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Visionary artist and musical pioneer Brian Eno is perhaps best known for being a founding member of Roxy Music and for the series of landmark solo albums that popularised ambient music to the masses. As a producer, he has collaborated with artists including David Bowie, Talking Heads, U2 and Coldplay. He has exhibited his visual art around the world and written extensively on music, art and culture. He even had a memorable cameo in the 1990s sitcom Father Ted as “Father Brian Eno” and scored the Netflix series Top Boy.
A conventional documentary couldn’t hope to cover a career this wide and diverse, but director Gary Hustwit, taking inspiration from Eno’s own experiments in generative music that evolves over time, has instead created a world-first generative documentary. Much like a musical performance that changes every night, every screening of Eno is completely different to the last. Utilising a bespoke software system developed by Hustwit and digital artist Brendan Dawes, the film has millions of possible variations drawing from original interviews and Eno’s archive of hundreds of hours of unreleased footage and music. Eschewing and subverting the traditional grand narrative usual for musical biopics of this type, Hustwit and Eno’s collaboration is literally a one-of-a-kind event designed to be experienced on the big screen. — Michael McDonnell
