“There’s a terrible housewifely tidiness”: Why Brian Eno thinks there’s too much “fiddling” in modern music productionBrian Eno has absolutely had it with over-produced music. The musician and pioneering ambient producer has explained how he keeps creativity flowing in the studio, and why he avoids “fiddling” with his records.
Eno has just released two albums – Luminal and Lateral – with composer Beatie Wolfe. At a playback and Q&A event held in Eno’s West London studio earlier this week, the duo lifted the curtain on their creative process, and revealed how they bonded over a shared hatred of NFTs.

READ MORE: “If you knowingly build systems that can enable war crimes, you inevitably become complicit in those crimes”: Brian Eno calls out Microsoft over ties to Israeli government

As reported by NME, when writing, the pair used Eno’s famous Oblique Strategies cards, which he created with Peter Schmidt in 1975. The cards provide rules and constraints to make the creative process challenging and tear down any walls or mental blocks.
“If she has a card that says, for example, ‘destroy everything’, and I have a card that says, ‘change nothing and continue with immaculate consistency’, then you’ve got two people who are working at cross purposes, which sometimes produces good results,” says Eno.
“What we tried to do was to set it up so the game was always interesting, so it never became another day in the studio. We tried to make it so that every day was a thrill, and it was, pretty much.”
Eno later explains how he likes to leave an “emptiness”  in his work to allow for feeling to flow in: “You’d think that the first question people ask themselves when they’re making pieces of music in studios would be, ‘am I getting any feeling from this?’ But funnily enough, a lot of people don’t,” he says.
“I don’t like fiddling anymore. I can hear fiddling – it makes me nervous. When I listen to recordings that have a sense of slight carelessness, I prefer them, when it hasn’t been tidied up… There’s a terrible sort of housewifely tidiness presented with music, because it’s now possible to fix absolutely everything to some kind of platonic ideal of what a C-sharp bass note should be, for example.”

Luminal and Lateral are available to buy or stream. You can also head to Beatie Wolfe’s website to find out more about her work.
The post “There’s a terrible housewifely tidiness”: Why Brian Eno thinks there’s too much “fiddling” in modern music production appeared first on MusicTech.