Roxy Music Quotes
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I've had quite a few moments I've liked, so it's good enough.
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Ambient music must be as ignorable as it is interesting.
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I always use the same guitar; I got this guitar years and years ago for nine pounds. It's still got the same strings on it.
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What I would really like to do, if I could have a sort of kingship for a short time and organize the group of my dreams - I would make one group which would be a combination of, say, Parliament and Kraftwerk - put those two together and say, "Make a record." Something that would be an extraordinary combination: the weird physical feeling of Parliament with this strange, rigid stuff over the top of it.
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Often, I think you find that you're enjoying certain things, you've got this new way of listening, and you find that you really enjoy the way that sounds on it and the way this other thing sounds on it and the way that other thing sounds on it. So, you're finding a new pleasure that you didn't know about before.
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I set up situations that involve abandoning control and finding out what happens.
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Ambient music is intended to induce calm and a space to think.
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Whenever you listen to a piece of music, what you are actually doing is hearing the latest sentence in a very long story you’ve been listening to - all the pieces of music you’ve ever heard.
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I do like Burial; he's so curiously clumsy, you can't help but be moved. It's so un-Hollywood, and the rhythms are so un-danceable.
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People always focus on people like me who use synthesizers, right, which are explicitly electronic and therefore obvious. "Ah, yes, that's electronic music." But they don't realize that so is the concept of actually taking a piece of extant music and literally re-collaging it, taking chunks out and changing the dynamics radically and creating new rhythmic structures with echo and all that. That's real electronic music, as far as I'm concerned.
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John Cage made you realise that there wasn't a thing called noise, it was just music you hadn't appreciated.
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The difficulty of always feeling that you ought to be doing something is that you tend to undervalue the times when you’re apparently doing nothing, and those are very important times.
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We have two different ways of working. One is completely unstructured where somebody just starts playing and somebody joins in and then the other person joins in, and something starts to happen. That's occasionally what happens. What more often happens is that we settle on some sort of - a few sort of structural ideas, like, "Okay, when I put my finger up, we're all going to move to the extremes of our instruments. So, that means you can only play either very high or very low or both. And we're going to stay there until I take my finger down.
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It's quite funny that, 20 years ago, one would have thought putting out a fragrance would [negatively] affect your musical credibility. Now it may enhance it.
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The whole point of art, as far as I’m concerned, is that art doesn’t make any difference. And that’s why it’s important. Take film: you can have quite extreme emotional experiences watching a movie, but they stop as soon as you walk out of the cinema. You can see people being hurt, but even though you feel those things strongly, you know they’re not real.
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I have a definite talent for convincing people to try something new. I am a good salesman. When I'm on form, I can sell anything.
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I'm very good with technology, I always have been, and with machines in general. They seem not threatening like other people find them, but a source of fun and amusement.
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I don't live in the past at all; I'm always wanting to do something new. I make a point of constantly trying to forget and get things out of my mind.
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I did some songs for Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby. I had done a jazz album of Roxy songs, and they used bits of it in the film. It would be nice to score a movie one day.
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Think inside the work - outside the work.
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I've done shows with orchestras, and I like writing with orchestras.
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All cultures have these feelings about non-functional areas of activity. And the more time people have on their hands, the more they commit it to those areas.
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In the future, you won't buy artists' works; you'll buy software that makes original pieces of 'their' works, or that recreates their way of looking at things. You could buy a Shostakovich box, or you could buy a Brahms box. You might want some Shostakovich slow-movement-like music to be generated. So then you use that box.
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Robert Fripp and I will be recording another LP very soon. It should be even more monotonous than the first one!