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American television really is pathetic.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
Musicians are there in front of you, and the spectators sense their tension, which is not the case when you're listening to a record. Your attention is more relaxed. The emotional aspect is more important in live music.
Brian Eno Roxy Music
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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.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
Classical - perhaps I should say 'orchestral' - music is so digital, so cut up, rhythmically, pitchwise and in terms of the roles of the musicians. It's all in little boxes. The reason you get child prodigies in chess, arithmetic, and classical composition is that they are all worlds of discontinuous, parceled-up possibilities.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
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.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
When you look back on a historical period of music, it seems so obvious to you what the characteristics of it are, but they're not obvious at the time. So, when I look back at my own work, I could easily write a very convincing sort of account of it that made it look like I had planned it all out from day one and that this led logically to that and then I did this and then that followed quite naturally from that. But that's not how it felt.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
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?'
Brian Eno Roxy Music
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If you think of the way a composer or say a pop arranger works - he has an idea and he writes it down, so there's one transmission loss. Then he gives the score to a group of musicians who interpret that, so there's another transmission loss. So he's involved with three information losses. Whereas what I nearly always do is work directly to the sound if it doesn't sound right. So there's a continuous loop going on.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
I do sometimes look back at things I've written in the past, and think, 'I just don't remember being the person who wrote that.'
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
I think the idea that people walk around to music is very interesting. They are actually creating the soundtrack to their lives as they walk around to it.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
It's nice, I think, when people use your music for things you didn't think of.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
Once music ceases to be ephemeral - always disappearing - and becomes instead material... it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a painting, existing as material in space, not immaterial in time.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
The seven white notes on the piano - each section of the piece (there are 12 sections) is five of those seven white notes. If you calculate it, there are 21 groups of five notes in any group of seven notes. And although there are 12 sections, this piece actually uses nine of those groups because some of the sections repeat earlier ones. So that's the formula. It's very simple as a way of generating something. It's my inner minimalist.
Brian Eno Roxy Music
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If you're in a forest, the quality of the echo is very strange because echoes back off so many surfaces of all those trees that you get this strange, itchy ricochet effect.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
I'm often accused of being ahead of my time, but it's simply not true. The truth is that everybody else is behind.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
I'm always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven't thought of doing yet.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
Gospel music is never pessimistic, it's never 'oh my god, its all going down the tubes', like the blues often is.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
I will be putting out a fragrance - I'm following in the great steps of Puff Daddy.
Bryan Ferry Roxy Music -
You shoot your arrow and then you paint your bulls eye around it, and therefore you have hit the target dead centre.
Brian Eno Roxy Music
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When we go out to the country and just sit there, what we're really doing is just switching off various kinds of alertness that we don't have to use. When we do that, we are stopping being defensive. We are no longer shutting ourselves off from different types of experiences, we are welcoming them in.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
The earliest paintings I loved were always the most non-referential paintings you can imagine, by painters such as Mondrian. I was thrilled by them because they didn't refer to anything else. They stood alone, and they were just charged magic objects that did not get their strength from being connected to anything else.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
Whenever there's a new music, there's a new way of listening. And whenever there's a new way of listening, there are new musics that follow from that. And people start listening differently - that can either mean in different places or at different volumes or in different social groups or through different technologies.
Brian Eno Roxy Music -
Once you've grown to accept something and it becomes part of the system you've inherited, you don't even notice it any longer.
Brian Eno Roxy Music