Brian Eno Quotes
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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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I'm very opinionated.
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Whenever you listen to a piece of music, what you are actually doing is hearing the latest sentence in a very long story you’ve been listening to - all the pieces of music you’ve ever heard.
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When I was working with Talking Heads what would happen typically is that they would go out and start playing a track, and I would always run the tape. I always record everything, even a run through where you're trying to get in tune. That's a principle because sometimes when the situation isn't clear interesting things happen, and they are worth listening to again.
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I don't live in the past at all; I'm always wanting to do something new. I make a point of constantly trying to forget and get things out of my mind.
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In terms of what has been happening recently, there have been, I think, some really interesting new instruments that have come out that sort of show me the direction of the future. Korg has introduced the - they've had a whole series now of these things called Kaoss Pads. They're wonderful because they do get your muscles working again. And what DJs do, of course, with their DJ turntables now, the CD turntables, which have pitch change and speed change and everything else. They're doing something that I think is interestingly physical.
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I, I wish you could swim Like the dolphins Like dolphins can swim Though nothing, nothing will keep us together We can beat them, forever and ever Oh, we can be heroes just for one day.
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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 hate the way CDs just drone on for bloody hours and you stop caring.
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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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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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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.
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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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If I had a stock of fabulous sounds I would just always use them. I wouldn't bother to find new ones.
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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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Ideas reflect the moment, and so you have to use them. If you store ideas, they wither.
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I'm bloody awful at multi-tasking.
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The point about working is not to produce great stuff all the time, but to remain ready for when you can.
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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.'
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As soon as I hear a sound, it always suggests a mood to me.
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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.
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A lot of the so-called systems composers have this thing that the system is always right. You don't fiddle with it at all. Well, I don't think that. I think the system is as right as you judge it to be. If for some reason you don't like a bit of it you must trust your intuition on that. I don't take a doctrinaire approach to systems.
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Well, I am a dilettante. It's only in England that dilettantism is considered a bad thing. In other countries it's called interdisciplinary research.
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Emotion creates reality, reality demands action.