Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

London Review Of Books SEPTEMBER 17, 2025 - by Ian Penman

INFINITE WIBBLE

What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory by Brian Eno and Bette A. / A Year With Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno's Diary by Brian Eno

One morning in early spring, I dreamed about Brian Eno's head. It was night-time in a deserted garden centre. At the entrance a sign proclaimed: 'Twenty Thousand Brian Enos!' Row upon row, little plant-pot bulbs of his smiling face, pegged out to the horizon. There was transparent sheeting as a guard against the frost, played about by a shimmer of soft artificial lights. What was this? Was it Art? Nature? Some kind of installation? And what did all those identical Enos smell like?

Eno has haunted me for more than fifty years, ever since I first saw Roxy Music on Top Of The Pops in 1972 playing - what's her name? - Virginia Plain, the band's first single, released two days before my thirteenth birthday. There are few enough of my teenage heroes still alive and working, never mind any who retain the ability to surprise and provoke; or really annoy, for that matter. Eno is a conundrum: impish disruptor and happy polymath, he can also be a bit of a tech prig lecturing us from on high, dropping serene apothegms that turn out on closer inspection to be vanishingly banal. It's as if there are two of him: Brian has a great sense of humour, Eno can be suffocatingly precious; Brian picks a brilliant selection of Desert Island Discs, Eno nominates for his beach read Richard Rorty's Contingency, Irony, And Solidaritys; Brian is all weird eros, Eno makes music that can be oddly clenched or wafty; Brian is inspiringly playful, Eno writes software to systematise (and cage, and kill) that playfulness.

Now aged seventy-seven, the two of them together make an almost venerable figure - recall his brief cameo in the last episode of Father Ted as 'Father Brian Eno' - and unlikely national treasure. At his best, Eno is a model of how to inhabit this role with verve and mischief; at other times you may wonder how exactly he went from playing Cornelius Cardew to producing Coldplay, and what had to be left out to achieve such a grand synthesis, or so disquieting a compromise.

He was born in 1948 and grew up in a small Suffolk backwater. This was a world closer to the nineteenth century than it was to our own dully fractious era. No global hullabaloo of youth culture: impossible to imagine Altamont or Live Aid, Michael Jackson on the Thames, Bono cold calling George Bush mid-gig, Katy Perry in orbit. No personal touchscreen beckoning itchy fingers. Just gazing dreamily into the distance or cycling about aimlessly on long summer afternoons. Boredom and its cloud-drift antidotes. Boredom as something almost erotic.

Eno's young life was lived between flat countryside and the beckoning sea, but he had other horizons too: Catholicism (he attended the Convent School of Jesus and Mary in Ipswich and his confirmation name was St Jean-Baptiste de la Salle); imported American music (hymn-like doo-wop, carnal R'n'B); and the spare modernism of Piet Mondrian, to which he was introduced by his uncle Carl (Mondrian, notice, not Picasso or Bacon or Pollock). There was also a family friend with an eclectic record collection, and Eno fell especially hard for the Ray Conniff Singers and their "lush, soft, silky quality". Muzak raptures! US cool entwined with European abstraction, brash spontaneity folded into systematic grids: everything here is a seed.

Eno's male relatives were happy tinkerers, bricoleurs, amateur musicians - modest, helpful, community-minded. Uncle Carl painted landscapes, repaired porcelain, gardened. One grandfather "built and repaired church organs, mechanical pianos, music boxes and hurdy-gurdies", David Sheppard records in his biography of Eno, On Some Faraway Beach (2008). Eno's father, William, was a postman who repaired clocks and watches for pennies. Eno came of age at a time when you could still get a decent higher education without taking on crippling debt. The future members of Roxy Music, born into working or lower-middle-class families, would metamorphose into literate exquisites, seriously arty poseurs, in a way previously unthinkable. As happy beneficiaries of postwar social mobility, Eno later recalled, they each brought with them different experiences and different sensibilities. Pop music was part of it. Kids from housing estates took their music into the art colleges, and it came back out with a fresh vigour and shot through with a lot of new ideas.

Bryan Ferry was taught by Richard Hamilton, whose mentor was Marcel Duchamp. Pop art took the capital of popular culture and reinvested it; pop culture took Pop art as its exemplar and reapplied it: a marvellous feedback loop. Virginia Plain was based on one of Ferry's own paintings: "It was a watercolour or a painting on paper. It was just like a surreal drawing of a giant cigarette packet with a pin-up girl on it." This was a different model of what modern art might encompass. Who made it, who judged it, who was excited by it. What it might look or feel or sound like.

