Graphic design is Brian Eno's passion. Above you'll find the cover art for Aurum: a new surprise album from the legendary producer and musical artist, released today exclusively through Apple Music. It's an ambient exercise from one of the gods of the game, delivered at a time when the genre has never been more popular.
Along with the album comes an Eno interview with Zane Lowe, which you can watch in full below while
In the interview, Eno talks about his early years with Roxy Music:
I was thinking the other day that when Roxy started, rock and roll was about 16 years old. If you think of it, 1955 is probably when you can say it started with Bill Haley, and rhythm and blues just becoming rock and roll, Little Richard, that kind of thing. 1955, '56. So that seemed like ancient history to us when we started Roxy Music, and now, what is that, that's 70 years ago. I suppose what I remember most was people saying, "Well, of course it won't last. It's a fad." And I was surprised that it lasted actually. I didn't expect to still be doing something like this at my age. I didn't expect to ever reach my age actually.
He also talked about the impact of AI:
The biggest problem for me about AI is not intrinsic to AI. It's to do with the fact that it's owned by the same few people, and I have less and less interest in what those people think, and more and more criticisms of what the effect of their work has been. I think social media has been a catastrophe and mildly useful at the same time. It's possible for both things to coexist, but I think in terms of what it's done to societies, it's been a catastrophe. What it's done to politics has been completely toxic. Again, that could have been avoided, I think. If it had started out in a not-for-profit regime, it would've been different, because maximize engagement wouldn't have been the headline of the whole project. Maximizing engagement is just another word for maximize profit. If that's your intention, then you get what we got, just like in the American food industry is maximize profit, which is why you have a lot of very, very unhealthy people.
Talking about AI itself, I've always been happy to welcome new technologies and to see what you could do with them that nobody else thought of doing with them, and what things they could do, other than those that they were designed for, because with all music technology, it's always very interesting that stuff is designed for one reason, and then people start to find new things they could do that are completely beyond what the designer was thinking about. Distortion is a good example. Distortion is, in a way, the sound of popular music, a lot of the things that we find uniquely exciting to do with equipment kind of going wrong. That's quite a bizarre thought, isn't it? That you design equipment to do this. Then, you start using it to do something else, which it doesn't do very well, and you get to like the sound of the not very wellness.
Aurum is out now via Opal.
