Brian Eno is widely considered one of the great contemporary composers and music producers, famously for his work with U2 and Coldplay, but perhaps most influentially with David Bowie and the Talking Heads. He began his career in 1971, in his early twenties, as a member of the band Roxy Music, then left to make music on his own, including such albums as Another Green World, Music for Airports, and (with David Byrne) My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, a landmark in the history of sampling.

His fascination with musical technologies and artistic systems led him to popularize the Koan algorithmic music generator, and, with Peter Schmidt, to develop the “Oblique Strategies” deck of cards, an intervention into the artistic process. His music is heard, unknowingly, by millions of people every day: he created the start-up sound of the Microsoft Windows 95 operating software. He is a founder of the Long Now Foundation, whose mandate is to educate the public into thinking about the distant future. Drums Between the Bells is his latest release.

David Mitchell, born in 1969, is the acclaimed, award-winning author of the novels Ghostwritten (1999), Number9Dream (2001), Cloud Atlas (2004)—the latter two shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize—Black Swan Green (2006), and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010). Granta selected him as one of the best young British novelists, and he was named one of the one hundred most influential people in the world by Time magazine, which credited him with having “created the 21st century novel.” Mitchell was raised in England, spent many years teaching and writing in Japan, and presently lives in Ireland with his wife and their two children.

Mitchell and Eno were fans and admirers of each other before the idea for this conversation came about, and spoke for the first time over email for the Believer. David Mitchell asked questions, and Brian Eno provided answers.

I. NO SONG, NO BEAT, NO MELODY, NO MOVEMENT

DAVID MITCHELL: Do you agree that no new genre is ever invented, but rather hybridized from something that was there before? That infallible source Wikipedia credits you with coining the phrase ambient music. If that’s so, from what was ambient music cross-pollinated?

BRIAN ENO: Yes, nothing starts from nowhere. My version of ambient was the coalescence of lots of different streams. Some of them were musical, others not. The musical threads I picked up would include Satie, of course, but also the early experiments of Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and the other minimalist composers of the late ’60s—all of whom were...