At Ipswich School of Art, meanwhile, Eno was taught by Roy Ascott, who "tore up the rule book for formal art education", Sheppard writes, "in favour of an anthropological remit based on disorienting psychological games". "Process not product" was Ascott's mantra. He gave Eno his first taste of conceptual thinking and introduced him to the new discipline of cybernetics. Eno also had his head turned by the musical enthusiasms of a slightly older painter friend called Tom Phillips: the mind-expanding work of John Cage and Cornelius Cardew was followed by Morton Feldman and La Monte Young, Steve Reich and Terry Riley. Phillips also alerted Eno to the untapped potential of tape recorders, and impressed him with a lecture using random cards and slides.

All these things that don't belong together, jumbled up as in a collage or a dream: John Cage, Jimi Hendrix, sci-fi, quiffs. In an early photograph of Roxy Music, they pose outside a marquee, their egg-carton platform heels sinking into the grass, a teddy boy gang played by drag queens. "We didn't go to art school," U2's Bono said. "We went to Brian." Roxy Music were art school for everyone. A Saturday job on a fruit and veg stall paid for my copy of the second Roxy Music album, For Your Pleasure, and two girls at school baptised me Roxy because of the pink fan club badge I wore pinned to my blue blazer. It now strikes me as odd that I was listening to such adult fare at this young age. Roxy Music may have had a glittery patina, but under their vinyl skin lay danker things. In Every Dream Home A Heartache was like J.G. Ballard delivering sermons from a porny neon pulpit. The Bogus Man and For Your Pleasure seem haunted by some unnameable grief or dread. There are several Roxy Music songs I can still recite from beginning to end. "The words we use tumble / All over your shoulder / Gravel hard and loose." Rock vocalists weren't meant to sound like this - more Noël Coward or Edith Sitwell than the usual refried mush of American blues and soul. "I would do anything for you," a stricken Ferry sings on If There Is Something. "I would put roses round our door / Sit in the garden / Growing potatoes by the score." (This lovelorn plea also features a treated oboe solo.) Eno's post-Roxy lyrics have a similarly English flavour: "Ooh what to do, not a sausage to do!" From a distance, Bryan and Brian may have looked worlds apart, but their work is laid out like two discrete English gardens: buttercups and daisies, sunsets and psalms, moors and briars.

Another Green World (1975) is my favourite Eno LP. (Prince loved it too, apparently.) Gently experimental and warmly formal, it is full of things which later evaporate from Eno's work: joy, humour, sex. Tracks like Everything Merges With The Night, I'll Come Running and St Elmo's Fire anticipate a whole future of DIY bedroom pop made with cheap electronics. This is radicalism in the service of prettiness, lightness, economy. Even the sleeve, by Tom Phillips, is all clean lines and crisp modernism: nature rendered invitingly semi-abstract, reflecting the music within. In the green-washed photo on the back, Eno has notably short hair and is reading a book. Not something you'd see on the covers of many rock albums of the time. Another Green World is the opposite of prog, although it features various prog-adjacent musicians, whose contributions Eno applies like dabs of watercolour. Tracks fade at just the point where they might go into some tiresome endless jam. Footnotes, postage stamps, postcards. Emotions without obvious names, moods not often admitted by rock music: arch, contemplative, rueful. It's like the third Velvet Underground album sieved through Dowland and Purcell, with a small debt to odd contemporaries like Kevin Ayers, Syd Barrett, Robert Wyatt.

• • •

In Germany in the mid-1970s, Eno hung out with the Cologne experimentalists Can and collaborated with Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius (aka Cluster, aka Harmonia). Not long after Another Green World was released he was in Germany and France working on what would become the anti-gravity triumph of Low and Heroes. (The üsseldorf band Neu!'s wonderful Neu! 75 was a palpable influence on the night-and-day soundscapes of Low.) One of the great lost Eno tracks was also inspired by events in Germany. Buried on the B-side of a single from 1978, R.A.F. is infinitely better than anything on the insipid Before And After Science. Perhaps not coincidentally it was a collaboration with two smart, bolshy women - Judy Nylon and Patti Palladin, aka Snatch - rather than another carefully curated assortment of muso mates. All this experimental outreach ensured that Eno survived the Maoist cull that followed punk. He was sought out and name-dropped. He adjusted, mingled, thrived. Here was a life in the arts that looked unparochial, sexy, fun. At a time when most conversation about the arts remained stuck in an Oxbridge common room, Eno was a one-man laboratory of alternative takes, and a major role model for young autodidacts like myself: have the courage to be truly pretentious!

