I recently watched a documentary about Brian Eno, which was streamed online as part of a 24-hour event where you could watch it up to 6 times. Each showing is different, generated randomly from hundreds of hours of interview footage from across Eno’s career– a very long and interesting career including his time as a glam rocker in Roxy Music, his work as a producer for artists like David Bowie, Talking Heads, and U2, and his solo work, including the ambient music he is now best known for. Some of his own music is generated using algorithms, in a similar way to how the documentary was produced.
Back in the 1990s, a friend gave me some cassette tapes of Eno’s early solo albums from the 1970s, such as Before and After Science. I haven’t listened to them in a long time, and I never really got into his ambient music, but after seeing the documentary, I want to revisit all his music as well as his writing. He has a lot of interesting thoughts about art and creativity, and guess what– he seems to have captured a lot of his ideas in notebooks!
I watched the documentary twice, and ended up being glad I did– about half of the footage I saw was repeated, but amongst the sections that were new in the second viewing, I had to snap this photo:
Screenshot from Eno by Gary Hustwit
I spy what must be a pocket sized Moleskine daily diary, and a Clairefontaine notebook, but I’m not sure what the other brands might be. The whole collection seems to span decades, as you can see dates from the 1970s written in white on some of the spines.
It’s tantalizing to see all those notebooks strewn over his desk, as he didn’t talk about them at all! That portion was focused on his “Oblique Strategies” card deck, a set of aphorisms that are meant to be used as creative prompts. But I suspect that some iterations of the documentary probably would include more discussion of the notebooks, based on this image from Brian Eno’s Facebook page:
According to this Medium article, Eno is a prolific keeper of visual diaries.
Even though Eno primarily makes music, he probably has kept more visual diaries than most of the artists who make visual art. In his notebooks, he kept everything from ideas of how to make an installation, to experience throughout a particular day, to reminders of dentist appointments.
“It’s the act of writing something down, that puts it into memory, takes it out of my mind, where it’s possible to think about it differently.”
Excerpt from Brian Eno’s notebook, 1970s, as show in Medium post by Ningxia Zhang
Here’s another image of some of Brian Eno’s notebooks from a fan site:
There are also some shown on the homepage of EnoShop.co.uk. If you click on the notebooks, it leads you to a quote about how Eno uses notebooks, which unfortunately is rather hard to read, at least to my eyes!
The best ways to learn more about Brian Eno’s notebooks are probably these books:
Brian Eno: Visual Music: this book is about Eno’s visual art, which looks like it includes some images of notebook pages.
What Art Does: this book (forthcoming in the US, already available in the UK) also looks interesting, even though it isn’t particularly about Eno’s notebooks.
All this makes me a little frustrated– the concept of the documentary being patched together so it’s different each time is cool, but I wish there was also a way to search for particular topics of interest! I don’t want to have to watch the same documentary millions of times in hopes of catching the one segment I’m looking for. In any case, I’m glad I watched it, and it inspired me to jot some ideas in my own notebook. I don’t know if it will be available for streaming again soon, but keep an eye out, it’s definitely worth watching if you have any interest in Brian Eno’s work.
