Ian Penman goes deep on Brian Eno.
Eno is a conundrum: impish disruptor and happy polymath, he can also be a bit of a tech prig lecturing us from on high, dropping serene apothegms that turn out on closer inspection to be vanishingly banal. It’s as if there are two of him: Brian has a great sense of humour, Eno can be suffocatingly precious; Brian picks a brilliant selection of Desert Island Discs, Eno nominates for his beach read Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony and Solidarity; Brian is all weird eros, Eno makes music that can be oddly clenched or wafty; Brian is inspiringly playful, Eno writes software to systematise (and cage, and kill) that playfulness.