Roxy Music Quotes
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Everybody thinks that when new technologies come along that they're transparent and you can just do your job well on it. But technologies always import a whole new set of values with them.
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The problem with fine art is that in most cases people have to make a special excursion to go and look at it: they can't afford to own it. So it isn't really part of their life in the way that music can be.
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Art is not an object, but a trigger for experience.
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I like to think Duke Ellington would probably embrace a fragrance as well.
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Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing - 'Oh, let's put that sentence there, let's get rid of this' - have become commonplace in films and music too.
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It's nice to know that there are several different avenues I could pursue.
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I don't really have a great deal of spare time. I still have a house in the country, but I'm in London 90 percent of the time.
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What matters in modern music is not the part you can write down, the words and the tune, but the rest - the texture, the atmosphere, the references and associations.
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I can never predict what's going to happen.
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I describe things in terms of body movements. I dance a bit to describe what sort of movement it ought to make, and that's a good way of talking to musicians. Particularly bass players.
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I like the idea of a kind of eternal music, but I didn't want it to be eternally repetitive, either. I wanted it to be eternally changing. So I developed two ideas in that way. 'Discreet Music' was like that, and 'Music for Airports.' What you hear on the recordings is a little part of one of those processes working itself out.
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Some people are very good at being 'stars' and it suits them. I'm grudging about it and I find it annoying.
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The artists of the past who impressed me were the ones who really focused their work.
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Be the first to not do what nobody has ever thought of not doing before.
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Sometimes something intrigues me about particular sounds, how they work together, and I think "Okay, I've found something here; I'm going to take it somewhere." And sometimes just to find a name for that sound, whatever it is, ends up becoming a title of the piece or becoming part of the title.
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The way 'Lux' was made is that there are 12 sections in here, though two of them are joined together. So there are really 11 sections, in a sense, and each one uses five notes out of a palette of seven notes, and my palette is all the white notes on the piano. That was the original palette.
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I would like to see a future where artists think that they have a right to contemplate things like global warming.
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Every collaboration helps you grow. With Bowie, it's different every time. I know how to create settings, unusual aural environments. That inspires him. He's very quick.
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It must be really hard to be starting out in music now.
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For instance, I'm always fascinated to see whether, given the kind of fairly known and established form called popular music, whether there is some magic combination that nobody has hit upon before.
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Not many people bought Velvet Underground LPs, but those who did, started a band.
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The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don't set out to say anything very important.
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You can never get silence anywhere nowadays, have you noticed?
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When I was at college - that was the first time I tried singing. I played in a band, and people seemed to like it.