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Collaboration with other rock and non-rock musicians has formed a very important aspect of
Eno's activity. Two albums of tape-looped synthesizer/guitar duets with King Crimson guitar-
ist Robert Fripp were among Eno's first publicly available experiments in the ambient sound.
Eno has worked with conceptual rock group 801 (a live band, formed around ex-Roxy Music
players Phil Manzanera on guitar and Eno on synthesizer), with Kevin Ayers and John Cale (a
live album), and with the German synthesizer group Cluster (several albums of ambient-
inflected music). Eno's collaboration on three albums with glitter/art rocker David Bowie
mixed hard rock, disco/funk, and electronic excursions in a unique combination of styles.
With David Byrne, leader of Talking Heads, Eno made the controversial album My Life in the
Bush of Ghosts, which used African and American radio "found sounds" in a number of musi-
cal collages in which complex rhythms and textures set up a kind of sonic frieze. Outside the
rock realm entirely, Eno has collaborated on albums with composers Harold Budd, Jon Has-
sell, Daniel Lanois, Michael Brook, and Roger Eno, creating a marvelously variegated set of
soundscapes and musical concepts. Eno's role in all of these collaborations has been varied,
but in the projects mentioned in this paragraph he has been credited as one of the composers,
and in some of them as the producer.
Eno's expertise in the recording studio has been much sought-after since about 1975, and he
has produced at least twenty-three albums on which he is not listed as one of the composers.
His actual role as a producer has varied from that of being a simple recording engineer to that
of being a de facto co-composer of the total sound. Again the types of music represented are
diverse. Eno produced two albums for the Portsmouth Sinfonia, the "world's worst sym-
phony" an ensemble founded on high camp satire consisting of non-musicians and musi-
cians playing instruments they didn't know how to play, stumbling through outrageously
butchered versions of the classical repertoire. Eno created a record label himself, Obscure
Records, which released eight albums in the 1970s. The Obscure philosophy, discussed by
Eno in several statements, was essentially to aid in the dissemination of experimental music,
the Obscure records included pieces by contemporary composers Gavin Bryars, Christopher
Hobbs, John Adams, Max Eastley, John Cage, Jan Steele, Michael Nyman, the Penguin Cafe
Orchestra, Tom Phillips, Fred Orton, and Harold Budd. Among the rock acts Eno has pro-
duced are John Cale, Robert Calvert, Talking Heads, Ultravox, Devo, and U2. Eno also pro-
duced the compilation No New York (documenting the New York punk scene of the late 1970s,
with music by the Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Mars, and DNA), an album fea-
turing the ethereal music of hammer dulcimer player Laraaji, and a record by the Ghanaian
pop group Edikanfo.
Eno has appeared as an instrumentalist (playing synthesizer, percussion, bass, and guitar) and
vocalist on at least twenty-three albums, ranging from the fabled Scratch Orchestra's re-
cording of Cornelius Cardew's experimental vocal composition The Great Learning to David
Byrne's music for Twyla Tharp's Broadway production, The Catherine Wheel.
Over the last decade Eno's approach to music has found favor among filmmakers, television
executives, and playwrights. Among other things, Eno produced the "Prophecy Theme" for
David Lynch's film Dune, and the music for the PBS series Creation of the Universe. Eno
compositions were used as background for the acclaimed Nova film The Miracle of Life,
which featured stunning color footage of inside-the-body structures and processes relating to
human reproduction. In 1978 Eno released an album of original compositions entitled Music
for Films; Music for Films, Vol. II followed in 1983. The pieces on these albums have been