Included with our new postcard set, Brian Eno has written an introduction to the ideas behind his work and some of his thinking.

It's particularly relevant at the moment – so we thought we'd reproduce an excerpt here: 

"I try to make my work seductive enough for people to want to surrender to it. I like the idea that art can be there to comfort you, to warm you and surround you: to make you feel that you can let your defences down: to make you feel that you can be calm, that you don't have to always be on the lookout, but can slow down and find a space to think. I’ve noticed that in these environments once we realise that nothing is going to get faster and be ‘stimulating’, we settle down to the slower pace of the piece. That change of pace is valuable.

Although as city-living technological people we move along an axis between control and surrender, we habitually dignify the control end of the spectrum. That’s what we think we’re good at: if there’s a problem we tend to look for the solution in technologies of control. But that doesn’t always work: many situations are beyond that kind of control. Sometimes we have to accept becoming part of the flow of things we can’t control, and that is a skill. Think of a surfer, climbing the wave and then being carried along by it. Control and surrender.

Surrender is an active verb. I want to create a situation where we dignify surrender, where we can step back from individualism, stop being "me" for a little while and enjoy being part of “us”. To me that’s a political statement.

We’re increasingly reluctant to accept parts of the world we don’t have control over. So our world shrinks to the bits that we can control. There’s a withdrawal: our sense of ‘here’ becomes reduced to four walls, because outside is chaos. 

Our sense of ‘now’ becomes shorter and shorter, because the past and future are too inscrutable. And if what happens within our walls is all we care about, if we don’t consider our neighbourhood - in space and time - then we will destroy it. 

The sense of a ‘small here’ and a ‘short now’ both spawn a sense of irresponsibility. 

What we really want to be doing is the opposite of withdrawing, to experience our actions as though they resonate outwards into a much bigger ‘here’ and a much longer ‘now’. We are responsible for the ripples we make. "