Brian Eno Quotes
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My guitar only has five strings 'cause the top one broke and I decided not to put it back on: when I play chords I only play bar chords, and the top one always used to cut me there.
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Gospel music is never pessimistic, it's never 'oh my god, its all going down the tubes', like the blues often is.
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I want to rethink 'surrender' as an active verb.
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We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.
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One of the interesting things about having little musical knowledge is that you generate surprising results sometimes; you move to places you wouldn't if you knew better.
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You can't really imagine music without technology.
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I suppose I am reluctant about being any sort of 'star' and I didn't particularly want to be portrayed as one.
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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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I've noticed a terrible thing, which is I will agree to anything if it's far enough in the future.
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I think one of my pursuits over the years is trying to answer the question of, 'What else can you do with a voice other than stand in front of a microphone and sing?'
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Most game music is based on loops effectively.
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As struggles go, being an artist isn't that much of one.
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I enjoy working with complicated equipment. A lot of my things started just with a rhythm box, but I feed it through so many things that what comes out sounds very complex and rich.
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If you watch any good player, they're using different parts of their body and working with instruments that respond to those movements. They're moving in many dimensions at once.
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The great benefit of computer sequencers is that they remove the issue of skill, and replace it with the issue of judgement.
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I wish there was a serious investigation into flying saucers that wasn't conducted by crackpots. Unfortunately nearly all of the people who are interested in them kind of manufacture the evidence to fit the theories rather than the other way around. So it's very hard to find any dispassionate treatment of them. Maybe there isn't any scientific basis in which case that's why you never see any scientific evidence.
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Once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music - not like a record that you'd put on, which would play for a while and finish.
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Nearly all the things I do that are of any merit at all start off just being good fun, and I think I'm sort of building up to doing something else quite soon.
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I think we're about ready for a new feeling to enter music. I think that will come from the Arabic world.
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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.
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The biggest crime in England is to rise above your station. It's fine to be a pop star. 'Oh, it's great, lots of fun, aren't they sweet, these pop stars! But to think you have anything to say about how the world should work? What arrogance!'
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Control and surrender have to be kept in balance. That's what surfers do - take control of the situation, then be carried, then take control. In the last few thousand years, we've become incredibly adept technically. We've treasured the controlling part of ourselves and neglected the surrendering part.
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One way of working is just bring a group of totally different musicians together and encourage them to stick to their guns, not to do the thing that normally happens in a working situation where everyone homogenizes and concedes certain points - so eventually they're all playing in roughly the same style. I wanted quite the opposite of that. I wanted them to accent their styles, so that they pulled away. So there would be a kind of space in the middle where I could operate, and attempt to make these things coalesce in some way. In fact quite a lot of my stuff has arisen from that.
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I'd love it if American kids were listening to Muslim music.