a. Brian Eno is a fictional creation. He invented himself. (Don't ask how he did it. He will only reply with a lie. He probably believes that he is real. Sometimes, it's all he has to hang onto.) As part of this fiction there has been a need to constantly produce facts, to convince us that he actually exists, and is not, as is actually the case, a figment of our imagination, a memory implant. There are many facts, so many that we don't even suspect that they are fabricated, part of a disorientating plot to set at the centre of the history of modern music a character that does not actually exist.

This story, of dates, facts, events, actions, collaborations, innovations, art, music, theory, mergers, aberrations, presentations is so far fetched it is astounding that we have all fallen for it. Then again, it is a story that is so full of fun, intrigue, discovery, surprise, sexiness, glamour and entertainment it is fascinating to consider that in some ways it might be all true. The world is a better place because this absurd story has been made up about an amateur musician with a sick, esoteric sense of humor who has been at some stage in his alleged life time a baby, a child, a teenager, an art student, a conceptual artist, a non-musical pop star, a record producer, a sidekick, a clairvoyant, a writer, a philosopher, a husband, a father, a pioneer, a prophet, a designer of atmosphere, a management consultant and a sex addict.

The story has been very beautifully organized. It is as if it all absolutely could have happened. There are elegantly managed connections with real happenings and real people. The Brian Eno character, a being that is constantly replaced with an exact copy, is filtered through the last thirty five years of musical development as if he has always been at the right place in the right time. As if the changes that music has made, technologically, culturally, electronically, needed to have some kind of human catalyst that was always around to mix and match and record and treat the moment so that whatever happened next seemed to be part of some plan, however accidental. It might as well have been Brian Eno, this cordial Dada Zelig, that was the personality that caused certain things to happen - say, the spread through our daily lives of ambient music, or the intellectual edge that there was to the more radical punk.

At every stage in the story it is worth considering whether it is possible that things could really have happened in this way. Pause for a moment as you inspect a certain claim, an apparent truth, and wonder if it actually occurred as it seemed to, or whether it has been massaged into history after the fact.

We are sure that Eno did happen and is continually happening, because we have been cleverly manipulated over the years to believe it. There are cleverly faked photographs, and most audaciously of all, the music that this character is said to have produced, for himself, for others, as active proponent or abstract guide, actually exists. That is the really scary thing about this whole illusion. This means that someone has put a hell of a lot of work into making up this complicated false memory that we have all been compelled to share. Someone has actually created the soundtrack to this impossible fictional person and his improbable adventure.

Some shadowy group of insidious individuals, a committee of desperate charlatans, has actually ensured that all of the sounds, as well as all of the stuff that never got used, can be heard. As soon as it is written into this plastic past that a certain record was released in a certain year sounding a certain way, it is available to be heard.

The job of this report is to collate as much of the information as possible, to establish most of the apparent facts, and decide whether the sinister manipulators of truth have gone a little too far. Have they made the Brian Eno characters too vivid in history, too creatively energetic, too influential? Can it really be that one man could be in so many places at so many different times, working with so many different sets of fantastic musicians, all innovators in their own right?

What kind of aesthetic network is involved in wanting us to believe that it was one artist, one mind, that did all of this, that thought so much, that was so knowing, so versatile, and ultimately so surreal. Have they in fact made this character too surreal - can such a surrealist ever make this kind of impact?

Is it a mistake that in part of the story, a story that involves such intellectual ideas, such smart content, such theoretical intensity, the Eno figure was actually a member of a successful pop group - did the shady committee acting in their own interests to convince us that Eno history is truth make up the Roxy Music element after some kind of drunken party? Can we really believe that man who mostly works in the shadows, in front of a machine, inside his own mind, was for a moment the most visible part of the most visible pop group in the country? The radiant Marlene Dietrich of the randy Roxy Music?

The scam, though, is too cleverly conceived to make such an elementary mistake. It's a perfect part of the mythology that, for a time, there was a Brian Eno dressed up to the size nines in show business finery - it creates great narrative lubrication to have a cartoon Eno move out of the conceptual art shadows at the age when he should quite properly be getting his ecstatic rocks off. Gradually, he then crawls back across the terrain of experimental rock towards the largely non-glamorous world of conceptual art. However avant-garde or ambitious or obscure he might get as he left behind the gay science of Roxy Music, he always had this period to remind people that once he was a sort of celebrity.

