Brian Eno Quotes
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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.
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The earliest paintings I loved were always the most non-referential paintings you can imagine, by painters such as Mondrian. I was thrilled by them because they didn't refer to anything else. They stood alone, and they were just charged magic objects that did not get their strength from being connected to anything else.
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I trust my taste. I trust it completely and I always have done, and I've always thought it isn't that different from everybody else's.
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I want to rethink 'surrender' as an active verb.
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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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American television really is pathetic.
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A part of me has become immortal, out of my control.
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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.
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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.
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Painting, I think it's like jazz.
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As struggles go, being an artist isn't that much of one.
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Saying that cultural objects have value is like saying that telephones have conversations.
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I cant duplicate my own successes, because part of the creation of that effect is making something happen that you didn't expect.
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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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The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.
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Well, there are some things that I just can't get out of my head, and they start to annoy me after a while. Sometimes they're of my own creation, as well - and they're just as annoying. It's not only other people's ear worms that bug me, it's my own, as well.
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I don't like headphones very much, and I rarely listen to music on headphones.
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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.
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I've discovered this new electronic technique that creates new speech out of stuff that's already there.
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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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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 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.
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You can hear the profile of a sound, in retrospect, so much more clearly than you did at the time. And I think one of the things that's going to be nauseatingly characteristic about so much music of now is its glossy production values and its griddedness, the tightness of the way everything is locked together.
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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.