enoweb

What sets Brian Eno's music apart? It's like perfume, as opposed to air conditioning. Like painting, as opposed to painting-by-numbers.

No, that's far too crawly. Let's try a different tack.

Brian Eno, eh? Cor, he was a bit of a lad in his time, wasn't he, mate? 'Course, his songs are full of references to, uh, what you might call "the act", aren't they? And he had long hair and some ostrich plumes. Wham, Bam, Eno is Glam - says it all.

No, no, I still feel we're showing too much respect. Never mind. The EnoWeb team welcomes you to this site, kindly hosted by Hyperreal. If we have a mission, it is to collect a huge pile of information on Brian Eno, his work and his music. And then set fire to it. (Sorry, we only put that in because we thought you might have started to skip-read by that point. We certainly wouldn't do anything of the sort - they don't allow us to have anything as sharp as matches in here.)

For the small number of people who have come to this page without knowing who Eno is, let us explain that he is an internationally renowned artist, musician, cultural thinker, legover expert, producer, and "drifting clarifier" (if the world of culture is like a glass of water, then Eno is like an Alka-Selzer. In reverse, obviously.)

The unofficial EnoWeb project was originally established by Malcolm Humes in October 1993 to demonstrate the power and capabilities of the (then) new World Wide Web. Yep, we were in at the start. At that time Eno did not have his own Web site. And he's still not interested in running one - see our Why you can't contact Eno page for the thinking behind this. Malcom brought together text and other archives originally collated via the Nerve Net mailing list, with a lot of help directly and indirectly from Alex Rubli and the Nerve Net subscribers. Special thanks are due to Gregory Taylor, Johann Haidenbauer, Daniel Dumych, C.J. Silverio, Ulrich 'Bommel' Bomnüter, Chris Hanis, Phil South, Martin Nilsson, Tom Boon, Jeffrey Morgan, Steve, Morpheus and probably a lot of other folks who also deserve credit here.

EnoWeb originally set up its stall at nwu.edu, and some of the files that are still there get picked up by Search Engines from time to time. It then tried to move to spies.com, but that didn't work out, although the Search Engines find files there too. An older version of the site is mirrored in Mexico (not to be confused with the Nerve Net pages). In addition, Hyperreal itself appears to have several names (bong.com is one that sticks in my mind). That's why there seem to be so many Eno sites with the same information in them. This is the only EnoWeb site that continues to be updated regularly.

In 1997 Tom Boon was Shanghai'd into "sharing the administrative burden" with Malcolm... which Tom then discovered meant that he would do all the work whilst Malcolm pursued a vigorous investigation into the world of cybersex. Purely for research purposes, you understand. As the years go on, it has yet to dawn on Tom that Malcolm isn't coming back to EnoWeb and he is basically stuck with it.

EnoWeb was originally envisaged as a group effort and not just a reflection of one or two people's perspectives. But the Internet has turned out to be a more passive medium than the original Web pioneers intended: most people want to surf or read web-sites, not contribute to them. EnoWeb does welcome help, but is currently unsure what really needs to be added for the moment. If you reckon you can add anything else of value or interest related to this project, please contact us -- we might even reply, you never know. We should add that spam does not count as anything of value or interest.

The material on this site is offered under the assumption that it is "fair use" to share this with individuals on a not-for-profit basis. Oops, there we go again with our Internet-circa-1993 approach. In cases where we're aware of any original copyright info we've attempted to keep such copyright notices intact and we request that readers respect the copyrighted nature of anything included here. We hope we're providing a public service to people who seek to learn more about Brian Eno, his work and in some cases his collaborators or possible influences or inspirations. We see this project as essentially providing free advertising for Eno and the interviewers, authors, publications, graphic artists, photographers and others who have contributed to creating the materials included here. We will gladly remove any materials considered questionable if requested to do so by anyone holding copyrights if they voice objection to their materials being included here. So far, one journalist has objected, and his article was gone within 15 minutes of us being informed. On the other hand, some journalists and creative people have been kind enough to supply us with their work on Eno, for which we are grateful.

Malcolm Humes, North Carolina
Tom Boon, Reading, Great Britain
May 2000

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