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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.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
You can hear the profile of a sound, in retrospect, so much more clearly than you did at the time. And I think one of the things that's going to be nauseatingly characteristic about so much music of now is its glossy production values and its griddedness, the tightness of the way everything is locked together.
Brian Eno Roxy Music
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Emotion creates reality, reality demands action.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
When you make something you are always offering some choices and denying others.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
One of the great breakthroughs of evolution theory is that you start with simple things and they will grow into complexity.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
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.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
If something is good, you must torture it mercilessly until it is either dead or great.
Brian Eno Roxy Music
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'Two Voices,' from my album with Peter Schwalm, is an intact dream-poem. I awoke one night with an image of a piece of paper and all the words of the poem written on it, so I just blundered down to the kitchen table and 'copied it out.'
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
I wanted to get rid of the element that had been considered essential in pop music: the voice.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
I'd love it if American kids were listening to Muslim music.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
I think I've committed the one really bad English crime, which is I've risen above my station. I was supposed to be a pop star, and suddenly I'm claiming that I'm an artist of some kind.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
What people call unemotional just doesnt have a single overriding emotion to it. The things that I like best are the ones that ambiguous on the emotional level.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
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.
Brian Eno Roxy Music
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When I started working on ambient music, my idea was to make music that was more like painting.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
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.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
You feel as if you're not living a full life. Which, of course, is why - it's my theory about why so many people who are heavily into computers are also into extreme sports and S&M. It's because their bodies are crying out for some kind of action.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
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.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
As soon as I hear a sound, it always suggests a mood to me.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
I think that sex, drugs, art and religion very much overlap with one another and sometimes one becomes another.
Brian Eno Roxy Music
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I take sounds and change them into words.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences... That solves a lot of problems ... Art is something that happens, a process, not a quality, and all sorts of things can make it happen ... [W]hat makes a work of art 'good' for you is not something that is already 'inside' it, but something that happens inside you.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
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.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
I think there's a lot of similarity between what people try to do with religion with what they want from art. In fact, I very specifically think that they are same thing. Not that religion and art are the same, but that they both tap into the same need we have for surrender.
Brian Eno Roxy Music