Brian Eno

Brian Eno is less a musician than a way of thinking about music, and few figures cast a longer shadow across everything Starweave maps. He arrived as the synthesizer-and-"treatments" provocateur in Roxy Music, then walked out after two albums to become something stranger and more consequential: the person who reframed the recording studio as an instrument and the producer as a composer. On Another Green World he entered the studio with nothing written, using his Oblique Strategies cards to build a record that turned from art-rock songcraft toward the minimalist instrumentals that would define ambient music — a genre he named and largely invented across Discreet Music and Music for Airports. As a producer he pushed Bowie, Talking Heads, Devo, and U2 out of their comfort zones. Nearly every artist here who values texture over technique, atmosphere over aggression, is drinking from a well Eno dug.