The generative Eno documentary was pretty good. I now sort of want to see it a few more times, in order to get a sense of exactly to what extent it’s generative. Like, are all of the major sections randomly spooled in from a larger collection thereof, or is there an overall structure of core scenes with insertion points pre-prepared for the randomised introduction of the smaller, uh, ambient bits?

That’s precisely the wrong word, of course, in light of what the man himself is talking about—and therein lies a nagging sense of aesthetic mismatch. So much of Eno’s generative work is about making music that’s close enough to organic iterative process that you don’t notice the gradual shifts and changes, or indeed the artifice overall. The film, meanwhile, makes a big and oddly cod-cyberpunk show of its stitchedness, complete with weird bit-munged sounds and gnomic filenames scrolling by in terminal fonts between scenes. Certainly it’s generative, though not at all in Eno’s sense of the term, and not at all ambient… and as I note above, I wonder just how different any two viewings actually are.

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There’s something very boyish about Eno, even now, and one of the early fragments in my viewing hinted at why: in some live interview in (I assume) the late 1980s, he’s asked if he remembers the first piece of music that really affected him, and he says yes, it was “Get a Job” by The Silhouettes, and it had two main impacts: he decided that this was what good music sounded like, and he decided that he was never going to get a job. He goes on to note that he’s never really had one, either, and maybe that boyishness is due in part to that—the (deserved) cliche of the artist as a child at play, perhaps.

I was mildly irked toward the end, when the environmental question surfaces. He first makes an important point (paraphrasing someone whose name I don’t recall) by saying that as human beings we have a tendency to overestimate what we can do in a day, and underestimate what we can do in ten years. Shortly afterward, though, he observes something to the effect that “human ability is increasing exponentially”—this being the bit of Eno that got involved in the Long Now Foundation, obvs—and that it’s a good thing it is, because the environmental crisis is also increasing exponentially.

It’s hard not to be disappointed when an intelligent, thoughtful person of Eno’s ilk can’t seem to see the direct causal relation between those two exponential increases.

Anyway, gripes aside, a good film about a fascinating character. Recommend.