Whenever I'm asked about Eno these days, I always say: he had one of the most brilliant first decades anyone has ever had in rock music; and then something happened and I flipped from convinced Enophile to curmudgeonly Enosceptic. I can date the first wince of pained ambivalence precisely. In the late 1970s Eno temporarily relocated to New York, where he produced Talking Heads, curated the 'No Wave' compilation No New York, and took Philip Glass to see the B-52s. I was briefly in New York in the summer of 1981 and read a long interview with him in a paper called the East Village Eye. This was my first sighting of a kind of hagiographical fanboy profile Eno would increasingly attract; it reached a point where it was as if each new release was just a pretext for the accompanying blather (The exceptions were pieces by two unlikely interlocutors, Lester Bangs and Chrissie Hynde. Both American, both out-and-out rockers). Eno talked at length about his groundbreaking new "video work", which seemed mainly to involve laying TVs on their sides - or, in Eno-speak, doing "something that artists have been wanting to do for many years... namely, to experiment with light origins and systems of controlling light". This wasn't just a bit try-hard, it was ground already broken by uncredited others, such as Nam June Paik of the Fluxus collective.

Eno also talked up My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, a new work on which he and David Byrne set a number of 'sampled' vocals (exorcists and evangelists, Arabic songs and Quranic recital) to a neurasthenic kind of downtown funk. For some, this was a revolutionary stylistic leap (Though to my mind the Can bassist Holger Czukay got there first in 1979 with Persian Love on his album Movies, which is infinitely more tender and ravishing than anything on My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts and still has the power to make hard cases swoon - a glass of sweet mint tea rather than a brisk shot of espresso.)/ Others found Eno's talk of 'found voices' and 'found material' a bit disingenuous: if you come across an old handbill in the street on your way back from the shops, that's a 'found object'; sampling other cultures like they're an exotic tasting menu is something else. Using the title of Amos Tutuola's My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts (1954) to dignify this sleight of hand now looks even more egregious. Whose life, and whose ghosts? In the liner notes for a reissue in 2006, Byrne happily admits that neither he nor Eno even read Tutuola's book, which begins with the slave trade and ends in oneiric encounters that are nightmarish yet also in some way healing. Byrne and Eno's album swerves any true encounter with the sacred, which is reduced to the shiny aural equivalent of African ritual masks in a hygienic gallery space. "You could probably argue for and against monkeying with something like that," Byrne said. You probably could, but if you did, maybe stress the question of what it is exactly that the sampled other gets out of all this.

There is a whole forest of ghosts here, corralled from Black music and worship. Eno's original musical epiphany - the track that "blew my socks off" - was Steve Reich's It's Gonna Rain (1965), in which Reich sampled and looped a Pentecostal street preacher called Brother Walter. Eno had also been listening to gospel, dub, Fela Kuti, Miles Davis. In a canny Arena documentary from 2010, Eno digitally recreates Donna Summer's State Of Independence, replacing its beautiful chorale backing with a multi-tracked choir of himself and erasing every last drop of awe and surrender in the process. (He later did the same thing with a version of The Velvet Underground's I'm Set Free.)

Eno is brilliant at analysing - and celebrating - other people's music, but prone to blind spots with his own. In A Year With Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno's Diary, he floats a few nagging imponderables. Why does the music he's producing sound so good on big powerful speakers in the studio, but a bit flat out in the world? He's aware that digital technology can eliminate the kind of rough edges that once made music so exciting; at the same time, in a 2016 interview with Michael Bonner, he says of Golden Hours from Another Green World:

When I listen to that song again, I think, "Jesus, I would never do that now." I could not leave that in that condition... It's so badly played but actually that is the character of the piece. I just wouldn't make it now like that.