It makes sense in the way that Eno has been massaged into our minds as such a major cultural figure that at some stage in his development he was a pop star. Without the genuine pop occasion we would never have believed other parts of the story - say, the production that helped the biggest post-punk rock group in the world seem much stranger, cooler and even nastier than they actually were - and in the end, the Roxy element is perhaps one of the shrewdest parts of this incredibly shrewd pop cultural mirage. The flash nonsense of it all helps make sense of the whole enterprise.

It is, though, a very small part of the story, if quite a garish one. It's positioned at just the right place, and the pop adventure has been designed to last for just the right, brief amount of time. Even more ingeniously, the committee have made it part of the illusion that this Eno figment actually slightly resents the fact that for all the brilliant things he has done, many people still think of him as just an ex-member of Roxy Music. As we shall see in this report, there could have been a world where he would be known mostly as an ex member of the Portsmouth Sinfonia, or as the founder of Obscure Records, or as the archduke of celestial muzak, or as the fifth member of U2.

All of that, though, would have been far too unlikely. The minds behind this complex illusion have never gone too far - they've never wanted to completely rupture the fabric of reality. In fact, to give them the benefit of the doubt, they have actually made sure that this story of a possible artist who may or may not have done some of the following things actually strengthens reality.

It is not clear what could exactly replace the following, some of which has settled down as established fact, some of which still shimmers on the synthetic edge of our memory. Remember as well that the following is merely scratching at the surface of the activities accredited to Eno in this outrageous fantasy, and is heavily biased towards his musical activities - although even then it doesn't really begin to record his guest appearances on records by the likes of Genesis, Matching Mole, Robert Wyatt, Material, the Neville Brothers and Unkle. There is the equivalent amount of work undertaken in the visual medium as there is in the sound medium, the extent of which further stretches credulity.

For now, it has been lodged into our minds that it all started in . . .

b. 1948 : Whoever it is that is in control has decided that Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno was born in Woodbridge, Suffolk, on May 15. For some people, the name alone is something of a give away that all is not as it seems. The full name is obviously an initial statement of bold intent by the powers that be: believe that and you will believe anything. But even the 'Eno' and the combination of the plain 'Brian' with the unlikely 'Eno' suggests something faintly disconcerting going on behind the scenes of logic. His dad was a postman - and some heretics suggest that to this day, behind the reality shifting façade that has been put in place, in the obscure wilds of Suffolk, there is a 'Brian Eno' quietly delivering letters, oblivious to how his identity has been stolen.

It has been suggested that the fake Eno's entire career has been a kind of version of the postman delivering letters - he has been delivering envelopes and parcels containing information, surprises and various demands through the metaphorical doors of our eyes and ears.

1953-1966 :
His early education is under religious auspices at the De La Salle order, Ipswich. It has always remained vague just what it is that happened between the young Brian and the monks and nuns teaching him that led to his belief that God did not exist, and that art did. Art made sense of the world. God, even as something that did not exist, as something implanted in our minds, always let you down. Ironically, considering the fact he too is a made up phenomenon, he would always be deeply suspicious of any attempts to console the masses with superstition.

With Art as his new God, his new discipline, he enrolled at the Ipswich Art School for foundation studies. He studied painting for two years, and then he moved to Winchester College of Art where he studied Fine Arts (Painting and Sculpture.)

This establishes Eno as a member of that great set of British rock musicians who attended art school. It was while he was at Winchester that he slips through the net of conceptual art towards music, and starts to develop what became an eye for sound, an ear for shape, and a feeling for the future. He also publishes poetry, and is inspired by the poetic and political impulses that are behind the music of John Cage and Cornelius Cardew. It is the avant garde music of Cage, Cardew, and other contemporary composers such as John Tilbury, mixed with an adolescent infatuation with the hearty, slightly eerie, doo-wop music resonating from the American air force bases near his home as if it was being wired from Mars, that was the seed of his love for music that was out of the ordinary. Music that came from out there.

