Brian Eno Quotes
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I enjoy working with complicated equipment. A lot of my things started just with a rhythm box, but I feed it through so many things that what comes out sounds very complex and rich.
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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!'
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The difficulty of always feeling that you ought to be doing something is that you tend to undervalue the times when you’re apparently doing nothing, and those are very important times.
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Often, I think you find that you're enjoying certain things, you've got this new way of listening, and you find that you really enjoy the way that sounds on it and the way this other thing sounds on it and the way that other thing sounds on it. So, you're finding a new pleasure that you didn't know about before.
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I'm often accused of being ahead of my time, but it's simply not true. The truth is that everybody else is behind.
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Quite often, and in fact more often, I would say, I'm struggling all the way through to think, "What is it I like about this? What is the personality of this thing I'm hearing that I like so much?" And it's nearly always a sort of mixed emotion, which is why I like it. It's something that I have mixed feelings about in the sense that it's both, say, placid and dangerous, or bitter and sweet, or dark and bright.
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The biggest crime in England is to rise above your station. It's fine to be a pop star. 'Oh, it's great, lots of fun, aren't they sweet, these pop stars! But to think you have anything to say about how the world should work? What arrogance!'
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I think audiences are quite comfortable watching something coming into being.
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Although cover notes for classical music albums tend to say that the trill of flutes suggests mountain streams and so on, I don't think anybody listens to music with the expectation that they're going to be presented with a sort of landscape painting.
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In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.
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Honor thy error as a hidden intention.
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The computer brings out the worst in some people.
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The trouble with New Age music is that there's no evil in it.
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I hate the way CDs just drone on for bloody hours and you stop caring.
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I'm bloody awful at multi-tasking.
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I do love being in my studio. Especially at night.
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I've had quite a lot of luck with dreams. I've often awoken in the night with a phrase or even a whole song in my head.
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We have two different ways of working. One is completely unstructured where somebody just starts playing and somebody joins in and then the other person joins in, and something starts to happen. That's occasionally what happens. What more often happens is that we settle on some sort of - a few sort of structural ideas, like, "Okay, when I put my finger up, we're all going to move to the extremes of our instruments. So, that means you can only play either very high or very low or both. And we're going to stay there until I take my finger down.
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What I would really like to do, if I could have a sort of kingship for a short time and organize the group of my dreams - I would make one group which would be a combination of, say, Parliament and Kraftwerk - put those two together and say, "Make a record." Something that would be an extraordinary combination: the weird physical feeling of Parliament with this strange, rigid stuff over the top of it.
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Except in a few cases like Music for Airports, which was a very clear case of noticing a niche [and] saying, "Okay, there's this situation in which people always play music, and nobody has written music for that situation so I'm going to." So, that was a very clear example of spotting a niche and working for it. I have done that occasionally.
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I'm very opinionated.
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John Cage made you realise that there wasn't a thing called noise, it was just music you hadn't appreciated.
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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.
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I'd love it if American kids were listening to Muslim music.