Isn't it such flaws that make pre-digital music sound so magical to us now? No algorithm or software would ever have come up with the glorious car-smash of the Velvet Underground or Roxy Music. The kind of happenstance alchemy that can never be programmed: a crack in a voice, an offbeat, disturbed air. So much of the music Eno loves has this ragged dash, which seems in marked contrast to the flawless sheen of some of his own best-known productions - U2 and Coldplay, for instance. When Eno discusses Miles Davis's He Loved Him Madly he is acutely sensitive to what makes it so special; when he applies its lessons to his own music he emerges with what you might call a critic's version: all the formal properties, but none of the soul. Eno might say this is a category error: he is not a jazz player or a soul man or someone with 'chops', and it would be undignified to pretend otherwise. But it does make you wonder: why does he think anyone might want to listen an infinite number of times to one of his own ambient pieces? You can lose yourself in Miles; there are no tangled labyrinths in Eno.

• • •

Eno spends a lot of time in his Diary wondering what exactly it is that he does. What is anyone doing when they do something called art? He revisits - or repackages - these thoughts in a new palm-sized sweeties-at-the-checkout book called What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory, co-authored with the Dutch artist Bette A. Not a book so much as a series of cheery Post-it notes for a mood board, it covers a lot of the same ground as some of the essays appended to the Diary. The core message is that art is something that helps us imagine what it is to make new worlds. It can be virtually anything! Yes, art is "novels, sculptures, symphonies, albums, paintings", but "WE'LL ALSO USE IT TO TALK ABOUT..." There follows a solid two-page list in girlboss pink, featuring - I quote at random - ESCAPOLOGY FLEA CIRCUSES BABY DOLLS PANAMA HATS UNICYCLES HASHTAGS FUNNY WALKS VINTAGE FAUCETS MOHAWKS SPOILERS MIME. Then at the end of the book, under the strapline "let's begin new worlds that we like through...", another list unspools, taking in "selfies, flip-flops, water ornaments, speciality coffees, hoodies, hijabs, bathroom tiles, sock puppets, cakes, bandanas".

Some of these things surely belong to pre-existing categories such as self-expression, personal style, craft or community ethos. A smart new haircut obviously isn't art, if art is also Rembrandt and Sylvia Plath and Stockhausen. Not all art has to be dark or difficult or epic or anguished; as Eno said in his Turner Prize lecture in 1995, sometimes it can be clarifying to uncomplicate things. But this is all a bit too self-consciously feel-good - what Jonathan Meades memorably pegged as the "new, accessibly accessible fun-style fun arts". Art as a kids' workshop in which no one ever fails. Which is, you might say, lovely in practice but not the least bit interesting as 'theory'. If everything is good, then nothing is good: it's just a kind of hum, like air-conditioning. Some art invites engagement and epiphany; a more sustained and deeper response than you will ever get from new shoes or even the nicest tattoo. It puts you in a vis-à-vis with time and history. It can make us feel good, but also bad, or baffled, or other emotions we may struggle to name. We're not quite sure what it is we're seeing or hearing or reading: art, as Dave Hickey puts it, "that flourishes in the problematic of its desirability".

The art of Eno's 'unfinished theory' is instant-hit art, browse art, mood-lighting art. Which also, conveniently, describes a lot of what Eno himself does: the patented Eno zone of wallpaper, perfume, ambient music, lightboxes, installations. In the Diary he takes on a commission from the Austrian glass-making company Swarovski to design something for a "museum/showroom to celebrate the company's centenary". (Eno's contribution was an installation that used "thirteen slide projectors controlled by a digital programming system".) The compound 'museum/showroom' is telling, as is the word 'celebrate'. A remark by John Foxx, another of Eno's collaborators, can't be improved on here: "The dangers inherent in these sorts of activity are fairly obvious - a sort of cultural Martha Stewartism, spreading too wide and thin."

There was a long middle period where Eno seemed to be coasting. When I reviewed Small Craft On A Milk Sea in 2010 it felt like an Eno in aspic, cut off from life outside the Eno compound, as if he wasn't aware that a whole new dispensation of Eno-influenced drone-glitch-ambient-electronica had substantially raised the bar. His own work felt too cautious, tasteful, smooth. A very tidy garden with not a single thing out of place. Compare all this with the work of a rough contemporary like the polymathic American musician John Zorn, who tapped into similar influences (notably John Cage: the same quickstep between arbitrary and planned, strict framework and bold improvisation), and Eno feels a bit tepid. Zorn excites where Eno soothes. Zorn inhabits forms of worship and ritual; Eno is without golem or daemon.

