here & now

It’s one of the interesting details about Brian Eno that even though he works mostly in the shadows, most people will be much more familiar with his work than they realise – having an album by U2 or Coldplay on their iPod, or almost by default if they used a PC in the 90s, since Eno was famously asked to compose the 3.25 second start-up sound for Windows 95. (Refresh your memory above, or enjoy a 5 minute remix below…) A lot was made of the fact that he composed the sound on a Macintosh, saying at some point that he didn’t even like PCs. But much more interesting are, of course, his observations on what it was like to cram a briefing of 150 adjectives into less than 4 seconds of sound:

‘The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I’d been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, “Here’s a specific problem — solve it.” The thing from the agency said, “We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah- blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,” this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said “and it must be 3 1/4 seconds long.” I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It’s like making a tiny little jewel. In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I’d finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.’