Education Quote by Brian Eno

Eno is poking at a clash of religions: the church of function versus the cult of possibility. Coming from a musician and producer who treats the studio like an instrument, his frustration with engineers isn’t anti-technical so much as anti-default. Engineering training, he suggests, produces a particular kind of intelligence: goal-driven, success defined by whether the system performs its assigned task. In a recording session, that mindset can quietly become a veto. If the function is “capture clean audio,” then distortion, bleed, feedback, and “wrong” mic placement register as problems to solve, not colors to paint with.

The subtext is about who gets to decide what the job is. Eno’s work - from ambient music to his Oblique Strategies - depends on redefining the function midstream: a tape machine isn’t only a tape machine; it’s a time-bender, a looper, a generator of accidents. Engineers often arrive with professional pride tied to reliability, repeatability, and standards. Eno arrives with pride tied to steering the unpredictable without killing it.

Context matters: this is post-60s studio culture, when multitrack recording and signal processing turned music production into a technical domain with gatekeepers. Eno’s line lands because it’s both complaint and diagnosis. “Learning from a functional point of view” isn’t an insult; it’s an explanation of why talented, well-meaning collaborators can still talk past each other. The irony is that the best engineers are also artists - but Eno is describing the moment before that crossover, when “performing the function” becomes the function.