Brian Eno

United Kingdom, 1971–now

British musician and producer. A member of Roxy Music before defining ambient music with Discreet Music and Music for Airports, he also produced Bowie, Talking Heads and U2, and treated the studio itself as an instrument.

MusicRoots documents 10 artists who influenced Brian Eno and 15 artists Brian Eno influenced in turn. Every connection cites a published source.

Who influenced Brian Eno?

• Kraftwerk — Eno cited Kraftwerk's systematic approach to timbre and texture as a key influence on his ambient and production work.
• John Cage — Cage's concept of music-as-process and his embrace of silence and chance were the philosophical backbone of Eno's ambient and generative music.
• Karlheinz Stockhausen — Eno took off from Stockhausen's electronic and process-based music.
• The Velvet Underground — Eno called the first Velvet Underground album a defining record for him.
• Fela Kuti — Eno shared the band's immersion in Fela and brought that African polyrhythm into his own production method on Remain in Light and after.
• Erik Satie — Eno's ambient manifesto descends from Satie's furniture music — music 'as ignorable as it is interesting', Satie's idea restated for the studio age.
• Harmonia — Eno called Harmonia 'the world's most important rock band' and travelled to Forst to record with them in 1976 (Tracks and Traces).
• La Monte Young — Eno has named La Monte Young — 'the daddy of us all' — a major influence; Young's sustained-tone minimalism underlies his ambient concept.
• Terry Riley — Riley's tape-loop and repetition minimalism (A Rainbow in Curved Air) was a documented model for Eno's generative and ambient methods.
• Steve Reich — Reich's phase and process music — It's Gonna Rain — was a direct model for Eno's systems-based approach to composition.

Which artists did Brian Eno influence?

• Aquarium — Brian Eno's art-rock and ambient textures are among the influences Grebenshchikov brought into Aquarium.
• Massive Attack — Brian Eno's ambient textures inform Massive Attack's atmospheric, studio-built soundscapes.
• Enigma — Enigma's ambient, texture-first soundscapes and studio-as-instrument approach descend from Brian Eno's ambient music.
• Robert Miles — The half of him that had no interest in the dancefloor at all. After Dreamland he spent twenty years going towards ambient, and Eno is where that impulse points.
• Cabaret Voltaire — Early Eno's studio and tape techniques were a reference for Cabaret Voltaire.
• Genesis P-Orridge — Eno's ideas of unrepeatable sound and tape processing influenced P-Orridge's industrial method.
• Biosphere — Jenssen has named Eno's ambient albums — Apollo above all — the foundation Substrata builds its arctic stillness on.
• Aphex Twin — Selected Ambient Works extends the ambient concept Eno founded — the lineage every history of the record documents.
• The Orb — Paterson defined ambient house as Eno plus beats — the Orb's collages are built on the ambient bed Eno invented.
• Slowdive — Eno worked with Slowdive on Souvlaki ('Sing') — the ambient patron the band had studied arriving in person.
• Ultravox — Eno produced Ultravox's debut (1977) and his art-rock/ambient sensibility shaped their early sound directly.
• LCD Soundsystem — Brian Eno's art-rock and production philosophy are a core influence on Murphy's textured, evolving productions.
• MGMT — Brian Eno is a touchstone for MGMT — Congratulations includes a song titled 'Brian Eno' in tribute to his art-rock and production.
• Boards of Canada — Brian Eno's 1970s ambient soundscapes are a core influence on Boards of Canada's warm, atmospheric electronica.
• Wire — The studio as the instrument, and the idea that a treatment can be the point of a track rather than a coat of paint on it.