The positive view is that Eno took difficult avant-garde ideas and made them mainstream. The sceptic might say he took genuinely radical work and repurposed it as a balm, or maybe a spritz, for the capitalist culture industry. (His ambient work Neroli is named after an essential oil used in the manufacture of scents.) An astute recycler, networker, synthesiser: a Blair or a Starmer, not a Corbyn or a Skinner. I've tried, but it's hard not to think here of the Millennium Dome and its 'Spirit Zone', divided into subzones with names that sound as if a page has been torn from Eno's What Art Does: Who We Are (Body, Faith, Mind and Self-Portrait); What We Do (Work, Learning, Rest, Play, Talk, Money and Journey); Where We Live (Shared Ground, Living Island and Home Planet). All the outward signs of something, never the experience itself.

Eno has always preferred the language of reason to the wild call of romance. When he talks aesthetics he turns to the syntax of inputs and solutions. Horizontal logic trumps the exorbitant excess of rock and roll: undulant flatness, not jagged mountain peaks. He favours a certain Anglo-American pragmatic-rationalist tradition, whose shout-outs are Stafford Beer, Daniel Dennett, Richard Rorty, Richard Dawkins. This may niggle those of us who cleave to a different tradition: Bataille, Benjamin, Blanchot. Not for Eno the black sun of mystical revelation. And yet, the fact that he makes such a public avowal of his atheism surely betrays a significant psychic investment. Is the sacred something like his founding expulsion or agon?

In any overview of Eno's life and works, one element that recurs, a ghostly profile in the foliage, is religion: his awe before gospel, and his view of it as a kind of ideal social model; the preachers in Steve Reich's It's Gonna Rain and the 'sacred lite' of My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts. (It may be no coincidence that the only thing by U2 I ever liked is the Eno-produced modern gospel of One.) But he appears unable to see religion itself as a system used to generate feelings we might not otherwise access: humility, ecstasy, the sublime. For many people, religion, for all its failings, remains infinitely preferable to a smug cabal of tech bros telling us what future they have mapped out for us all.

• • •

The Diary is one of my favourite Eno things. It is head and shoulders above most rock memoirs in its casual self-revelation: funny, ribald, a great time capsule. He drinks, leches, smokes fags, dances with his young daughters. There is a cast (or is it a caste?) of artist-activist-musician celebrities that is like the dramatis personae of some great 1990s satirical novel: U2, Björk, Elvis Costello, Laurie Anderson, Tony Blair at the Q Awards. There's a running gag about Angus Deayton popping up anywhere Eno goes. In one episode, Eno orders a specialist porno tape from America, but is frustrated when it gets stuck in his VHS; he ends up having to take the entire thing apart. At the same time he is pushing his own confident take on the future of home computing: what people want - what they really really want - is not more information, but better screensavers made of lovely mosaic patterns, made of, well, more Eno-esque stuff.

Eno is both hedgehog and fox, and in the Diary he engages with a wide range of people from different backgrounds: he can talk science with scientists and art with artists. His Turner Prize lecture is another of my favourite Eno things: an impish, chiding call for less obfuscatory insider lingo in the public discourse about art. This is all about a certain kind of soft power, Eno as the anti-Geldof: cautious, measured, never jumps in with both feet. A charming networker but good at cutting through red tape. A vociferous, long-time supporter of Palestinian rights. Perhaps Eno missed his calling: he would surely have made a decent and effective politician.

The Diary's mid-1990s moment now looks like an interregnum between the hopeful promise of the early internet and the coming babel of deepfakes and organised troll battalions. Global intimacy is now a net in which we are helplessly ensnared. In his introduction to the new edition of A Year With Swollen Appendices, written in 2020, Eno attempts an accounting of all the things that have happened or appeared in the intervening quarter-century: 9/11, Black Lives Matter, Botox, Brexit, Covid, Netflix, PayPal, Skype, Uber... The list is twelve and a half pages long. You'd think Eno the utopian futurist - deviser of the Microsoft login sound, no less - might want to dive deep on weaponised tech and usurper AI. But the tone of this overview feels oddly disengaged - a faintly amused skim, it might be the work of an AI Eno-bot.