He acquires a tape recorder, his first musical instrument. This enables him to tape things from out there. Eventually he would own 31 tape recorders. His early fascination with this ability to actually hold in place, mess about with and keep for all time something as ethereal as sound hints at all his future work.

He records therefore he is.

1967 :
He forms the avant-garde troupe Merchant Taylor's Simultaneous Cabinet, and a heavy rock group Maxwell Demon. He mysteriously sings and generates signals, as you do, at least in this fact packed fantasy, making up the words as he goes along. They play two gigs.

1968 :
Writes and publishes a theoretical handbook, Music for Non-Musicians. He is convinced that to make music it is not in any way a handicap to be non-musical. He is also a passionate believer in the determination of John Cage to resist the idea of music as a science with very fixed, deadening rules.

1969 :
Finishes Art School with a diploma in fine art, and more importantly contacts and connections with leading British contemporary composers such as Gavin Bryars. Moves to London, where he continues playing music, and works as an electronics trader and newspaper designer to earn a living. He performs with Cornelius Cardew's large experimental musical community group Scratch Orchestra, and becomes the clarinetist in Gavin Bryars Portsmouth Sinfonia - a full sized orchestra of amateur musicians who play all your favorite pieces of classical music. (This music actually exists, and somebody has had a lot of fun sort of melting the classics over a slow heat, taking the beat out of Beethoven, the art out of Mozart, and emphasizing the rave in Ravel.) From the tape recorder, which had been like his acoustic guitar, he progresses to the electric guitar of the synthesizer. He is among the first seven to play the synthesizer in this country - the Synthesizer Seven was a short lived club that met on a few legendary occasions to consult with each other about just exactly what it was they were doing. They published a pamphlet, The Process Statement.

1971 :
Records with Cornelius Cardew and joins Roxy Music. Between these two poles lies the truth about Eno's musical extremes. The charismatic Cardew was interested in pushing music to the end of itself. Roxy Music were a chance collision in a recording studio between machine crazed rockabilly and the open umbrella of conceptual art. They were a two-headed monster - and one of those heads wore many hats. That would be Eno. Bryan Ferry was, in order, suave, urbane and stylish. Brian Eno was, in no order, faintly sinister, futuristic and fishy. It was said that between the two of them there was Roxy Music.

Invited to join by saxophonist/oboist Andy Mackay, Eno's official early role in Roxy Music was as mixer and electronic supervisor. At first, during a year of rehearsals and preparation, he wore the white coat of a scientist. Once they were ready to perform, he would wear the pastel feather boas and velvet corsets of an exhibitionist.

1972 :
With their self titled debut album the two faced Roxy Music are an overnight success, a glam rock band that not only knew how to boogie, but how to define post-modernism years before it's time. Their aim was to synthesize past styles with revolutionary techniques, and this was right up Eno's avenue of interest. His image within the group was half magician, half technician, half human, half alien. Roxy rocked, Eno distorted. All was well with the world.

1973 :
In this year, so we are forced to believe, Brian Eno was involved in the production of three classic records - right across the spectrum of his interests. He produces the Portsmouth Sinfonia album Portsmouth Sinfonia Plays The Popular Classics - classical music with the skeleton of integrity surgically removed. There is the second Roxy Music album For Your Pleasure - Velvet Underground in a tuxedo. And, with Robert Fripp, recorded in a day, No Pussyfooting - sampled guitars looped through the tape machine of time, Steve Reich in a hall of mirrors. The drone as a thing of beauty that you can see, hear, touch, smell . . .

All three records proved early on in his career how he was pulling ideas from modern, experimental classical music into the studio, space and theatre of rock and pop, and then feeding back the excitement and glamour of rock back into the enclosed world of classical music.

Having moved so far stage left as part of Roxy Music, he fell off. Disaster strikes. He leaves Roxy. Musical differences between Ferry and Eno were cited - Ferry was looking for meaning, Eno for more than meaning. His first solo album, Here Come The Warm Jets is Roxy Music, Can, VU and Cornelius Cardew in a blender. He sings, somewhere between charming and menacing. It reaches the top thirty: as if.

1974 :
Though not in love with the life of a touring musician, he sets off around the country offering up solo bits and pieces backed by pub band The Winkies. Naturally, he collapses, as if his skeleton had been surgically removed, possibly by the ghost of Strauss - although some suggest Strauss would have approved how the Portsmouth Sinfonia dealt with his Blue Danube. The powers that be have slid into the mythology the detail that he spent a part of 1974 in hospital.
Produces John Cale's Fear.

