Brian Eno Quotes
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Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we've been having with painting. There's no way of looking at art as though you hadn't seen art before.
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Music in itself carries a whole set of messages which are very, very rich and complex, and the words either serve to exclude certain ones or point up certain others.
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I'm always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven't thought of doing yet. I think that's sort of a characteristic of the way I've worked ever since I started.
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I'm a painter in sound.
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If you want to make someone feel emotion, you have to make them let go. Listening to something is an act of surrender.
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Avant-garde music is sort of research music. You're glad someone's done it but you don't necessarily want to listen to it.
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I used to think that, given enough goodwill, anybody would be able to 'get' any music, no matter how distant the culture from which it came. And then I heard Chinese opera.
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People tend to play in their comfort zone, so the best things are achieved in a state of surprise, actually.
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At the party, Rob Partridge said to me, 'You gave hope to other balding men.' My new epitaph: 'Co-wrote a couple of decent songs and went bald shamelessly.'
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Lyrics are the only thing to do with music that haven't been made easier technically.
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When I finish something, I want it out that day. Pop music is like the daily paper. Its got to be there then, not six months later.
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In my normal life I'm a very unadventurous person.
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When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That's one of the great feelings - to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.
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The reason I don't tour is that I don't know how to front a band. What would I do? I can't really play anything well enough to deal with that situation.
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I believe in singing.
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By the mid-'60s, recorded music was much more like painting than it was like traditional music. When you went into the studio, you could put a sound down, then you could squeeze it around, spread it all around the canvas.
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I believe in singing to such an extent that, if I were asked to redesign the British educational system, I would start by insisting that group singing becomes a central part of the daily routine. I believe it builds character and, more than anything else, encourages a taste for cooperation with others. This seems to be about the most important thing a school could do for you.
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Sometimes you recognize that there is a category of human experience that has not been identified but everyone knows about it. That is when I find a term to describe it.
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Frequently, I go straight into the studio and see what's around. I might hire a couple of instruments that I've never used - maybe a particular type of electronic organ or an echo unit. Then I just dabble with sounds until something starts to happen that suggests a texture. The texture suggests some kind of mood, and the mood suggests some kind of lyric. That's like working in reverse, often quite the other way around, from sound to song. Although often they stop before they get to the song stage.
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I have the '77 Million Paintings' running in my studio a lot of the time. Occasionally I'll look up from what I'm doing and I think, 'God, I've never seen anything like that before!' And that's a real thrill.
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I've got a feeling that music might not be the most interesting place to be in the world of things.
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Also something that you don't have to listen to from beginning to end - you can enter at any point and leave at any point.
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There are hundreds of manufacturers always producing dvices that in general do the same things. Since they have slight structural differences if you take one and fool around with it and give it a good kick it will actually do something that it wasn't designed to do. I have this relationship with my synthesizers. I've had them for so long, and I've never had them serviced, so that now practically all of their functions operate differently from what they were designed to do. They do very interesting things now, but that means nobody else can use them either.
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If you don’t call it art, you’re likely to get a better result.