Brian Eno Quotes
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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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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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I thought it was magic to be able to catch something identically on tape and then be able to play around with it, run it backwards; I thought that was great for years.
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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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I don't like celebrity programmes - but I do like programmes about how ideas are formed and evolve.
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I often work by avoidance.
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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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One often makes music to supplement one's world.
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It's nice, I think, when people use your music for things you didn't think of.
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I felt extremely uncomfortable as the focal point, in the spotlight. I really like the behind the scenes role, because all my freedom is there.
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I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant.
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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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I'm struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity.
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Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness.
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Culture is everything you don't have to do.
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I hate talking about music, to tell you the truth.
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I wouldn't call myself a synaesthete in the sense that Nabokov was. But I'll talk about a sound as being cold blue or dark brown. For descriptive purposes, yes, I often see colors when I'm listening to music and think, 'Oh, there's not enough sort of yellowy stuff in here, or not enough white.'
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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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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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Although designers continue to dream of 'transparency' - technologies that just do their job without making their presence felt - both creators and audiences actually like technologies with 'personality.'
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Instead of shooting arrows at someone elses target, which Ive never been very good at, I make my own target around wherever my arrow happens to have landed. You shoot your arrow and then you paint your bulls eye around it, and therefore you have hit the target dead centre.
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I think generally playing live is a crap idea. So much of stage work is the presentation of personality, and I've never been interested in that.
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There is a sort of convergence starting to happen between the computer and musical instruments, but it's still quite a long way off.
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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.