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Try to make things that can become better in other people’s minds than they were in yours.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
You can't really imagine music without technology.
Brian Eno Roxy Music
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You know that in order to copyright material somebody has to write it down for you. Any piece of recorded material has to be scored in order for it to be copyrighted. I've seen the scores of my things and they don't resemble the music in any way. If you give them to somebody who has never heard the music and say, "What does this sound like to you?" they'll play you something that has no relationship with the music it derives from. Notation simply isn't adequate.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
Ideas worth questioning: 'Being an artist is a job for life.'
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
We're going through this super-uptight era, which I think comes entirely from literacy, actually. It's the result of machines that were designed as word processors being used for making music.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
Software options proliferate extremely easily - too easily, in fact - because too many options create tools that can't ever be used intuitively. Intuitive actions confine the detail work to a dedicated part of the brain, leaving the rest of one's mind free to respond with attention and sensitivity to the changing texture of the moment.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
I want to make something that is breathtaking. Of course, you can't make something that is always breathtaking, or you would never be able to breathe. You would collapse.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
The problem with improvisation is, of course, that everyone just slips into their comfort zone and does sort of the easy thing to do, the most obvious thing to do with your instrument.
Brian Eno Roxy Music
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Most of those melodies are me trying to find out what notes fit, and then hitting ones that don't fit in a very interesting way.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
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.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
Pop is totally results-oriented and there is a very strong feedback loop.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
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.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
I periodically realize every few years that the only person whose taste I really trust is me.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
As soon as you externalize an idea you see facets of it that weren't clear when it was just floating around in your head.
Brian Eno Roxy Music
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Musicians are there in front of you, and the spectators sense their tension, which is not the case when you're listening to a record. Your attention is more relaxed. The emotional aspect is more important in live music.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
Instruments sound interesting, not because of their sound, but because of the relationship a player has with them. Instrumentalists build a rapport with their instruments, which is what you like and respond to.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
American television really is pathetic.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
The only value of ideology is to stop things becoming showbiz.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
I want to rethink 'surrender' as an active verb.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that.
Brian Eno Roxy Music
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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.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
If you watch any good player, they're using different parts of their body and working with instruments that respond to those movements. They're moving in many dimensions at once.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
Classical - perhaps I should say 'orchestral' - music is so digital, so cut up, rhythmically, pitchwise and in terms of the roles of the musicians. It's all in little boxes. The reason you get child prodigies in chess, arithmetic, and classical composition is that they are all worlds of discontinuous, parceled-up possibilities.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
If you think of the way a composer or say a pop arranger works - he has an idea and he writes it down, so there's one transmission loss. Then he gives the score to a group of musicians who interpret that, so there's another transmission loss. So he's involved with three information losses. Whereas what I nearly always do is work directly to the sound if it doesn't sound right. So there's a continuous loop going on.
Brian Eno Roxy Music