Plays concert with John Cale, Nico and Kevin Ayers - the Velvet Underground semi-reassembled as ACNE, an avant-garde cabaret ensemble selling sex, misery and mystery. A furtive plan by those in control of this self-perpetuating fable may well lead to the June 1st 1974 live album that was released as a souvenir of the concert being turned into a major feature film. (Nick Cage as John Cale, Gwyneth Paltrow as Nico, Owen Wilson as Kevin Ayers and John Malkovich as Eno.)
November sees the release of his second solo album, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy). He is inspired by a set of postcards he found in San Fransisco depicting a Chinese revolutionary opera. His abstract band of avant-garde ragtime regulars, such as Robert Wyatt, Phil Manzanera, Andy Mackay and John Cale, are involved as unusual, and the Portsmouth Sinfonia, one by one, add strings in a style somewhere between Henry Mancini and Spike Milligan. Now hailed as a pop wizard, with knobs on, the album presents Eno as a socially responsible artist with two basic tasks - to engage our hearing in novel ways, and to provide objects for a new world. He's still singing, somewhere between plaintive and abrasive.

A slight mistake in the memory implant - a blip, not quite wiped from history, the fact that Eno produces the first Television album. It is not meant to be this year, and so it is not released.

1975 :
Releases Oblique Strategies with Peter Schmidt, a set of one hundred cards to give inspiration to the artist. They represent Eno's devotion to the liberating properties of chance. They are added to over the years, until a fifth revision is produced in 2001.

Bedridden for several months after a car accident, extreme lateral, to the point of horizontal, thinking leads to the discovery of what Eno called ambient music - unable to get out of bed to turn up the volume on his stereo, he notes how the low level of the music he is listening to filters in and out of the sound of rain pouring outside his room. In a state between waking and sleeping, he softly hallucinates a music that is in a state between liquid and solid, between real and unreal, between light and shape.

Releases Evening Star with Robert Fripp, guitars looped through the tape machine of space, Terry Riley in a bedroom of many colours. The drone as pure bliss.

His third solo album Another Green World is released. Ambience starts to penetrate the songs and gently reduce them to psychic jelly. Presence is turned into absence, absence into presence. Love is turned into sound. The mistake in the master plan to make us believe all of this happened when it seemed to happen is that there is no way that an album that sounded so 21st Century, as well as so 16th century, could have been released in 1975. You could just about get away with the first two solo records belonging to the early 70s, but not this one.

Exploiting all the attention as posing post-Roxy schemer and dreamer, Eno sets up the pioneering Obscure Records. Eventually, ten extremely collectable experimental gems are released, most of them produced by Eno - it gives artists like Penguin Café Orchestra, Michael Nyman, Gavin Bryars and Harold Budd their first chance to record and release their music.
Eno's contribution to Obscure is Discreet Music, making use of a digital recall synthesizer and long delay tape system. The deep, dark pool of ambience broken up throughout Another Green World spreads all the way through this record, and out of the speakers, round the world, and into history.
Works on a series of radical, mesmerizing rock records with John Cale (Slow Dazzle and Helen Of Troy), Phil Manzanera (Diamond Head) and Robert Wyatt (Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard.)

1976 :
Music For Films is released in a limited edition of 500 and distributed to various film directors.
Publishes Generating and Organizing Variety in the Arts.
Work on David Bowie's Low begins.
A suspicious lack of activity in this year fuels rumor that a false memory that would involve Eno and the Sex Pistols backfired, leaving a black hole in the Eno space-time continuum that can never be filled.

1977 :
Just to test how much we have fallen for this whole belief system, Eno produces Ultravox. Few people remember this, which is a minor suggestion that this memory implant has not quite taken hold.
Bowie's Low is released. Eno does not produce but stalks the landscape in white coat and metal corset, wearing a series of appropriate masks.
Records and plays live with Cluster.
The fourth Brian Eno solo album is released, Before and After Science. It starts hard and fast and ends soft and slow, and is to some extent Eno's solo farewell to the pop song structure. From now on, he will help others with their songs, but as far as his own are concerned, he's had enough. He's had the last word.
Bowie's Heroes is released. Eno does not produce but is guilty as charged. Two decades later Philip Glass turns Low and Heroes into full-blooded symphonies.

