British musician, composer, record
producer and visual artist Brian Eno was on Wednesday awarded
this year's Venice Music Biennale career achievement prize.
The citation said 74-year-old Suffolk-born Eno had got the award
"for his research into the quality, beauty and diffusion of
digital sound and his conception of the acoustic space as a
compositional instrument".
Born in Suffolk, Eno studied painting and experimental music at
the art school of Ipswich Civic College in the mid 1960s, and
then at Winchester School of Art. He joined glam rock group Roxy
Music as its synthesiser player in 1971, recording two albums
with the group before departing in 1973. Eno then released a
number of solo pop albums beginning with Here Come the Warm Jets
(1974) and, also in the mid-1970s, began exploring a minimalist
direction on influential recordings such as Discreet Music
(1975) and Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978), coining the
term "ambient music" with the latter.
Alongside his solo work, Eno collaborated frequently with other
musicians in the 1970s, including Robert Fripp, Harmonia,
Cluster, Harold Budd, David Bowie, David Byrne and Judy Nylon.
He also established himself as a sought-after producer, working
on albums by John Cale, Jon Hassell, Laraaji, Talking Heads,
Ultravox, and Devo, as well as the no wave compilation No New
York (1978). In subsequent decades, Eno continued to record solo
albums and produce for other artists, most prominently U2 and
Coldplay, alongside work with artists such as Daniel Lanois,
Laurie Anderson, Grace Jones, Slowdive, Karl Hyde, James, Kevin
Shields, and Damon Albarn.
The Venice award ceremony will take place in the Sala delle
Colonne di Ca' Giustinian, venue of the Biennale, on October 22.
The citation added: "Eno's compositional work since his debut
was conceived as a generative process that evolves according to
a potentially infinite time dimension."
It also said "Eno broadened his creative career involving a
multiplicity of disciplines: painting, sculpture, and video
art".
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