Brian Eno Quotes
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I believe in singing to such an extent that, if I were asked to redesign the British educational system, I would start by insisting that group singing becomes a central part of the daily routine. I believe it builds character and, more than anything else, encourages a taste for cooperation with others.
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I'm fascinated by musicians who don't completely understand their territory; that's when you do your best work.
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What matters in modern music is not the part you can write down, the words and the tune, but the rest - the texture, the atmosphere, the references and associations.
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Cooking is a way of listening to the radio.
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Every collaboration helps you grow. With Bowie, it's different every time. I know how to create settings, unusual aural environments. That inspires him. He's very quick.
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Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness.
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The problem with computers is that there is not enough Africa in them.
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I often say to people that producing is the best-paid form of cowardice. When you produce things, you almost always get credit if it's a good record, but you hardly ever get the blame if it's not! You don't really take responsibility for your work.
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I had a lot of trouble with engineers, because their whole background is learning from a functional point of view, and then learning how to perform that function.
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It must be quite mysterious to some people why I bother to carry on. Because, you know, I don't sell that many records.
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If you've spent a long time developing a skill and techniques, and now some 14 year-old upstart can get exactly the same result, you might feel a bit miffed I suppose, but that has happened forever.
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When I started making my own records, I had this idea of drowning out the singer and putting the rest in the foreground. It was the background that interested me.
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The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band.
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When I work there are two distinct phases: the phase of pushing the work along, getting something to happen, where all the input comes from me, and phase two, where things start to combine in a way that wasn't expected or predicted by what I supplied. Once phase two begins everything is okay, because then the work starts to dictate its own terms. It starts to get an identity which demands certain future moves. But during the first phase you often find that you come to a full stop.
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I think it's a myth that American public or any other public is so stupid that they need to be constantly pricked.
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The way 'Lux' was made is that there are 12 sections in here, though two of them are joined together. So there are really 11 sections, in a sense, and each one uses five notes out of a palette of seven notes, and my palette is all the white notes on the piano. That was the original palette.
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You just make different music on a computer. And you can make wonderful music on a computer, but don't pretend that the machinery is transparent. It makes as much difference to what you're doing as it does if you play an acoustic guitar as opposed to a kettledrum. You're not going to make the same music.
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If you want to make computers that really work, create a design team composed only of healthy, active women with lots else to do in their lives, and give them carte blanche.
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If there is a new fascism, it won't come from skinheads and punks; it will come from people who eat granola and think they know how the world should be.
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There's a kind of edge to what you're doing, the kind of leading edge of what you're doing. Inside that edge [are elements you] are familiar with, and are probably becoming slightly bored with, as well, over a period of time. "I've pulled that one out before. Oh, no, I can't I'm just fed up with that. Let's do something else."And you always think "Oh my God I've never done anything at all like that before." But, of course, in retrospect, and to an outsider, they'll say, "Oh, yeah that's typical Eno.
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I had an interesting day. I was in the studio with a group of musicians, who shall remain nameless, and I said to them "Our exercise today is not to use 'undo' at all. So, there's no second takes. Or, if you do a second take, you have to do the whole take. There's no sort of drop in, change that little bit". The session broke down in, I'd say, 40 minutes. It was impossible for people to work in that restriction any longer.
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People do dismiss ambient music, don't they? They call it 'easy listening,' as if to suggest that it should be hard to listen to.
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The problem with fine art is that in most cases people have to make a special excursion to go and look at it: they can't afford to own it. So it isn't really part of their life in the way that music can be.
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Every band I've worked with also wants to be countercultural in the sense that they want to feel that they've gone somewhere that nobody else has been.