music played on walls...

British wallpaper manufacturer Graham & Brown have called on the wonderful Brian Eno to add his creative magic to a collection of wallpaper that recently launched in the US. 

He has always worked in other mediums as well as music but I was quite surprised to see him work on wallpaper. Although it makes sense when he explains it saying -

I think of wallpaper as ambient painting – an area of interior design that changes the atmosphere in a room. I really responded to classic floral designs and also those with West African roots from Graham & Brown’s archive, resulting in a dynamic layering of pattern to create the collection – a kind of music to be played on walls.

He created two bold prints, Flower Mask Blue Wallpaper and Flower Mask Jade Wallpaper, where he cleverly layered his own original designs with archival patterns from Graham & Brown.

Much as I love these, I think I would find them overwhelming in my house. I've got so many pictures and stuff that my eyes and brain would just overload and explode. 

It's all very odd because when I think of Brian Eno, I think of ambient and minimal.

I play his albums while I'm working , especially Ambient 1: Music for Airports 

Released by Polydor Records in 1978, the album consists of four compositions created by layering tape loops of differing lengths. It was the first of four albums released in Eno's "Ambient" series, a term which he coined to differentiate his experimental and minimalistic approach to composition from "the products of the various purveyors of canned music".

The music was designed to be continuously looped as a sound installation, with the intent of defusing the tense, anxious atmosphere of an airport terminal. To achieve this, Eno sought to create music "as ignorable as it is interesting." 

It certainly does the trick in a tense anxious studio...

Queen Marie