1978 :
Produces the No New York new wave sampler album featuring Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, DNA and Mars.

Half genius, half potato, he produces Devo.
Soundtracks for non-existent films released, Music For Films - the ambient pool spreads beneath the action in films that only existed in the mind of someone who only existed in the mind of a mysterious committee. It is not quite the same as the limited edition Music For Films released two years earlier.
After The Heat is released by Eno, Moebius and Roedelius (Cluster).
Talking Heads' More Songs About Building And Food released. Eno is very much in the vicinity.
Eno's pursuit of ambient perfection reaches an un-crashing anti-climax with Music For Airports - ambient ground zero, it is designed to calm passengers with a fear of flying.

1979 :
Eno produces Talking Heads Fear of Music.
Bowie's Lodger is released, the conclusion of an unofficial Berlin trilogy. Eno does not produce, but he chooses the curtains.

1980 :
Collaborates with gentle man Harold Budd on Ambient 2 : The Plateaux of Mirror and with Zen trumpeter Jon Hassell on Possible Musics.
Produces Talking Heads international success Remain in Light, and co-writes all but one of the songs.

1981 :
Having been expelled from Talking Heads, a group he was never actually a member of, or at least, the memory implant never fully took hold, he re-unites with the groups leader David Byrne. They record My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, a fusion of electronic music, found sound, and other worldly Third World texture that is the missing link between Holger Czukay's 1968 Canaxis and Moby's 2001 Play. The techniques involved in assembling the music anticipate the sampling of hip hop just as Eno's electronic invention and sonic manipulation is always, rather suspiciously, ahead of everyone else's. Again, this all implies that this music is being produced in laboratories in the present time, using up to date machines, plug ins and programmes, and then positioned back in time, where it seems sublimely out of step with everything else around it.

1982 :
The long music of Eno's ambience continues this side of forever with the release of Ambient 4 :On Land - music that shimmers a few centimetres under the surface of the earth.

1983 :
Releases Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks in collaboration with producer Daniel Lanois and brother Roger - music that simmers a few centimetres beyond the Milky Way. Apollo and On Land suggest that in fact Eno's music is being produced some time in the future and being beamed back to the appropriate year.

1984 :
U2 invite him to produce their Unforgettable Fire album, and he saves them from being dragged down by nostalgia for the blues, and shoots them into a shiny, metallic future full of sex, success and media play.

At the other end of the other end, collaborates with Harold Budd and Daniel Lanois on the album Pearl.

1985 :
Having shagged U2, in the best possible taste, he releases Thursday Afternoon, on CD only. It is the sound of a Thursday afternoon lasting forever, in the best possible way.

1986 : Produces two tracks for Carmel - exactly the same amount of people who heard his work with Ultravox heard this, and it makes sense of the unlikely 2003 tour where Carmel and Ultravox shared the bill - the I Was Produced By Brian Eno Let Me Out Of Here Tour.
Produces Jon Hassell's incandescently minimal Power Spot album for the ECM label.

1987 :
In the studio, if not the bedroom, with U2 again, to produce Joshua Tree. His involvement with U2 is at the same time the most prosaic and the most sensational of his collaborations. In the long run it means that he is essentially the best-compensated avant-garde musician of all time, apart from Yoko Ono. The closeness of their surnames suggests a programming malfunction in the creation of the pretence that there really is a Brian Eno, and the possibility that in some alternative version of this story he enjoyed a homosexual relationship with John Lennon.

At the other end of the end of history Eno produces Jon Hassell's The Surgeon Of The Nightsky Restores Dead Things By The Power Of Sound.

1988 :
Eno wins a Best Record of the Year Grammy for Joshua Tree.
Eno, with Lanois, Budd and various others, produces Music For Films III.
Gives a series of lectures around the world on various subjects - Public Talk. The public gets the change to ask questions. No one asks him if he in fact doesn't exist. If they had have done he would not have been around to answer.

