Punkt Festival 2012'

Legendary artist and producer Brian Eno is confirmed as Artistic Director of next year’s Punkt Festival. Eno will curate all 18 concerts and live remixes during the three day festival (6. - 8. September.). Limited edition “earlybird” passes at reduced price are available now. See the Tickets section for how to purchase the passes.


Last time Eno curated a whole festival was at the Sydney Opera House. Then, the New South Wales Government called the festival “the biggest event of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere”. Now, in 2012, Brian Eno curates the first Punkt Festival at the new Kilden Performing Arts Centre in Kristiansand, where he will present some of his current favourite artists.

Brian Eno is an English musician, composer, record producer, singer and visual artist, known as one of the principal innovators of ambient music. He visited Punkt in 2008 with the audiovisual installation 77 Million Paintings for Punkt, and now he will bring some of his favourite artists to Punkt 2012.

Brian Eno has produced and performed on three albums by Talking Heads, including Remain in Light (1980); produced seven albums for U2, including The Joshua Tree (1987); and worked on records by James, Laurie Anderson, Coldplay, Depeche Mode, Paul Simon, Grace Jones and Slowdive, among others.

Eno joined the band Roxy Music as their keyboards and synthesizers player in the early 1970s. Roxy Music’s success in the glam rock scene came quickly, but Eno left the group after the release of For Your Pleasure (1973), beginning his solo career with the art rock records Here Come the Warm Jets (1973) and Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) (1974).

Eno extended his reach into more experimental musical styles with (No Pussyfooting) (1973) and Evening Star (1975), both collaborations with Robert Fripp, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (1974) by Genesis where his work is credited as “Enossification”, and his influential solo records Another Green World (1975) and Discreet Music (1975).

His pioneering ambient efforts at “sonic landscapes” began to consume more of his time beginning with Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978) and later Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks (1983) which was composed for the documentary film For All Mankind. Eno nevertheless continued to sing on some of his records, ranging from Before and After Science (1977) to Wrong Way Up (1990) with John Cale to most recently Another Day on Earth (2005) and Drums Between the Bells (2011).

Eno’s solo work has been extremely influential, pioneering ambient and generative music, innovating production techniques, and emphasizing “theory over practice”. He also introduced the concept of chance music to popular audiences partly through collaborations with other musicians.

By the end of the 1970s, Eno had worked with David Bowie on the seminal “Berlin Trilogy,” helped popularise the American punk rock band Devo and the punk-influenced “No Wave” genre, and worked frequently with Harold Budd, John Cale, Cluster, Robert Fripp and David Byrne, with whom he produced the influential My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981).

Eno pursues multimedia ventures in parallel to his music career, including art installations, a newspaper column in The Observer and a regular column on society and innovation in Prospect magazine, and “Oblique Strategies” (written with Peter Schmidt), a deck of cards in which each card has a cryptic remark or random insight meant to resolve a dilemma. He continues to collaborate with other musicians, produce records, release his own music, and write.