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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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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Pop music can absorb so many peculiar talents, ranging from the completely nonmusical poseur who just uses music as a kind of springboard for a sense of style, to people who just love putting all that complicated stuff together, brick by brick, on their computers, to people like me who like playing conceptual games and being surprised.
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Rationality is what we do to organize the world, to make it possible to predict. Art is the rehearsal for the inapplicability and failure of that process.
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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 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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Some people are very good at being 'stars' and it suits them. I'm grudging about it and I find it annoying.
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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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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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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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I hate talking about music, to tell you the truth.
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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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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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What I believe is that people have many modes in which they can be. When we live in cities, the one we are in most of the time is the alert mode. The 'take control of things' mode, the 'be careful, watch out' mode, the 'speed' mode - the 'Red Bull' mode, actually. There's nothing wrong with it. It's all part of what we are.
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Everybody thinks that when new technologies come along that they're transparent and you can just do your job well on it. But technologies always import a whole new set of values with them.
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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 hardly ever go into the studio with a work complete in my head. It emerges from communal activity.
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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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At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.
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One often makes music to supplement one's world.
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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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Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that's what the music is about.
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I often work by avoidance.
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Pop is totally results-oriented and there is a very strong feedback loop.