people in groups tend to make much more interesting decisions

Ever since hearing minimalist composer Steve Reich's cutandpaste tape piece It's Gonna Rain (1966), Eno has been fascinated with music that generates itself in semirandom fashion -- resulting in "complexity arising out of simplicity". And so Eno has made several pieces consisting of disparate elements spread out over several CDs, played by a batch of ghettoblasters in 'shuffle' mode, leading to endless neverbeforeheard variations of the pieces in question.

"It's Gonna Rain was one of the most important pieces of music in my life," Eno comments, "and the whole idea of generative really came out of that. With a generative piece you set a machine going and it makes itself, and you as the composer are also the listener. The act of listening is the act of composing. When you're hearing these complicated shifting patterns going on, it's the aural equivalent of Moire illusions, and that very much impressed me. What also impressed me was how different the composer's role is from the old romantic idea that the composer pours out these wonderful things to the passive you, the listener -- with art as a kind of tube that the artist shouts down to the more or less thick listener at the end."

Eno's work area, with some of the ghettoblasters used in his generative music experiments.

"Honour thy error as a hidden intention," proclaimed the first of a set of Oblique Strategies cards which Eno devised (with artist Peter Schmidt) in the 1970s, to be used in oraclelike fashion whenever one was feeling creatively stuck. One particularly significant mistake that turned into a hidden intention occurred when Eno spent several months of 1975 bed-ridden after a car crash. Physically unable to play the role of the 'old romantic' composer, and being forced to listen to environmental noises with increased intensity, he hit on the idea of music as an atmosphere, an environment. It fit the concept of generative music like a glove, and this became the germination point of his most influential concept: ambient music.

Starting with Discreet Music (1975), Eno released several nowclassic ambient albums, including Music For Films (1978), Ambient 1: Music For Airports (1978), Ambient 2: The Plateaux Of Mirror (1980, with Harold Budd), Possible Musics (1980, with Jon Hassell), and Ambient 4: On Land (1982). All were wholly or partly composed according to generative principles, often making innovative use of the technology of the day, such as synthesizers, tape machines and delay lines. (Eno also famously devised the Revox tape delay process that was applied extensively by guitarist Robert Fripp, who unselfishly called it Frippertronics.)

These ambient albums complement Eno's more conventionally songbased output, first as a member of Roxy Music, then followed by No Pussyfooting (1973, with Robert Fripp), Here Come The Warm Jets (1973), Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) (1974), Another Green World (1975), Before And After Science (1977), and Wrong Way Up (1990, with John Cale). Many of these albums were made with extensive help from other musicians, exemplifying another Eno axiom: "people in groups tend to make much more interesting decisions".

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/oct05/articles/brianeno.htm