Eno's exchanges in 1995 with friends such as Kevin Kelly (Wired, the Whole Earth Review) and Stewart Brand (the Whole Earth Catalogue, the WELL) now feel a little quaint, like a coffee house claque in eighteenth-century Vienna. These are guys who started out as hippie utopians, before buying into - in both senses - a certain model of 'enlightened entrepreneurship' typified by Brand's consulting firm Global Business Network, which supplied 'scenario planning' to corporations and governments. Scenario planning was first used by the US military in the Second World War, then by the RAND Corporation think tank (motto: 'Thinking the Unthinkable') during the Cold War, before finding its natural home in corporate strategy.

It's possible to be broadly in sympathy with the blue-sky thinking of Brand/Eno while still wondering: are good intentions enough? Their mid-1990s brainstorming now looks rather naive. The one future they could never have dreamed up was the triumphant rise of right-wing versions of themselves: Bannon, Musk, Thiel et al. This was the other side of the utopian coin: venal tyrants, resurrected demons, annihilatory rage and negation, yesterday's bright future become today's nightmare. What seems to be missing from their myriad 'scenarios' is any awareness of class and economics. Brand/Eno may offer themselves as the more eco-friendly, left-leaning avatars of progress, but they come across as members of a self-elected autocracy, lording it over a proletariat of click-workers.

There has been something of an Eno bonanza lately: the reissues of A Year With Swollen Appendices and On Some Faraway Beach; the documentary Eno in 2024 (assembled from thirty hours of interviews and five hundred hours of material from Eno's personal archives); and in 2025, as well as What Art Does, the new electronic work Aurum (released via Apple Music) and a two-CD collaboration with the artist and composer Beatie Wolfe.

Is he showing any signs of anxiety over his legacy? In interviews, he can get a bit grumpy when old glories are recalled. You can see how people fetishising a few hours' work you did fifty years ago might get irritating; still, it feels a bit graceless. He'd rather talk about his latest Big Ideas. In the Diary, he's already bigging up 'generative' music, which is essentially algorithm-shepherded art with a fancy name. A digital 'seed' is planted, which produces a slightly different arrangement each time it is activated by the listener - Eno proudly claims it would take "almost ten thousand years to hear the entire possibilities" of one particular piece. His 77 Million Paintings (2006) featured 'generative' video and music "specifically fashioned for home computers" using "different combinations of video slides prepared by Eno each time the program is launched". (The use of the word 'slides' evokes memories of certain family nights in the 1970s I'd rather not revisit.) The official running time of Reflection, in its iteration as an iOS app, is ∞, or infinity. In a certain light, this could look like the conceit of someone who takes themselves for God with a laptop: at the same time utterly anonymous and loftily grandiOSe. The Eno documentary uses software - a program called Brain One - to select footage and assemble it on the fly so that a different version is shown each time it is screened. When Eno says "since the beginning of the twentieth century, artists have been moving away from an idea of art as something finished, perfect, definitive and unchanging towards a view of artworks as processes or the seeds for processes - things that exist and change in time, things that are never finished," or "culture-makers see themselves as people who start things, not finish them," he makes it sound as if the perspective from his own soapbox is the general view.

Eno spoke about generative music in San Francisco in 1996 at something called the Imagination Conference, a "progressive interactive event featuring original multimedia presentations". It's an idea that has "obsessed" him, he says, and which he keeps pushing even though it never meets with the admiring gasps he obviously expects. It's an odd thing to be evangelical about, somehow both cutting-edge and old hat. He's so stoked by the idea of having "no one definitive version", he even asks whether our current habit of listening to favourite pieces of music over and over again will one day seem ludicrous. Again, Eno is extrapolating from his own interests - or self-interest - into a vast generalisation. Some music is eternally unfinished: you can play it for decades and it can still make you dizzy. (It just happened to me with The Rolling Stones' Street Fighting Man.) The paradox of generative music is that you would have to play it over and over again in order to notice any of the gazillion tiny differences. An infinite wibble. The eternal return of the vaguely familiar.

• • •

Eno's preoccupation with time - or Time - yields the other Big Idea he has staked a lot on: the 'long now' and its material representation, the Clock Of The Long Now. Eno coined the term in his essay The Big Here And Long Now, and eventually it issued in a project to build a mechanical clock that would keep time for ten thousand years, overseen by the Long Now Foundation, a non-profit based in San Francisco (Eno and Stewart Brand are both on the board of directors). This is the world of Davos and TED talks - motto: 'Ideas Change Everything' - and anyone outside the magic circle may feel that the main change has been how comfortably rich it's made a lot of the wizards on the inside, while outside things go from bad to worse. "As artists and culture-makers begin making time, change and continuity their subject-matter," Eno asserts, "they will legitimise and make emotionally attractive a new and important conversation." Brand's own original inspiration was the first photograph of the Earth taken from space in the 1960s, and the sense that it would change everything. How's that working out for the planet?

