Relying on improvisation and collaboration, Eno has produced critically revered albums by the Talking Heads, David Bowie, and U2. Photograph by Richard Burbridge

In January, 1975, the musician Brian Eno and the painter Peter Schmidt released a set of flash cards they called “Oblique Strategies.” Friends since meeting at art school, in the late sixties, they had long shared guidelines that could pry apart an intellectual logjam, providing options when they couldn’t figure out how to move forward. The first edition consisted of a hundred and fifteen cards. They were black on one side with an aphorism or an instruction printed on the reverse. Eno’s first rule was “Honour thy error as a hidden intention.” Others included “Use non-musicians” and “Tape your mouth.” In “Brian Eno: Visual Music,” a monograph of his musical projects and visual art, Eno, who still uses the rules, says, “ ‘Oblique Strategies’ evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation—particularly in studios—tended to make me quickly forget that there were other ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach.”

Eno is widely known for coining the term “ambient music,” and he produced a clutch of critically revered albums in the nineteen-seventies and eighties—by the Talking Heads, David Bowie, and U2, among others—but if I had to choose his greatest contribution to popular music it would be the idea that musicians do their best work when they have no idea what they’re doing. As he told Keyboard, in 1981, “Any constraint is part of the skeleton that you build the composition on—including your own incompetence.” The genius of Eno is in removing the idea of genius. His work is rooted in the power of collaboration within systems: instructions, rules, and self-imposed limits. His methods are a rebuke to the assumption that a project can be powered by one person’s intent, or that intent is even worth worrying about. To this end, Eno has come up with words like “scenius,” which describes the power generated by a group of artists who gather in one place at one time. (“Genius is individual, scenius is communal,” Eno told the Guardian, in 2010.) It suggests that the quality of works produced in a certain time and place is more indebted to the friction between the people on hand than to the work of any single artist.

The growing influence of this idea, ironically, makes it difficult to see clearly Eno’s distinct contributions to music—his catalogue of recordings doesn’t completely contain his contribution to the pop canon. When someone lies on the studio floor and sings at a microphone five feet away, Eno is in the air. When a band records three hours of improvisation and then loops a four-second excerpt of the audiotape and scraps the rest, Eno has a hand on the razor blade. When everybody except for the engineer is told to go home, Eno remains. Behind Eno stand John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, and Erik Satie, but those guys didn’t make pop records.

It feels odd to call Eno’s new album, “High Life,” released this week, a collaboration. Credited to Eno and Karl Hyde, of the electronic duo Underworld, “High Life” is indeed the work of several people. But deciding that any one project of Eno’s is a collaboration seems off, because collaboration is Eno’s primary mode. Eno’s first recorded work was the sound of a pen hitting a lamp. Who deserves credit for that—Eno, the pen, or the lamp?

Born on May 15, 1948, in Woodbridge, Suffolk, he was christened Brian Peter George Eno. His father, William, was a postman, and his mother, Maria Buslot, who was Flemish, stayed home. When Eno was eleven, he entered St. Joseph’s College, a Catholic grammar school in Ipswich. According to “On Some Faraway Beach,” David Sheppard’s excellent biography, the school encouraged students to incorporate some part of the school’s religious heritage into their identities, so Eno called himself Brian Peter George Jean-Baptiste de La Salle Eno, after the patron saint of teachers. Eno has long had a vaguely aristocratic bearing, implacable and seemingly above the fray, which makes it seem plausible that he came from a long line of European clerics. People often refer to Eno now as a boffin, or describe him as looking like a professor or an architect. When I met him, in 2013, he was wearing a variety of comfortable fabrics that I couldn’t identify. He looked like someone who owns lots of expensive things, which he does, and is used to being listened to, which he is.

After St. Joseph’s, Eno attended the Ipswich Art School, beginning in 1964, and then moved on to the Winchester School of Art, in 1966. At Ipswich, he studied under the unorthodox artist and theorist Roy Ascott, who taught him the power of what Ascott called “process not product.” Having never mastered an instrument, Eno began experimenting with tape recorders, at the urging of an instructor and friend named Tom Phillips, who introduced him to the work of John Cage and the Fluxus group. At Winchester, Eno performed “Drip Event,” by the Fluxus member George Brecht. The entire “score” of “Drip Event” reads: “Erect containers such that water from other containers drips into them.” Eno then wrote a piece whose instructions read:

The instruments are in turn ground down and individually cast into blocks of acrylic resin. The blocks are given to young children. Now the music begins . . .

Though Eno drew and painted at both Ipswich and Winchester, he left school with no plans to become a fine artist. “I thought that art schools should just be places where you thought about creative behavior, whereas they thought an art school was a place where you made painters,” he said later.

“I think negative ambition is a big part of what motivates artists,” Eno told me. “It’s the thing you’re pushing against. When I was a kid, my negative ambition was that I didn’t want to get a job.” After leaving Winchester, in 1969, Eno moved to London and became involved with a sprawling group called the Scratch Orchestra, led by the composer Cornelius Cardew. The orchestra conducted various “happenings,” some of which involved promenading through public spaces while playing; almost all of its work emphasized improvisation over technical skill.

In 1970, Eno ran into the saxophonist Andy Mackay, a friend he’d met while at Winchester. “Have you still got some tape recorders?” Eno recalls Mackay asking him. “I’m in this band, and we need to get some proper demos made.” Mackay owned a small synthesizer, operated with a joystick and small pinboard, which he encouraged Eno to take home and experiment with—a moment in pop history that is roughly equivalent to Jimi Hendrix’s discovering feedback. Eno mastered the instrument by using it as something other than an instrument. He fed the band’s music into the synthesizer, then sent the processed result through various tape decks and out through a P.A. system whose elements he’d collected over the years. The band began rehearsing in Eno’s house, with Eno acting as “sound manipulator,” a cross between a live-sound engineer and a band member. The outfit’s leader, Bryan Ferry, eventually chose the name Roxy Music. By the end of 1972, the band was famous in the United Kingdom, no member more so than the partly bald man with his long hair painted silver. Eno started his live career with Roxy Music by setting up at the back of the venue and ended up onstage, sometimes playing his synthesizer with an oversized plastic knife and fork.