Long Now founding board member Brian Eno has released a new album called Small Craft on a Milk Sea. Recently he gave two great interviews on his creative process, one you can listen to over at NPR, and the other you can read over at Pitchfork. I highly recommend listening and reading to both interviews in the their entirety, but I was especially taken with his answer on how to create music that is truly new:
“Imagine it’s the year 2064 and all digital music has been destroyed in a huge digital accident, an electromagnetic pulse or something like that. So, all we know about the music between 2010 or 2030 is hearsay. There don’t exist any recordings. We’ve read about a kind of music that existed in the suburbs of Shanghai in 2015 to 2018, and this music was played on–” then you specify a group of instruments– “was played on, say, industrial tools, such as steel hammers, and augmented with samplers and various electronic versions of some Chinese instruments. And it was intensely repetitive and played at ear-splitting volume,” for example. So, we then, taking that brief, try to imagine what that music would be like, and we try to make it.
