40
"Make the canvas such-and-such square, make a mark 14 inches from
the top right-hand corner, and then measure a line down at 83 degrees
and find a point here ...," and so on. Each instruction built on the one
before. If there was any error, it would be compounded throughout the
picture. I ended up with four canvases that were clearly related but dif-
ferent from each other, and they were stuck together to make one pic-
ture.
3
The line between music and other forms of art was obscured in many such experiments, yet
Eno became more and more attracted to music itself, since here was an art-form that had al-
ways been a "performance art" involving real-time processes. He found it increasingly diffi-
cult to finish his paintings, which tended to look "as if I'd got bored half-way through, which
in fact is what had happened." Music, on the other hand, offered an activity that was more
immediate, that involved instantaneous feedback between process and product, Eno also felt
that music was "an activity that has a more direct emotional appeal."
4
What ultimately in-
trigued him most in the musical realm, however, was not its performance aspect, but the pos-
sibilities of the tape recorder, which seemed to make composing directly analogous to paint-
ing: "I realized you could mess with time storing it and then distorting it any way you
wanted and this made music into a plastic art. It instantly struck me as more interesting than
painting."
5
Thus the processes involved in making art-works exerted a peculiar fascination over Eno: he
saw them as valuable not only in terms of their ability to stimulate composition and to lend
insight into craft, but as interesting ideas in themselves. His enthusiasm for talking about
process has impressed most of the writers who have interviewed him, and indeed it is his
acute awareness of the varieties of the creative process, and his ability and willingness to ar-
ticulate his experiences with them, that set him apart from a host of progressive rock musi-
cians of the early 1970s. (An occasional writer found Eno's preoccupation with process irritat-
ing: Lester Bangs declared Eno's much-discussed methods "boring as shit to talk about at
much length and probably unnecessarily complicated, but they've given us some of the most
amazing albums of the decade.")
6
However, by 1981, if not earlier, disillusioned by the proliferation of self-indulgent concep-
tual debris being passed off as art, and with a much clearer and perhaps more traditional
conception of what is involved in making a piece of music, Eno had come round to the posi-
tion that there were definite limits to the interest that could be sustained by an artist's dwelling
on process as a sort of artistic product in its own right:
I was taught in art school that process is everything, which is another
way of saying that having an idea is enough. Since I'm basically lazy, I
liked that idea, but I no longer think it's true. The structure or process
that I used in Discreet Music is almost identical to the structure of
3
Arthur Lubow, "Brian Eno: At the Outer Limits of Popular Music, the Ex-glitter Rocker
Experiments with a Quiet new Sound," People Weekly (11 Oct. 1982), 94.
4
Geoff Brown, "Eno's Where It's At," Melody Maker 48 (10 Nov. 1973), 41.
5
Demorest, "Discreet Charm of Eno," 83.
6
Lester Bangs, "Eno Sings with the Fishes," Village Voice 23 (3 Apr. 1978), 49.