Brian Eno Quotes
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It's insane that, since the Beatles and Dylan, it's assumed that all musicians should do everything themselves. It's that ridiculous, teenage idea that when Mick Jagger sings, he's telling you something about his own life. It's so arrogant to think that people would want to know about it anyway!
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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There are certain sounds that I've found work well in nearly any context. Their function is not so much musical as spatial: they define the edges of the territory of the music.
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I hate talking about music, to tell you the truth.
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I'm not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.
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I love the sort of ambivalence of this, the ambiguity of something - being, for instance, in a quite busy Mexican restaurant with one of these very gentle tracks playing I remember as being particularly nice.
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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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I hardly ever go into the studio with a work complete in my head. It emerges from communal activity.
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I periodically realize every few years that the only person whose taste I really trust is me.
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It's not the destination that matters. It's the change of scene.
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People in the arts often want to aim for the biggest, most obvious target, and hit it smack in the bull’s eye. Of course with everybody else aiming there as well that makes it very hard and expensive to hit. I prefer to shoot the arrow, then paint the target around it. You make the niches in which you finally reside.
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I do sometimes look back at things I've written in the past, and think, 'I just don't remember being the person who wrote that.'
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I've got nothing against records - I've spent my life making them - but they are a kind of historical blip.
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Not many people bought Velvet Underground LPs, but those who did, started a band.
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Once you've grown to accept something and it becomes part of the system you've inherited, you don't even notice it any longer.
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Whenever there's a new music, there's a new way of listening. And whenever there's a new way of listening, there are new musics that follow from that. And people start listening differently - that can either mean in different places or at different volumes or in different social groups or through different technologies.
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I hate the thought that someone had picked up one of my song records and was really excited about it, and walks [out of] a record shop with On Land and is disappointed because it isn't what they wanted. So, I try to make signs, graphically and visually, to say to people "Okay, this is this department of my work and this is this other department of my work." And of course I'm very pleased if people like all of them, but I don't want them to feel deceived at any point.
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Democracy is a daring concept - a hope that we'll be best governed if all of us participate in the act of government. It is meant to be a conversation, a place where the intelligence and local knowledge of the electorate sums together to arrive at actions that reflect the participation of the largest possible number of people.
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The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one's furniture.