Brian Eno Quotes
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The English don't like concepts, really, not from a pop star. It's alright if they come from an 'intellectual,', but from a pop star you're getting ahead of yourself. Part of the class game is that you shouldn't rise above your station, and to start talking about concepts if you're in the pop world is getting a bit uppity, isn't it?
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Honor thy error as a hidden intention.
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One of the great breakthroughs of evolution theory is that you start with simple things and they will grow into complexity.
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People always focus on people like me who use synthesizers, right, which are explicitly electronic and therefore obvious. "Ah, yes, that's electronic music." But they don't realize that so is the concept of actually taking a piece of extant music and literally re-collaging it, taking chunks out and changing the dynamics radically and creating new rhythmic structures with echo and all that. That's real electronic music, as far as I'm concerned.
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I'm bloody awful at multi-tasking.
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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.
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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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Most game music is based on loops effectively.
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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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Everything good proceeds from enthusiasm.
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We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.
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The tools are evolving, and people's interests are evolving as well. So, suddenly people like to hear bands, people like Devendra Banhart or the xx, bands that make a kind of virtue of sloppiness. That isn't what they would describe what they're doing, but the fact is they make a virtue of the sort of hand-made nature of what they're doing.
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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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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.
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I'd love it if American kids were listening to Muslim music.
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You can't have a relationship with a device whose limits are unknown to you, because without limits, it keeps becoming something else.
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Human development thus far has been fueled and guided by the feeling that things could be, and are probably going to be, better.
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Robert Fripp and I will be recording another LP very soon. It should be even more monotonous than the first one!
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I take sounds and change them into words.
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I hate the way CDs just drone on for bloody hours and you stop caring.
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If something is good, you must torture it mercilessly until it is either dead or great.
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Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable sic as it is interesting.
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Emotion creates reality, reality demands action.
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Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences.