Modern day Brian Eno is dancing to a Fela Kuti track playing from YouTube at his office desk. The writer Paul Morley is vox-popping members of the 1990s British public about who exactly is Brian Eno. On the cusp of fame, a twentysomething Bono looks up from his long mullet for reassurance from an older man in a windowless recording studio. A dashing Bryan Ferry at a mid-1990s award ceremony fixes a slightly affable, slightly wary smile as an old friend takes to the stage.

In Eno, the 2024 documentary by filmmaker Gary Hustwit, all of these moments are shuffled parts that appear — seemingly at random — to tell a story about the creative life of the British producer, musician and visual artist Brian Eno.

Using technology specially designed for the film by Hustwit — who is known for his Design Trilogy of films on fonts and urban planning — and digital artist Brendan Hawes, the technology ensures that Eno is different every time. The algorithm, named Brain One in tribute to its subject, purports to assemble possible outcomes from 30 hours of contemporary interview footage and 500 hours of archive into distinct 90-minute films for each screening. I saw Eno twice, on a Friday afternoon in East London and a Saturday afternoon in South London.

Brian Eno was born in Suffolk in 1948, the son of a Flemish immigrant mother and a Suffolk postman father. Father and son would, Eno jokes in one cut of Eno, both work in communications. Art education in the post-war Britain that Eno was born into was undergoing a shift from the patient study of Old Masters to something far more radical, engaging with contemporary culture like modernism and surrealism. The new art school pioneers included Victor Pasmore and Patrick Heron at the Central School in London, Harry Thubron in Sunderland and Richard Hamilton in Durham. This had massive implications for tens of thousands of young people in general — many of them working and lower-middle class kids suddenly liberated by the post-war settlement — and the teenage Brian Eno in particular, who studied at Roy Ascott’s especially experimental Groundcourse programme in Ipswich. Groundcourse included aphoristic statements of ‘unlearning’, such as ‘describe visually the movements of a hungry, caged lion; then those of a frightened squirrel’ or ‘imagine you wake up one morning to find yourself a sponge. Describe visually your adventures during the day.’

Not much of this is mentioned in Eno, though. Soundly, the film attempts to solve the obvious problems of the biographical music documentary format, problems like predictable trajectories and a vulnerability to cliché. There are no talking heads (though, happily, there are Talking Heads.) ‘People thought I was a failed glam rock star,’ says Eno, aghast, in archive footage here of the years immediately following his 1973 exit from Roxy Music. Of course, during these years Brian Eno wrote, recorded and co-produced — working with David Bowie, Talking Heads, Harold Budd, Robert Fripp, Devo and more — some of the most extraordinary British music of the twentieth century. On albums like 1975’s Another Green World, this meant conjuring imagined landscapes from hushed and recessive electronica, or on 1981’s collaboration of ‘ethnic forgeries’ with David Byrne, My Life In The Bush of Ghosts, displaying a startling promiscuity around global sounds.

Or did he? Eno gives options. Where one version I saw tracked the producer’s pioneering of ambient music, the other did not mention the A word once. In the late 1970s, Eno used experiments with tape loops and systems to create 1975’s breakthrough Discreet Music and, more consequentially, 1978’s Ambient 1: Music For Airports.

Eno would later frame these as early generative system experiments. It’s this generative tradition that the film’s format genuflects to and, in its potential for producing amnesia about key chunks of Eno’s creative career, is weirdly the film at its most successful. Here, Eno re-enforces how, more than most, its subject exists on different timelines for different audiences (the prog rock seniors at my South London screening may have a sharply different Eno to, say, the frazzled office worker streaming Thursday Afternoon to slam admin tasks, or the Las Vegas ticket holder watching U2 perform their Eno produced Achtung Baby in full this year at the wraparound Sphere entertainment centre.)

How seriously, though, should we take Eno’s generative format? Quite seriously, if its director is to be listened to. ‘If Christopher Nolan said my next film will never be the same twice, the industry would change,’ Hustwit told The Quietus, ‘everybody would flip out and it would break all kinds of boundaries. Eno is just an opening statement for what we’re trying to do.’ On repeat viewings, this bravado disguises curious continuities. About 50 percemt of the two films I saw were the same, which tracks with the available evidence from Letterboxd and professional reviews from other screenings. Eno has something of a fixed structure, pinning down a surprisingly conventional rock journey through the peaks of Eno’s headline collaborations. Some of its omissions are interesting too: it does not seem the case so far that there is studio footage from Eno’s work with Coldplay (he co-produced their 2008 album Viva La Vida), nor his recent work with onetime mentee Fred Again (how the true blue-blooded aristocrat and Marlborough College boarder Fred Gibson came to become Eno’s presumably unpaid teaboy tells you something about more persistent and sharp-elbowed systems), which feels hedged. Today, music documentaries are increasingly made in collaboration with their subject — a frictionless branding exercise that journalist Daniel Dylan Wray has referred to as doc-washing — and Eno is suitably squeaky clean and closely brand managed. Nobody talks about Brian Eno who is not Brian Eno (or Brain One.)