Records “You Don't Miss Your Water” an old Byrds song, for the Married to the Mob soundtrack. It is his first lead vocal after eleven years of releasing pools and spools of non-vocal music.
First spell check of Brian Eno's name using a word processing programme suggests his name should in fact be Eon. Or Ego.

1989 :
Eno produces John Cale's Words for the Dying, Terry Riley's Inc and Zvuki Mu's Zvuki Mu.

1990 :
Brian Eno sings on Wrong Way Up with John Cale.

1991 :
Eno produces Achtung Baby for U2. His production technique here was that he would only agree to have his name credited as producer if he was satisfied that the album was charged, grungy and wonderful enough that he would want to have his name on it. When he was satisfied that it sounded like an album he might have produced, then the album was finished. He didn't spend weeks in the studio sitting at a mixing desk. He largely produced by correspondence, the odd sigh, the occasional diagram and the overall pretence that there was any one at all called Brian Eno who had a series of opinions regarding the nature of music that had been developing for over 25 years.

1992:
Eno begins an occasional series of remixes for other artists - starting with EMF's “Unbelievable” and then including throughout the 90s The Grid, Deplete Mode, INXS, Suede, Bryan Ferry, Massive Attack, 808State and Can.
Produces When I Was A Boy for Jane Siberry.
Releases Nerve Net and The Shutov Assembly, accompanied by the “Fractal Zoom” single.
Presents Perfume, Defence and David Bowie's Wedding, a lecture and slide installation at Sadler Wells, London. Begins with the immortal line, "I first discovered smell in 1964".

1993:
Box 1 and Box 2 reissues of Eno's song and non-song music released.
Half man, half fifth member of U2, Produces Zooropa for U2.
Produces Laid for James.
Releases Neroli

1994:
Produces Bright Red for Laurie Anderson
Produces Wah Wah for James

1995:
Those disturbing mind controllers responsible for organising this tremendous series of fabrications and misdirection have yet to implant any grand untruths about the career of Eno into 1995. As we get closer to the present, it is noticeable that the details get sketchier, the facts have yet to lock in to our collective mind, there is a sense that this end of the Eno myth things are more tender and unformed than in the earlier stages. The closer we are to now, the more unreal Eno seems, the less likely it seems that he was really responsible for any of the above, let alone all the other things that have been left out. It is as if the latest Eno character is part of some transformation in the story that will eventually result in Eno becoming some kind of machine, as if all of this has been to prepare him and us for this ultimate progression from human being to technological figment of the imagination.
As if to confirm this feeling that there is the beginning of a kind of computer regeneration of the fantasy of Eno, a hard fact is embedded into 1995, one that didn't seem to be there a few years ago - that he was responsible for the Windows start up sound.

And then it appears that he formed a loose collective with members of U2, Luciano Pavorotti and Howie B to write and record Passengers : Original Soundtracks.

Something else appears to be happening, as if we are seeing the very moment it becomes a fact - he chooses the carpets, the curtains, the wallpaper and the furniture as he reunites with David Bowie for the Outside album.

All of this seems to be changing shape in front of or eyes. One day we will believe it as if this was always how it happened.

1996 :
Eno's long time interest in self evolving compositions results in 'Generative Music', music that can never be heard the same way twice. This is a kind of sonic paradise for Eno - music that escapes being fragments held in a fixed way inside time, as even his ambient music is. His ambient music gave glimpses of an eternal music - his generative music opens up the skies. One day it might be hailed as Eno's finest achievment - producing music that creates itself, that fills every nook and cranny of the Universe, that coats the listener with pure experience, that seeps outside time.
Rumour suggests that the Generative music is actually the immortal Eno, having been transformed some time in the future into a virtual being, sending signals back to the present in the form of sheer sound. It is possibly Brian Eno himself, catching sight of himself in the corridor of time, turned into pure sound.

A Year (With Swollen Appendices), Brian Eno's diary and essays, was published by Faber and Faber. An insight into the mind of an artist as if there could really be such a mind and such an artist who knows so many bloody people. That's when you can really feel that the whole thing must be fixed.

