Mu, in various capacities such as use of his studioelectronic treatments, vocals, guitar, bass guitar, and even just as being 'Eno'. In 1984, he composed and performed the "Prophecy Theme" for the David Lynch film , the rest of the film's score performed by the group Toto.

He collaborated on the development of SSEYO's Koan generative music system, which he used to create his hybrid album

"Some very basic forms of generative music have existed for a long time, but as marginal curiosities. Wind chimes are an example, but the only compositional control you have over the music they produce is in the original choice of notes that the chimes will sound. Recently, however, out of the union of synthesisers and computers, some much finer tools have evolved. Koan Software is probably the best of these systems, allowing a composer to control not one but one hundred and fifty musical and sonic parameters within which the computer then improvises (as wind improvises the wind chimes).

The works I have made with this system symbolise to me the beginning of a new era of music. Until 100 years ago, every musical event was unique: music was ephemeral and unrepeatable and even classical scoring couldn't guarantee precise duplication. Then came the gramophone record, which captured particular performances and made it possible to hear them identically over and over again.

But now there are three alternatives: live music, recorded music and generative music. Generative music enjoys some of the benefits of both its ancestors. Like live music it is always different. Like recorded music it is free of time-and-place limitations - you can hear it when and where you want.

I really think it is possible that our grandchildren will look at us in wonder and say: "you mean you used to listen to exactly the same thing over and over again?"

"Each of the twelve pieces on Generative Music 1 has a distinctive character. There are, of course, the ambient works ranging from the dark, almost mournful Densities III (complete with distant bells), to translucent Lysis (Tungsten). These are contrasted with pieces in dramatically different s, such as Komarek with its hard edged, angular melodies, reminiscent of Schoenberg's early serial experiments, and Klee 42 whose simple polyphony is similar to that of the early Renaissance. But of course, the great beauty of Generative Music is that those pieces will never sound quite that way again."

Eno has also been active in other artistic genres, producing videos for gallery display and collaborating with visual artists in other endeavors. One is the set of "Oblique Strategies" cards that he produced in the mid-70s, which was described as "100 Worthwhile Dilemmas" and intended as guides to shaking up the mind in the process of producing artistic endeavors. Another was his collaboration with artist Russell Mills on the book a narrated story with music originally published by a small art gallery in Spain.

In 1996 Brian Eno, and others, started the Long Now Foundation to educate the public into thinking about the very long term future of society.

Eno is a columnist for the British newspaper, .

In 1994 Eno was approached by Mark Malamud and Erik Gavriluk, senior designers at Microsoft on the Cairo project. The result was the start-up sound for the Windows 95 operating system (which Eno created on his Apple Macintosh). From an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle:

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The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I'd been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, "Here's a specific problem – solve it." The thing from the agency said, "We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah-blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional," this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said "and it must be 3 14 seconds long." I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It's like making a tiny little jewel. In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I'd finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.

In 2003 he appeared on a Channel 4 discussion on the Iraq war with top military spokesmen. He was highly critical of the war. In 2005 he spoke at an anti-war demonstration in Hyde Park, London.

The character of I-No (pronounced the same as "Eno"), in the videogame series Guilty Gear is most likely a reference to Brian Eno. This is one of dozens of music references in the series. is entitled "King's Lead Hat", which is an anagram of "Talking Heads", a band that he has worked with. (His own name, "Brian Eno", has an anagram of "One Brain".)The song "Lay My Love" with John Cale was on the soundtrack More Music From Northern Exposure released in 1994.