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One way of working is just bring a group of totally different musicians together and encourage them to stick to their guns, not to do the thing that normally happens in a working situation where everyone homogenizes and concedes certain points - so eventually they're all playing in roughly the same style. I wanted quite the opposite of that. I wanted them to accent their styles, so that they pulled away. So there would be a kind of space in the middle where I could operate, and attempt to make these things coalesce in some way. In fact quite a lot of my stuff has arisen from that.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
As struggles go, being an artist isn't that much of one.
Brian Eno Roxy Music
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For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
I set up situations that involve abandoning control and finding out what happens.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
I'm very opinionated.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
I got an amazing 10-CD set, it's the music that Alan Lomax recorded in Haiti in 1936. And what's incredible is how fantastic the drummers are and how off-the-grid they are. The liveliness is astonishing; they're just totally alive, these recordings. It's very interesting, to me, to be reminded of that, that there was a time when things were not that tight.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
Another way of working is setting deliberate constraints that aren't musical ones - like saying, "Well, this piece is going to be three minutes and nineteen seconds long and it's going to have changes here, here and here, and there's going to be a convolution of events here, and there's going to be a very fast rhythm here with a very slow moving part over the top of it." Those are the sort of visual ideas that I can draw out on graph paper. I've done a lot of film music this way.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
I hate the thought that someone had picked up one of my song records and was really excited about it, and walks [out of] a record shop with On Land and is disappointed because it isn't what they wanted. So, I try to make signs, graphically and visually, to say to people "Okay, this is this department of my work and this is this other department of my work." And of course I'm very pleased if people like all of them, but I don't want them to feel deceived at any point.
Brian Eno Roxy Music
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I never wanted to write the sort of song that said, 'Look at how abnormal and crazy and out there I am, man!'
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
I think audiences are quite comfortable watching something coming into being.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
Honor thy error as a hidden intention.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
Most game music is based on loops effectively.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
I wish there was a serious investigation into flying saucers that wasn't conducted by crackpots. Unfortunately nearly all of the people who are interested in them kind of manufacture the evidence to fit the theories rather than the other way around. So it's very hard to find any dispassionate treatment of them. Maybe there isn't any scientific basis in which case that's why you never see any scientific evidence.
Brian Eno Roxy Music
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The micro-compositions are the pieces themselves, but the macro-composition is the whole set of them and how it moves from track to track and how the titles relate to one another, for example. Always when I do records like this of a selection of instrumental pieces - the titles, to me, are very important.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
With all fashion, what we do is play at being somebody else. We play at inhabiting another kind of world.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
I'm very good with technology, I always have been, and with machines in general. They seem not threatening like other people find them, but a source of fun and amusement.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
Everything good proceeds from enthusiasm.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
John Cage made you realise that there wasn't a thing called noise, it was just music you hadn't appreciated.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
Control and surrender have to be kept in balance. That's what surfers do - take control of the situation, then be carried, then take control. In the last few thousand years, we've become incredibly adept technically. We've treasured the controlling part of ourselves and neglected the surrendering part.
Brian Eno Roxy Music
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The whole point of art, as far as I’m concerned, is that art doesn’t make any difference. And that’s why it’s important. Take film: you can have quite extreme emotional experiences watching a movie, but they stop as soon as you walk out of the cinema. You can see people being hurt, but even though you feel those things strongly, you know they’re not real.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
You can't have a relationship with a device whose limits are unknown to you, because without limits, it keeps becoming something else.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
I don't like headphones very much, and I rarely listen to music on headphones.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
In the future, you won't buy artists' works; you'll buy software that makes original pieces of 'their' works, or that recreates their way of looking at things. You could buy a Shostakovich box, or you could buy a Brahms box. You might want some Shostakovich slow-movement-like music to be generated. So then you use that box.
Brian Eno Roxy Music