Brian Eno Quotes
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One often makes music to supplement one's world.
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Even though I'm known as a pop musician, I have a seriousness about what I do.
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I had wanted a tape recorder since I was tiny. I thought it was a magic thing. I never got one until just before I went to art school.
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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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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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It's not the destination that matters. It's the change of scene.
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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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The only value of ideology is to stop things becoming showbiz.
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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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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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The basis of computer work is predicated on the idea that only the brain makes decisions and only the index finger does the work.
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Not many people bought Velvet Underground LPs, but those who did, started a band.
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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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I think the idea that people walk around to music is very interesting. They are actually creating the soundtrack to their lives as they walk around to it.
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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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People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.
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Basically, you're still sitting there using just the muscles of your hand, really. Of one hand, actually. It's another example of the transfer of literacy to making music because the assumption is that everything important is happening in your head; the muscles are there simply to serve the head. But that isn't how traditional players work at all; musicians know that their muscles have a lot of stuff going on as well. They're using their whole body to make music, in fact.
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I often work by avoidance.
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When I started working on ambient music, my idea was to make music that was more like painting.
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I mostly used the studio devices, because I knew what they had. Generally I find I'm happy to use whatever's around. If there's nothing there I'll make something. For example, one of the things I tried doing was getting a tiny loudspeaker and feeding the instruments off the tape through this tiny speaker and then through this huge long plastic tube - about 50 feet long - that they used to clean out the swimming pool in the place where I was staying. You get this really hollow, cavernous, weird sound, a very nice sound. We didn't use it finally, but nonetheless we well could have.
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Pop is totally results-oriented and there is a very strong feedback loop.
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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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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.
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You shoot your arrow and then you paint your bulls eye around it, and therefore you have hit the target dead centre.