Brian Eno Quotes
-
I remember when in the early days of rock'n'roll, when everything sounded totally different, all amazing and blah blah blah blah blah. Now you can play me one second of any record from that time, and I'll say "1959" or "1961." I can hear precisely. It's like it has a huge date stamp on it.
-
I love the sort of ambivalence of this, the ambiguity of something - being, for instance, in a quite busy Mexican restaurant with one of these very gentle tracks playing I remember as being particularly nice.
-
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.
-
I think that technology is always invented for historical reasons, to solve a historical problem. But they very soon reveal themselves to be capable of doing things that aren't historical that nobody had ever thought of doing before.
-
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.
-
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.
-
With recording, everything changed. 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. It's an idea that many composers have felt reluctant about because it seemed to them to diminish the importance of music.
-
I think there's a lot of similarity between what people try to do with religion with what they want from art. In fact, I very specifically think that they are same thing. Not that religion and art are the same, but that they both tap into the same need we have for surrender.
-
As struggles go, being an artist isn't that much of one.
-
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.
-
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.
-
When I went back to England after a year away, the country seemed stuck, dozing in a fairy tale, stifled by the weight of tradition.
-
Any constraint is part of the skeleton that you build the composition on - including your own incompetence.
-
The only value of ideology is to stop things becoming showbiz.
-
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.
-
Since I have always preferred making plans to executing them, I have gravitated towards situations and systems that, once set into operation, could create music with little or no intervention on my part. That is to say, I tend towards the roles of planner and programmer, and then become an audience to the results.
-
I've discovered this new electronic technique that creates new speech out of stuff that's already there.
-
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.
-
Painting, I think it's like jazz.
-
I think most artists would be happy to have bigger audiences rather than smaller ones. It doesn't mean that they are going to change their work in order necessarily to get it, but they're happy if they do get it.
-
You can't really imagine music without technology.
-
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.
-
I suppose I am reluctant about being any sort of 'star' and I didn't particularly want to be portrayed as one.
-
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.