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"It\u2019s surprising that Brian Peter George St. Jean le Baptiste de la Salle Eno, at age 60 arguably the preeminent music producer of several generations and genres, hasn\u2019t been subjected to the rigors of a full-length biography until now. Then again, not frittering away your days talking to writers leaves one with plenty of time for inventing both ambient music (Discreet Music) and the term &amp;quot;ambient music,&amp;quot; painting, sculpting, scoring films, and launching iPhone apps (ambient-music generator Bloom, plus an iPhone version of Eno\u2019s earlier Oblique Strategies, essentially a deck of cards containing instructions to foment creative art). Oh, yeah\u2014and then there was that whole Roxy Music thing.\n\nMore interesting than these known quantities, though, are the things we didn\u2019t know about Eno until David Sheppard\u2019s exhaustively researched and wonderfully contextual new bio, On Some Faraway Beach, came along. Eno\u2019s a perfume expert and obsessed horticulturalist, for example, and he prefers not to know how much he\u2019s being paid for his various musical commissions for fear that this knowledge might influence the time and attention paid to the project. Sheppard\u2019s early telling of how Eno\u2019s carefully cultivated eccentricity began as a desperate (and very successful) teenage attempt to bed women lends a humanity to the tale of a mere multitasker that remains throughout the book. So, come for the groupie stories, stay for the guided tour through twentieth-century experimental music. By the end, it\u2019s easy to understand Sheppard\u2019s note that &amp;quot;writing about Eno can sometimes feel like folding down a skyscraper into a suitcase.&amp;quot;\n\n On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno, $18.45, amazon.com"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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