Portrait of Brian Eno by Cecily Eno

Brian Eno was creating soundtrack music for films even before he joined Roxy Music in 1971. His first project was a repetitive, proto-ambient score for Malcolm Le Grice’s experimental short “Berlin Horse” in 1970, but it wasn’t until 1976 that his music appeared in another film, Derek Jarman’s homoerotic Sebastiane. Since then Eno has worked with some of the world’s finest directors, including Peter Jackson, David Lynch, Michael Mann, Michelangelo Antonioni, Dario Argento, Jonathan Demme, Danny Boyle, animator Ralph Bakshi, Al Reinert, and several others. The fruits of these several decades of work—which has seen hundreds of his songs used in films, TV shows, documentaries, advertisements and of course the Windows 95 startup sounds—has been collected together on Film Music 1976 – 2020.

The lead track from the album, “Decline and Fall” originally featured on the soundtrack to 2017’s O Nome da Morte, (AKA 492: A Man Called Death) and that film’s director, Henrique Goldman, was personally commissioned by Brian Eno to make the song’s promo video.

Goldman says of the piece:

“Our video juxtaposes two cinematic narratives set in Brazil, one of the main frontiers in the final battle between Man and Nature. The first comprises fragments of a drama about the tortured soul of the assassin portrayed in O Nome da Morte, and the second depicts a magical natural phenomena – the Invisible River of the Amazon – a meteorologic process on a colossal scale, whereby rainforest trees continually spray billions of gallons of water into the atmosphere.

The video is foreboding and suspenseful. Somewhere in the vast Brazilian landscape, something momentous lurks in the background. An unforeseen, greedy and merciless force disrupts the divine stream of life. The same force drives the hitman, who stealthily steps out of the shadows to kill for money. As rain and fire, fiction and science, birth and death, nature and civilisation, art, love and greed continually juxtapose each other, we become aware of the delicate natural balance that is being severely disrupted by our civilisation.”

Brian Eno’s Film Music 1976 – 2020 is already out in the UK on double vinyl and CD, with the US release coming on January 22nd.