Brian Eno Quotes
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The whole history of pop music had rested on the first person singular, with occasional intrusions of the second person singular.
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Lyrics are the only thing to do with music that haven't been made easier technically.
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In England and Europe, we have this huge music called ambient - ambient techno, ambient house, ambient hip-hop, ambient this, ambient that.
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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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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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I'm a painter in sound.
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I believe in singing.
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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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People tend to play in their comfort zone, so the best things are achieved in a state of surprise, actually.
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In my normal life I'm a very unadventurous person.
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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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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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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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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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If you don’t call it art, you’re likely to get a better result.
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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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Part of me likes a more ragged, jagged guitar sound or performance, but our work might not have been as innovative had we followed in the footsteps of what came before. We were very proud of what we had hit on.
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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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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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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 think, if you spend a day or - as many people do - a life working only with that aspect of your being, the cerebrum connected to a finger, I feel that the rest of you atrophies, essentially.
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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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The time I like listening to music most on headphones is, I have a game I play with my brother, he's a musician as well.And he sends me MIDI files of keyboard pieces. So, these are pieces where I just get a MIDI file; I don't know what instrument he was playing them on; I know nothing about his section of the sound of the piece, and then when I'm sitting on trains I do a lot of train travel I turn them into pieces of music. And I love to do that; it's my favorite hobby.