The effect of Eno, then, is a little like watching half a music documentary, some bits of live footage, a few late night TV interviews and a few minutes of a lecture. This is interesting, but resembles something that already exists: the YouTube algorithm, and I have been consuming music this way since I was a teenager. Whilst Eno uses its machine-learning as a cinematic feature — cutely signified by coding whirring into action against a dark holding screen as a glitchy electronic sound effect crunches — it has almost no viewpoint on its technological master. There’s a moment where Eno argues in favour of generative art, which ‘lets the audiences do the cooking’ (presumably in contrast to boring snoring regular art, churning out easy connection for the dumbos.)

In this, where Eno is coming from is not the AI debates of the 2020s but a dispatch from a particular point of the 1990s. At that point, legacy artists from the 1970s and 80s relocated the futurism that had propelled their now-distant creative peaks in wide-eyed Web 1.0 optimism. David Bowie launched BowieNet in 1998 (tagline: ‘everyone has a voice’) in which the singer would field fan questions on chat rooms, deliver exclusive live recordings for completists and, remarkably, even pioneer a Bowie branded internet banking (BowieBanc!) complete with a Starman branded chip-and-pin card. Or there was Todd Rundgren, whose 1993 No World Order album was an interactive CD-I consisting of hundreds of snippets of music that could be shuffled and assembled to suit the listener’s preference. Prince too set up the tech-utopian NPGMusicClub where he could, and did, release a glut of new tracks, edits and proto-podcasts directly to subscription paying fans. ‘I too think it’s possible,’ wrote Eno in 1995, ‘that our grandchildren will look at us in wonder and say, you mean you used to listen to exactly the same thing over and over again?’. Where Bowie saw the future on chat rooms and recognised it as banal, Eno never really left that moment. There’s even a monument to it: visitors to Jeff Bezos’ sprawling Texas ranch will find The 10 000 Year Clock, an art installation designed to promote long-term thinking which is soundtracked by 3.65 million variations on wind chimes composed by Eno. Whenever the technology sufficiently updated, Eno has returned to those tech-utopian 1990s ideas, like on 2017’s REFLECTION album which was released in one version as a ‘premium generative’ IOS app. Trickily, by this point, Eno’s ambient output had been diminished to wipe-clean sonic surfaces and a polite but distant authorial voice.

Today, instead of this optimism, musicians who are curious about the AI possibilities to come — take figures like Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst — tend to wisely temper excitement with serious health warnings about the need for governmental structures around the technology. Voice modelling is one example, where replicating the exact vocal sound of artists creates infinite opportunities for the music industry to pursue a particularly eerie form of exploitation for artists. That is to say nothing of the debates around AI and the film industry that propelled last year’s SAG-AFG strikes in the US. This is frustrating, because Eno as a public figure is usually uniquely attuned to the nightmares of late capitalism. After a stint as Nick Clegg’s Youth Czar, Eno was an enthusiastic public supporter of Corbynism and, more recently, has co-founded Earth Percent, which aims to be the music industry’s premier climate NGO (AI is also a looming climate issue, as its data centres will drain enormous energy and water resources.) ‘I started to realise that I was (working) on a planet that was suddenly, quite noticeably, getting worse,’ says Eno towards the end of the film, where he explicitly calls for a ‘new economics’ to counter the climate crisis, ‘let’s acknowledge that without it, none of us would be doing anything. We’ve got to start looking after it.’

One possible alternative, though, is buried within the film. On one of the versions of Eno that I saw, modern day Eno hits up YouTube to play The Silhouettes’ 1957 doo-wop classic Get A Job on YouTube. This street corner American vocal music formed part of his musical awakening, he says, as GI soldiers popularised the new sound in the Suffolk of his childhood. Watch Eno sing along to the footage, matching its still strange and exciting vocal dexterity, and you can see his evident delight in the capacities of the human voice: just look at what this machine can do.

This love of human voices is there throughout his work if you look for it, like 1978’s Backwater — drunk on its own addictive internal rhymes and onomatopoeic prog whimsy — or 2016’s gospel version of The Velvet Underground’s I’m Set Free, where a choir of digitally layered Brian Eno voices alchemise a scratchy folk rock cut into very heaven. The most powerful sections of Ambient 1: Music For Airports are when the human vocal is stretched out (physically, at the time, with the tape spooled slowly around the studio’s metal table legs) and examined. Or again in this film, when Eno sings the backing vocals of Talking Heads’ The Great Curve, which he produced, a polyrhythmic ping-pong of shouts, chants and incanted phrases. People putting their faith in the human voice asserting itself, making strange decisions, doing strange things. Sometimes with the help of machines, of course, but that machines could never imagine.