Roxy Music Quotes
-
In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.
-
I despise computers in many ways. I think they’re hopelessly underevolved and overrated.
-
The problem with improvisation is, of course, that everyone just slips into their comfort zone and does sort of the easy thing to do, the most obvious thing to do with your instrument.
-
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.
-
My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.
-
For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.
-
Any constraint is part of the skeleton that you build the composition on - including your own incompetence.
-
Perhaps when music has been shouting for so long, a quieter voice seems attractive.
-
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.
-
One of the things you do when you make a piece of art is you try to make the world you'd rather be in.
-
The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.
-
I don't like headphones very much, and I rarely listen to music on headphones.
-
I've noticed a terrible thing, which is I will agree to anything if it's far enough in the future.
-
In art, you CAN crash your plane and walk away from it.
-
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.
-
Well, there are some things that I just can't get out of my head, and they start to annoy me after a while. Sometimes they're of my own creation, as well - and they're just as annoying. It's not only other people's ear worms that bug me, it's my own, as well.
-
With all fashion, what we do is play at being somebody else. We play at inhabiting another kind of world.
-
When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone's talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false 'intelligence' and selected 'leaks.'
-
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.
-
You know that in order to copyright material somebody has to write it down for you. Any piece of recorded material has to be scored in order for it to be copyrighted. I've seen the scores of my things and they don't resemble the music in any way. If you give them to somebody who has never heard the music and say, "What does this sound like to you?" they'll play you something that has no relationship with the music it derives from. Notation simply isn't adequate.
-
I think that's very significant that we're so attached to the idea now of - it was something I advocated for years, that you can make music in studios, music doesn't have to be made as a real-time experience. But now you see the results of that in people who are completely crippled unless they know that they have the possibility of "cut and paste" and "undo." And "undo" and "undo" and "undo" and "undo" and "undo" again.
-
Gospel music is never pessimistic, it's never 'oh my god, its all going down the tubes', like the blues often is.
-
I've discovered this new electronic technique that creates new speech out of stuff that's already there.
-
I'm always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven't thought of doing yet.