Brian Eno Quotes
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Saying that cultural objects have value is like saying that telephones have conversations.
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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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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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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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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.
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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.
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Instead of shooting arrows at someone elses target, which Ive never been very good at, I make my own target around wherever my arrow happens to have landed. 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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If you grow up in a very strong religion like Catholicism you certainly cultivate in yourself a certain taste for the intensity of ideas.
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I do love being in my studio. Especially at night.
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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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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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I don't like celebrity programmes - but I do like programmes about how ideas are formed and evolve.
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With devices my technique is always to hide the handbook in the drawer until I've played with it for a while. The handbook always tells you what it does, and you can be quite sure that if it's a complex device it can do at least fifteen other things that weren't predicted in the handbook, or that they didn't consider desirable. It's normally those other things that interest me.
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A part of me has become immortal, out of my control.
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My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.
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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.
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Once music ceases to be ephemeral - always disappearing - and becomes instead material... it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a painting, existing as material in space, not immaterial in time.
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Painting, I think it's like jazz.
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In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.
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I despise computers in many ways. I think they’re hopelessly underevolved and overrated.
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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.
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Any constraint is part of the skeleton that you build the composition on - including your own incompetence.
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For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.
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Perhaps when music has been shouting for so long, a quieter voice seems attractive.