There is a certain amount of truth in saying that Eno stumbled into his musical career. It is at Ipswich College, studying art in the 1960s, that Eno truly discovered himself. He studied art under controversial maverick educator Roy Ascott who introduced a different way of looking at art, especially devouring the more experimental aspects of it, including the ‘mind map’ technique that Eno has used throughout his entire career. But it is through his lecturer Tom Phillips that Eno discovered avant-garde classical music, in particular the work of John Cage, who had inadvertently invented ambient music in a piece of piano music called ‘In A Landscape’ written in the year of Eno’s birth (1948). It was mainly the American minimalist movement of composers such as Terry Riley and La Monte Young that initially got Eno interested in creating music. This and his meeting with the British teacher in experimental composition, Cornelius Cardew. It was at this point that Eno began to collect old reel-to-reel tape recorders and then slowly pieced together experimental musique concrète. David Sheppard described his first tape compositions in his 2008 bookOn Some Faraway Beach: The Life And Times Of Brian Eno:
His first recorded ‘piece’ was the sound of a pen striking the hood of a large anglepoise lamp, multi-tracked at different speeds to form a shimmering, bell-like cloud of tones, over which a friend read a poem. Its hazy reverberations, Eno told me, ‘sounded very similar to the music I make now’.
In 1966 Eno entered Winchester School of Art and it is here that he slowly transformed himself into the person who bursts onto the music scene with Roxy Music. It is here that Eno began to slowly discard more traditional forms of painting in favour of sound painting using his collection of tape recorders.
It was also during this period that Eno discovered the New York band The Velvet Underground, who would have a profound influence on his rock career throughout the seventies. At this point, Eno became a performer with the Scratch Orchestra, mainly focusing on works by La Monte Young. Later he started to perform solo concerts with renditions of his own compositions of his manipulated tape pieces as well as piano works by Toru Takemitsu. It was at one of these concerts at Reading University in 1968 that Eno made the acquaintance of Andy Mackay and the pair struck up a friendship, even forming a mostly theoretical band called Brian Iron and The Crowbars. But it was Eno’s next band that set him firmly on a course for blending rock music with the avant-garde, with fellow Winchester student Anthony Grafton on guitar and Eno on vocals and signal generator. They mixed blues and Stockhausen electronics and called themselves Maxwell Demon (inspired by Eno, Maxwell Demon was the name given to the character in Todd Haynes’ 1998 film about glam rock calledVelvet Goldmine. The soundtrack also featured songs by Eno). It was also at this point that Eno invested in his first electric guitar called a Starway, which cost him nine pounds and he would use it on a vast number of his recordings during the seventies.
In June 1969, Eno graduated from Winchester with a fine art diploma and a major interest in both modern class
