Eno — A Year with Swollen Appendices

Author: Brian Eno
Title: A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary
Year: 1996
Type: Diary and essays (Faber and Faber; twenty-fifth-anniversary edition 2021)

A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary is a book by Brian Eno, published by Faber and Faber in 1996 and reissued for its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2021. Its first part is a diary of 1995, a year in which Eno worked on records with David Bowie, U2, James and Jah Wobble and did charity work for War Child. Its second part, the appendices, gathers his writing since 1978 on ambient and generative music, copyright and what artists are for, including his liner notes for Music for Airports. In a letter to Dave Stewart, Eno proposes “scenius,” the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene, as the communal form of genius, and sets it against what he calls the “Big Man” theory of history. In the appendix on generative music he describes it as a third form beside live and recorded music, always different like a performance and free of time and place like a record. Colin Berry, in Wired, called the book “a cranium tour of one of the most creative minds of our age.” Frank Valish, reviewing the 2021 reissue, preferred the appendices to the diary, and George Grella found the diary short on insight into Eno’s process.

Faber and Faber published the book in London on September 5, 1996, with a cover photograph by Anton Corbijn.¹ Eno kept the diary through 1995, a year in which he worked with Bowie on Outside, with U2 on the Passengers album Original Soundtracks 1, with Jah Wobble on Spinner and with James, and on the War Child charity record The Help Album.¹ The diary includes his correspondence with Stewart Brand, which Frank Valish, in Under the Radar, describes as mostly about world politics.² It covers his work with SSEYO’s Koan software, which led to his release Generative Music 1 in 1996.¹ Faber reissued the book in 2021 with a new introduction that includes, George Grella reported, a list nearly thirteen pages long of words that had entered common use since 1996.³

The appendices, printed on pink paper in the first edition, mix forms, from essays and letters to interviews and stories, and run back to 1978.¹ Eno’s liner notes for Music for Airports appear in the appendices’ chapter on ambient music.³ A diary entry for May 16 records a letter to Dave Stewart about the scenius concept, and the letter is printed among the appendices.⁴ In it Eno writes that he had become “more and more convinced that the important changes in cultural history were actually the product of very large numbers of people and circumstances conspiring to make something new.” He calls this “scenius,” “the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene,” and writes, “It is the communal form of the concept of genius.” He sets it against “what I call the ‘Big Man’ theory of history—where events are changed by the occasional brilliant or terrible man, working in heroic isolation,” and writes that he would prefer to believe the world “is constantly being remade by all its inhabitants.”⁴

The appendix on generative music starts from recording. “Until 100 years ago every musical event was unique,” Eno writes. Then the gramophone record “captured particular performances and made it possible to hear them identically over and over again.” “From now on there are three alternatives,” he writes, “live music, recorded music and generative music.” Like live music, generative music “is always different,” and like recorded music it is free of the limits of time and place, and “it can be composed empirically,” by listening while working it out.⁴

Reviewers praised the book, and Frank Valish, reviewing the 2021 reissue, preferred the appendices to the diary. Colin Berry, reviewing the book in Wired in December 1996, called it “a cranium tour of one of the most creative minds of our age.”⁵ Faber’s publicity for the anniversary paperback quotes Leah Kardos, in The Wire, finding the book “by turns fascinating, engaging and wonderfully mundane.”⁶ Valish, who rated the reissue 7.5 out of 10, found that the diary entries “can be slightly obtuse” for readers without the background, and called the appendices “the more interesting and lastingly relevant part of the book.”² George Grella, in the Brooklyn Rail, found that the diary, “for the most part, is informative in a different way” from the appendices. He found the book most insightful where Eno’s liner notes for Music for Airports tie ambient music to the commercial recording studio, the world of pop albums and Muzak, and away from the universities. Most of the diary, in his reading, records daily life “with little insight into any kind of creative process or philosophy,” a few jottings aside, though it makes clear “his taste drives his creative judgment, and at the end of the day, he’s a pop musician.”³

Key contributions

• Scenius: important cultural change as the product of a whole scene, the communal form of genius, set against the “Big Man” theory of history.
• Generative music as a third form beside live and recorded music, always different and free of time and place.
• A working diary of 1995, the year of Eno’s work with Bowie on Outside and with U2 on the Passengers project.

See also

• Ocean of Sound — David Toop’s 1995 history of ambient music
• On Some Faraway Beach — David Sheppard’s 2008 biography of Eno
• Turn On, Tune In, Drift Off — Victor Szabo’s 2022 history of ambient music