1997 :
Releases TheDrop.
Music for White Cube forms the beginning of a series of albums you can buy in the shop Eno opens online. Music For White Cube is available in a limited edition of 500, now sold out - since then, the availability of various installation soundtracks, ancient studies, private doodles, occasional projects, and sundry curiosities. This is the timeless Eno functioning in a world beyond commerce, producing music that is beyond obscure, and which flows as if through a dream the young art student Eno might have had about how music can be an exquisite recording of the unsentimental romantic spirit. This is the quiet Eno, and as loud as Eno has got, with Roxy, with Talking Heads, with U2, he loves being so quiet he almost disappears, as if nothing about him existed in the first place, except his thoughts, which drift through his music. The rest of his story had to be made up.

1999 :
Produces Millionaires for James.

2000 :
With Daniel Lanois, produces All That You Can't Leave Behind for U2.

2001 :
Produces Pleased To Meet You for James.
Releases the album Drawn From Life with J Peter Schwalm

2002/4 :
Now available in the on-line Enoshop - 18 Keyboard Studies by Hans Friedrich Micheelsen, by Brian and Roger Eno, and Bell Studies For The Clock Of The Long Now. You can visit the Eno shop at www.enoshop.co.uk
Eno works on latest solo album. Will it revisit the past or revisit the future? Will he be singing on it, somewhere between sensibly and strangely? Has he thought of some words? Will it sound like the work of the man who has produced U2 and James or the man who thinks the time at the moment is zero o'clock? Will he be dealing with the question of the possibility or impossibility of meaning? Will it be a completely new kind of radically eclectic pop music, something that sounds as if it has already been produced some time in the 22nd Century? Will it be electronic poem? Will it be a concept album about the Post Office? Will it arouse indignation or sympathy? How much computer will there be on the album, how much human nature? Will there be solos from Robert Fripp or Phil Manzanera that kiss the sky, and will Eno treat and manipulate the sound and structure of the song in ways that will change the nature of music in the 21st Century? Will he be wearing velvet corset or spotless white coat, will it be the follow up to Before and After Science, or a music-object bearing some kind of resemblance to No Pussyfooting, or Music For Airports, or The Drop? Will it be typically Eno in that it sounds unlike anything he has ever done before? Or typically Eno in that it confirms, in it's own way, in it's own time, Eno's continuing faith in the fluidity of all things?
One day we'll think we know the answer as if we knew it all along.

This is where Brian Eno is now. He is all of the above, and everything that has been left out.

Someone who popularised the cultural, artistic and technological discoveries of Erik Satie, John Cage, Terry Riley and Steve Reich. Someone who concluded that duration was the most essential factor in the making of music, who believed that the recording studio was the most important instrument in popular music, who understood the importance of the visual image in relationship to music, who was as comfortable with hard primitive noise as he was with sophisticated sound dropped to less than a whisper.

He introduced into rock ideas that helped the music constantly move forward, from glam to punk to new wave to electro-pop to ambient to techno to Britpop to IDM to hip hop, from Joy Division to Radiohead, from XTC to Aphex Twin, from Japan to David Sylvian, from Depeche Mode to Bjork, from Durutti Column to Orb, from A Certain Ratio to Underworld.

He has to exist, because if you took away all of the above facts and figures the thirty five years of fighting boredom, of championing intelligence, of searching for a kind of existential elegance, of sheer enthusiasm for the surprise of music, there would be huge holes in reality. There would be vast illogical gaps that would be hard to explain. How did we get from Steve Reich to Kylie Minogue, from the Velvet Underground to Tortoise, from Joe Meek to Missy Elliot, from John Cage to Britney Spears, from Tangerine Dream to Sigur Ros, from the Beach Boys to Blur, from Erik Satie to Dr Dre ? Where would the thread be that runs from La Monte Young to Outkast ?

Whoever it was that created the illusion that one man got around to doing all this might occasionally be testing our patience, and sometimes surely be having us on. In the end, though, there had to be a man with a map, a map he knew how to read, a map he helped finish off. A map that measures out in great detail the ocean of the soul and how it all connects with the continent of the body and the environment of the heart. A map that defines where inner space meets outer space. A map of modern music. And we have been hoodwinked into believing that the man with the map is called Brian Eno. It might even have been Eno himself who has been doing the hoodwinking. Making himself up as he goes along.

Despite all the facts, and all of the music, I don't believe that he really exists. But I'm glad that he does.