You could get lost for days exploring the strange and wonderful things that Brian Eno has done.
From his wild experimentations with tape looping alongside King Crimson’s Robert Fripp to his groundbreaking ambient works, he is one of the most accomplished and unconventional musical minds of our time.
Back in 2006, Brian Eno composed a suite of ringtones for Nokia for some reason. You can listen to them below.
Although most of his work has been within the outer realms of the musical sphere, he has dabbled in the commercial side of things too. In the 1990s he composed the opening chime for the Windows 95 operating system, and as we just found out, in 2006 he composed a suite of ringtones for the Nokia 8800 Sirocco mobile phone.
Considering the limited sonic palette he was working with, the ringtones are pretty impressive. These include several “guitar” and “piano” compositions, plus a reworking of the Nokia theme tune.
What’s funny is that, at the time, Eno was reminded by an interviewer that several years prior he had laughed at the idea of composing ringtones. Asked why the change of mind, he replied:
“Heh heh! At that time they were asking you to compose a piece of music, but you could only use those sounds. They would compose ringtones out of these – beep boo boop, beepy noises. So I thought, ‘That’s hopeless – what can you do with that?’ You know the sound I mean, neep neep neep; so people were composing neep-neep neep-neep nee-nee nee-nee. In the meantime things changed so they had polyphonic tones; so you could actually have more complicated sounds. It’s not really a great medium for writing music.”
As to why he ended up composing these tunes, we have no idea. If anyone has any idea, please fill us in.
[via Open Culture]
