Brian Eno Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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A part of me has become immortal, out of my control.
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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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My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.
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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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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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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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For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.
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I do love being in my studio. Especially at night.
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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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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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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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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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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 think that's very significant that we're so attached to the idea now of - it was something I advocated for years, that you can make music in studios, music doesn't have to be made as a real-time experience. But now you see the results of that in people who are completely crippled unless they know that they have the possibility of "cut and paste" and "undo." And "undo" and "undo" and "undo" and "undo" and "undo" again.
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Perhaps when music has been shouting for so long, a quieter voice seems attractive.
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With all fashion, what we do is play at being somebody else. We play at inhabiting another kind of world.
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Composition is a way of living out your philosophy and calling it art.