Brian Eno Quotes
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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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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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Every increase in your knowledge is a simultaneous decrease. You learn and you unlearn at the same time. A new certainty is a new doubt as well.
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When you look back on a historical period of music, it seems so obvious to you what the characteristics of it are, but they're not obvious at the time. So, when I look back at my own work, I could easily write a very convincing sort of account of it that made it look like I had planned it all out from day one and that this led logically to that and then I did this and then that followed quite naturally from that. But that's not how it felt.
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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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When I first started making ambient music, I was setting up systems using synthesizers that generated pulses more or less randomly. The end result is a kind of music that continuously changes. Of course, until computers came along, all I could actually present of that work was a piece of its output.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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I have these headphones, which pretty much exclude everything else so that you can really completely control the sound that you're hearing. I don't use them very much, I have to say. I very rarely listen on headphones.
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Anything popular is populist, and populist is rarely a good adjective.
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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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I think the other thing that's important is getting to a place, which very, very rarely happens with improvising groups, where somebody can decide not to play for a while. You watch any group of musicians improvising together and they nearly all play nearly all the time. In fact I often say that the biggest difference between classical music and everything else is that classical musicians sometimes shut up because they're told to, because the score tells them to. Whereas any music that's sort of based on folk or jazz, everybody plays all the time.
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If something is good, you must torture it mercilessly until it is either dead or great.
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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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I do love being in my studio. Especially at night.
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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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One often makes music to supplement one's world.
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The only value of ideology is to stop things becoming showbiz.
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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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The philosophical idea that there are no more distances, that we are all just one world, that we are all brothers, is such a drag! I like differences.
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I'm often accused of being ahead of my time, but it's simply not true. The truth is that everybody else is behind.
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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.