Brian Eno, Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement

He was a protagonist of glam rock, the music of disguise and the overcoming of genres, with Brian Ferry’s Roxi Music, he ‘invented’ music for environments with a long list of scores and records that theorized soundtracks for airports and places of transition, it has produced albums such as ‘Remain in Light’, by the Talking Heads which, in 1980, blew into the streets of the metropolis a wild and uncontrollable gust of tropicalism. Musician, painter, supporter of the role of chance in composition, with his ‘oblique strategies’, Brian Eno returns to Italy next October, after the installations in the Castello del Buonconsiglio in Trento, to receive the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement from the Biennale Music of Venice 2023

An acknowledgment to an artist who has always made crossing, languages ​​and forms of expression his identity sign, passing from studio work with U2 to collaborations with experimenters between jazz and world music such as trumpeter Jon Hassel in Fourth World Vol 1 Possible Music

The motivation for the recognition reads ‘For his research on the quality, beauty and diffusion of digital sound and his conception of acoustic space as a compositional tool”

The recording studio, therefore, becomes for the English artist, real name, a central element for the realization of the work, conquers the dignity, as the text accompanying the announcement says, a real musical instrument, with equal dignity of the others. Its silences, echoes, reverbs, vibrations, manipulations filtered through the mixer contribute, like a guitar or a keyboard, to the final result.

The room is, for Brian Eno, an organic environment, which dialogues with the bodies and with the virtuosity, defining the shape of the song. A process that began with dub techniques in the studios of Kingston, Jamaica, then used extensively in the first underground wave of disco and ‘adopted’ by Eno to produce masterpiece works such as Remain in Light, where rock returns to its African origins, and does with technological mediation. Before that there was the ambient series. “Generative and environmental music – continues the motivation – is conceived by Brian Eno as the conceptual creation of a seed, capable of developing, rather than as a tree already designed in all its details, invoking the birth of a compositional paradigm inspired by biology rather than architecture, capable of self-evolving and constantly generating new soundscapes”

Eno will be on stage at the Teatro la Fenice on October 21 for the world premiere of his work “Ships”, performed by the Baltic Sea Philharmonic conducted by Kristjan Jarvi, where the music played on stage will interact with the space that hosts it, in a dialogue between the orchestra and the environment, also thanks to the use of special software.

The day after, on the 22nd, in the Sala delle Colonne of Ca’ Giustinian, there will be the ceremony for the awarding of the Golden Lion, followed by a conversation with the music critic Tom Service