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Any constraint is part of the skeleton that you build the composition on - including your own incompetence.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
You either believe that people respond to authority, or that they respond to kindness and inclusion. I'm obviously in the latter camp. I think that people respond better to reward than punishment.
Brian Eno Roxy Music
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Art is not an object, but a trigger for experience.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
Every increase in your knowledge is a simultaneous decrease. You learn and you unlearn at the same time. A new certainty is a new doubt as well.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
There is a sort of convergence starting to happen between the computer and musical instruments, but it's still quite a long way off.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
Performing was terrifying.
Bryan Ferry Roxy Music -
Democracy is a daring concept - a hope that we'll be best governed if all of us participate in the act of government. It is meant to be a conversation, a place where the intelligence and local knowledge of the electorate sums together to arrive at actions that reflect the participation of the largest possible number of people.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
I trust my taste. I trust it completely and I always have done, and I've always thought it isn't that different from everybody else's.
Brian Eno Roxy Music
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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.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
I cant duplicate my own successes, because part of the creation of that effect is making something happen that you didn't expect.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
I think generally playing live is a crap idea. So much of stage work is the presentation of personality, and I've never been interested in that.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
I had an interesting day. I was in the studio with a group of musicians, who shall remain nameless, and I said to them "Our exercise today is not to use 'undo' at all. So, there's no second takes. Or, if you do a second take, you have to do the whole take. There's no sort of drop in, change that little bit". The session broke down in, I'd say, 40 minutes. It was impossible for people to work in that restriction any longer.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
When I first started making ambient music, I was setting up systems using synthesizers that generated pulses more or less randomly. The end result is a kind of music that continuously changes. Of course, until computers came along, all I could actually present of that work was a piece of its output.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
I love the sort of ambivalence of this, the ambiguity of something - being, for instance, in a quite busy Mexican restaurant with one of these very gentle tracks playing I remember as being particularly nice.
Brian Eno Roxy Music
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People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
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.'
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
People do dismiss ambient music, don't they? They call it 'easy listening,' as if to suggest that it should be hard to listen to.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
Saying that cultural objects have value is like saying that telephones have conversations.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
Even though I'm known as a pop musician, I have a seriousness about what I do.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
There are certain sounds that I've found work well in nearly any context. Their function is not so much musical as spatial: they define the edges of the territory of the music.
Brian Eno Roxy Music
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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.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
I'm not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
Anything popular is populist, and populist is rarely a good adjective.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
With devices my technique is always to hide the handbook in the drawer until I've played with it for a while. The handbook always tells you what it does, and you can be quite sure that if it's a complex device it can do at least fifteen other things that weren't predicted in the handbook, or that they didn't consider desirable. It's normally those other things that interest me.
Brian Eno Roxy Music