Brand believes the Clock Of The Long Now might have the same revolutionary effect as that image of Earth: "Such icons reframe the way people think." Well, maybe if the clock were being built in Gaza or Ukraine. As it is, the manufacture of the first full-scale prototype clock is being funded by Jeff Bezos's investment firm Bezos Expeditions to the tune of $42 million, and it will be situated on land that Bezos owns. A $42 million hourglass in a billionaire's backyard? Most people will have more immediate concerns. The Clock Of The Long Now does seem a perfect symbol for a lot of what has transpired in the last twenty-five years, but not in the way its sponsors hope. It is a fetish object, a means for the super-wealthy to exclaim "Hey! I do too care about the environment!" while continuing to trample everything underfoot. Encouraging the rest of us to reflect on time running out, while already planning to colonise space or work out a way to live for eternity as an AI version of themselves. When Eno proudly tells us his generative music might play for ever, what kind of future world does he imagine it playing in? Who is listening to it, and under what conditions? It presumes a nice, orderly world in which nothing too bad has intervened to disturb the Enoliberal consensus. A tweak here, a tweak there - for music and politics both. It's a worldview that a younger, stroppier me would not have hesitated to call counter-revolutionary.

It's possible, today, to go through life without hearing a single thing by massively popular artists. Music is no longer part of the transistored air the way it was when Eno started out in Roxy Music, or even when he first produced U2 in 1984. Social media is the new ambience, and its keynote is disputation, not singalong. On television the new buzz word is 'immersive', with a soundtrack to match. A few examples I recently took down from onscreen subtitles: Serene music, continuously... Dark music playing softly... Contemplative music playing... Sombre vocalising. Eno's beloved ambient music has seeded everywhere, but possibly not as he envisaged.

One of Eno's recent ambient works, Reflection (2017), was nominated for a Grammy in the Best New Age Album category, but alongside the classic New Age music collected on the compilation I Am the Centre four years earlier, it seems rather spartan, neuter, chilly. The title Reflection may suggest lush reverie, but the graphics on the CD cover make it look like music for a corporate atrium, or some boutique hotel's minimalist spa. It's mildly pleasant, but then so is the music accompanying yoga tutorials on YouTube. At its best, ambient music embodies blank time in an era when even the hearth has been reconfigured as a 24/7 workstation. But it may also function as muzak for that same hyper-busy world: a sonic wallpaper for our self-constructed bunker walls. Maybe the last thing we need right now is any more chill-out. If there is something like a future of serene music continuously, then who will be doing the soothing? And why?

Eno himself seems to have been reassessing some of these things. Works such as The Ship (2016) and ForeverAndEverNoMore (2022) were prompted by "concerns about the future from both an environmental and geopolitical standpoint" and "the prospect of humankind's demise". Which all sounds a bit Global Business Network, but his anger is palpable and welcome. For a long time we seemed to get discrete bits of him; here, Brian and Eno are as one. A graceful, seamless merger of voice and sound, politics and aesthetics. Despite Eno's avowed atheism, this is music with a distinctly religious undertone. A form of prayer or requiem, a contemplation of last things. His singing voice is lower now, and he sounds weary, battered, baffled, refusing the easy consolation of any kind of 'redemption' at journey's end. Time was he dreamed unlikely futures into life; now he mourns a lost spirit of optimism and any sense of continuity. "And who gives a thought / About the labourers / The ones who dig and hoe / Who weld and reap and sow." What was once wistful now feels more despairing, tinged with grief. Things crash or sink as well as float and drift. This haunted mood recalls what Coil were doing so beautifully in the late 1990s (especially on Astral Disaster), the Northern melancholia of Richard Skelton, or Mark Fisher and Justin Barton's On Vanishing Land (which includes samples from Eno's On Land); or maybe a sonic version of W. G. Sebald's The Rings Of Saturn: eerie solitude, deserted sands, inexorable decline. Small distances and long views. All that is solid dissolving into spray. It is late in the day and the light starts to weaken and grow dim. Everything loops back to where it began.