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used in film, TV, advertising, dance company, and planetarium applications in the U.K.,
U.S.A., Australia, Japan, and Holland.
Since 1979 Eno has been working in the area of audio-visual installations shows in galleries
and other public places in which taped music, video monitors or video "sculptures," and the
spatial characteristics of the site itself complement each other, forming an aesthetic whole that
he feels is best appreciated through repeated visits. He has set up such installations in over
fifty locations in the U.S.A., Canada, France, Australia, Holland, England, Italy, Austria, and
Germany. Sometimes the technological means have been extravagant, as at La Foret Museum,
Akasaka, Tokyo, where he used thirty-six video monitors.
Owing to the expansive, multi-faceted nature of his ideas, and, doubtless, to his highly publi-
cized collaborations with rock stars like David Bowie, Robert Fripp, and Talking Heads,
whose work has loomed much larger in the record-buying public's estimation, Eno's music
has received sustained critical attention out of all proportion to the (rather meager) number of
records he has sold. In his early work in Roxy Music and subsequent solo progressive rock
albums, Eno styled himself a rock musician, capturing the attention of the rock press and pub-
lic with his imaginative approach to the synthesizer, his constant textural experimentation, the
dry, witty irony of his lyrics and with his public image as a sort of cerebral hermaphrodite
(with Roxy Music he wore women's clothing and makeup). His credentials as as an outré rock
innovator thus established, he continued to pique the imagination of his public when his com-
positions turned away from rock forms, rhythms, harmonies and styles entirely, with the re-
lease of a number of albums of quiet, gentle compositions, often entirely without pulse or
melody. It is doubtful whether Eno's ambient music would have found its way into the fore-
front of popular music discourse had he not begun his public career working more or less
within the rock mainstream. Eno has thus become, for many critics, a symbol of the potential
of "art rock": not only has he brought his philosophical inclinations, attitude of experimenta-
tion, and self-consciously "artistic" sensibilities to bear on creating what might be called rock
music for the thinking person or aesthete (as have musicians like Frank Zappa and Robert
Fripp), but he has worked within new, non-rock genres essentially of his own creation.
Fascination with Eno extends beyond the world of the music press, his life and music have
been treated in general interest magazines like Esquire, Omni, People Weekly, and Time, as
well as art periodicals like Artforum, Art in America, and Flash Art. Critical response to spe-
cific solo albums by Eno range from extremes of praise, expressed in effusive hyperbole, to
extremes of boredom, expressed through witty or indignant put-downs, both extremes are
often found in different reviews of the same work.
If Eno's approach to music can be summed up here, it is in terms of inventing systems and
setting them in motion, vigilantly maintaining an open mind and child-like curiosity with re-
gard to the infinite play of musical possibilities, taking command of technology's array of
music-making equipment from tape recorders to synthesizers to mixing consoles, generally
working within a relatively narrow range of expressive possibilities for any given piece, and
accepting happy accidents at any stage of the creative process. "Honor thy mistake as a hid-
den intention," says one of the Oblique Strategies, a set of oracle cards Eno produced and