Roxy Music Quotes
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In terms of what has been happening recently, there have been, I think, some really interesting new instruments that have come out that sort of show me the direction of the future. Korg has introduced the - they've had a whole series now of these things called Kaoss Pads. They're wonderful because they do get your muscles working again. And what DJs do, of course, with their DJ turntables now, the CD turntables, which have pitch change and speed change and everything else. They're doing something that I think is interestingly physical.
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When I was working with Talking Heads what would happen typically is that they would go out and start playing a track, and I would always run the tape. I always record everything, even a run through where you're trying to get in tune. That's a principle because sometimes when the situation isn't clear interesting things happen, and they are worth listening to again.
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The tools are evolving, and people's interests are evolving as well. So, suddenly people like to hear bands, people like Devendra Banhart or the xx, bands that make a kind of virtue of sloppiness. That isn't what they would describe what they're doing, but the fact is they make a virtue of the sort of hand-made nature of what they're doing.
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Much as I love the northeast, I didn't want to spend my life there. I wanted to experiment. Savour everything you can while you're here! Touring, seeing the world... That in itself gives you a different perspective.
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I never wanted to write the sort of song that said, 'Look at how abnormal and crazy and out there I am, man!'
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And Mary J. Blige, she's got all these fur coats and hats and stuff. She's good; I like her.
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When you make something you are always offering some choices and denying others.
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Honor thy error as a hidden intention.
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Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable sic as it is interesting.
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Something I've realized lately, to my shock, is that I am an optimist, in that I think humans are almost infinitely capable of self-change and self-modification, and that we really can build the future that we want if we're smart about it.
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Get down with your old Allman Bros. records!
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I love San Francisco and Brighton has something of San Francisco about it. It's by the sea, there's a big gay community, a feeling of people being there because they enjoy their life there.
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I hate the way CDs just drone on for bloody hours and you stop caring.
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You can't have a relationship with a device whose limits are unknown to you, because without limits, it keeps becoming something else.
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Another way of working is setting deliberate constraints that aren't musical ones - like saying, "Well, this piece is going to be three minutes and nineteen seconds long and it's going to have changes here, here and here, and there's going to be a convolution of events here, and there's going to be a very fast rhythm here with a very slow moving part over the top of it." Those are the sort of visual ideas that I can draw out on graph paper. I've done a lot of film music this way.
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At home I don't really have any drum machines or anything like that, I just have a piano and a cassette machine, an old-fashioned one, an old relic which I've always used.
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Quite often, and in fact more often, I would say, I'm struggling all the way through to think, "What is it I like about this? What is the personality of this thing I'm hearing that I like so much?" And it's nearly always a sort of mixed emotion, which is why I like it. It's something that I have mixed feelings about in the sense that it's both, say, placid and dangerous, or bitter and sweet, or dark and bright.
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I take sounds and change them into words.
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The micro-compositions are the pieces themselves, but the macro-composition is the whole set of them and how it moves from track to track and how the titles relate to one another, for example. Always when I do records like this of a selection of instrumental pieces - the titles, to me, are very important.
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I think audiences are quite comfortable watching something coming into being.
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Roxy was just going too safe, and at the time I was also a bit pissed off at the business—not with playing, but with the people in it.
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Although cover notes for classical music albums tend to say that the trill of flutes suggests mountain streams and so on, I don't think anybody listens to music with the expectation that they're going to be presented with a sort of landscape painting.
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Everything good proceeds from enthusiasm.
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If you had a sign above every studio door saying ‘This Studio is a Musical Instrument’ it would make such a different approach to recording.
