This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

For decades, Brian Eno has been a hugely influential figure in the music business, particularly in the studio.

He's produced hit after hit with you two, Talking Heads, David Bowie, Grace Jones, and many, many others.

But he's also known as a kind of musical philosopher, a guru of the soundboard.

Here's the New Yorker's music critic, Amanda Petrusich.

Brian Eno is an English musician and producer,

whose career is so vast and adventurous

it really can't be easily encapsulated.

But here's my best shot.

After leaving the glam rock band Roxy Music in the early 70s,

he released a series of extraordinary solo records.

Somewhere along the way, he essentially invented,

or at the very least named, ambient music,

which is what we now call any minimalist electronic

composition. But for me, it's really just kind of a thing that you feel in your body, in all the

soft and tender places that go untouched by thought. That idea of tapping into something less

thinky and more instinctive is present in everything Eno does.

Eno's work has been a funny kind of North Star in my life. He's someone who's obviously thought

quite deeply about art and love and culpability and desire and duty and risk and what it means

to honor the very wild fact of your existence.

Amanda Petrosich spoke with Brian Eno about two new records that have just come out in his new book, What Art Does?

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