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I Hate The Thought That Someone Had Picked Up One Of My Song Records And Was Really Excited About It, And Walks [out Of] A Record Shop With On Land And Is Disappointed Because It Isn't What They Wanted. So, I Try To Make Signs, Graphically And Visually, To Say To People "okay, This Is This Department Of My Work And This Is This Other Department Of My Work." And Of Course I'm Very Pleased If People Like All Of Them, But I Don't Want Them To Feel Deceived At Any Point.

-Brian Eno

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I Hate The Thought

Brian Eno

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I Hate The Thought That Someone Had Picked Up One Of My Song Records And Was Really Excited About It, And Walks [out Of] A Record Shop With On Land And Is Disappointed Because It Isn't What They Wanted. So, I Try To Make Signs, Graphically And Visually, To Say To People "okay, This Is This Department Of My Work And This Is This Other Department Of My Work." And Of Course I'm Very Pleased If People Like All Of Them, But I Don't Want Them To Feel Deceived At Any Point.

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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.

I Would Like To See A Future Where Artists Think That They Have A Right To Contemplate Things Like Global Warming.

There Is A Sort Of Convergence Starting To Happen Between The Computer And Musical Instruments, But It's Still Quite A Long Way Off.

Except In A Few Cases Like Music For Airports, Which Was A Very Clear Case Of Noticing A Niche [and] Saying, "okay, There's This Situation In Which People Always Play Music, And Nobody Has Written Music For That Situation So I'm Going To." So, That Was A Very Clear Example Of Spotting A Niche And Working For It. I Have Done That Occasionally.

In The 1960s, People Were Trying To Get Away From The Pop Song Format. Tracks Were Getting Longer, Or Much, Much Shorter.

It's Nice, I Think, When People Use Your Music For Things You Didn't Think Of.

I Always Have Wanted To Know How The Whole Thing Was Done, What The Process Involved. And I Don't Particularly Enjoy That My Music Is Stripped Of Ancillary Details, And It Just Sort Of Comes Out Of This Big Tap Called The Internet Like Water. I Like Some Of My Water To Be Neatly Presented In A Bottle. With A Label On It.

As Soon As I Hear A Sound, It Always Suggests A Mood To Me.

I Believe In Singing.

The Point About Working Is Not To Produce Great Stuff All The Time, But To Remain Ready For When You Can.

John Cage Made You Realise That There Wasn't A Thing Called Noise, It Was Just Music You Hadn't Appreciated.

I've Noticed A Terrible Thing, Which Is I Will Agree To Anything If It's Far Enough In The Future.

Make An Exhaustive List Of Everything You Might Do & Do The Last Thing On The List.

In Fact, Quite A Lot Of What I Do Has To Do With Sound Texture, And, You Can't Notate That. You Can't Notate The Sound Of "st. Elmo's Fire." There's No Way Of Writing That Down. That's Because Musical Notation Arose At A Time When Sound Textures Were Limited. If You Said Violins And Woodwind That Defined The Sound Texture; If I Say Synthesizer And Guitar It Means Nothing - You're Talking About 28,000 Variables.

You Feel As If You're Not Living A Full Life. Which, Of Course, Is Why - It's My Theory About Why So Many People Who Are Heavily Into Computers Are Also Into Extreme Sports And S&m. It's Because Their Bodies Are Crying Out For Some Kind Of Action.

When I Started Making My Own Records, I Had This Idea Of Drowning Out The Singer And Putting The Rest In The Foreground. It Was The Background That Interested Me.

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.

Once I Started Working With Generative Music In The 1970s, I Was Flirting With Ideas Of Making A Kind Of Endless Music - Not Like A Record That You'd Put On, Which Would Play For A While And Finish.

You Don't Have To Act As If You Know What You're Doing

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.

Art Is Not An Object, But A Trigger For Experience.

Ambient Music Must Be Able To Accommodate Many Levels Of Listening Attention Without Enforcing One In Particular; It Must Be As Ignorable As It Is Interesting.

One Of The Interesting Things About Having Little Musical Knowledge Is That You Generate Surprising Results Sometimes; You Move To Places You Wouldn't If You Knew Better.

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.

I Want To Rethink Surrender As An Active Verb.

I'm Not Interested In Possible Complexities. I Regard Song Structure As A Graph Paper.

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.

I'm Very Good With Technology, I Always Have Been, And With Machines In General. They Seem Not Threatening Like Other People Find Them, But A Source Of Fun And Amusement.

I Think The Other Thing That's Important Is Getting To A Place, Which Very, Very Rarely Happens With Improvising Groups, Where Somebody Can Decide Not To Play For A While. You Watch Any Group Of Musicians Improvising Together And They Nearly All Play Nearly All The Time. In Fact I Often Say That The Biggest Difference Between Classical Music And Everything Else Is That Classical Musicians Sometimes Shut Up Because They're Told To, Because The Score Tells Them To. Whereas Any Music That's Sort Of Based On Folk Or Jazz, Everybody Plays All The Time.

Basically, You're Still Sitting There Using Just The Muscles Of Your Hand, Really. Of One Hand, Actually. It's Another Example Of The Transfer Of Literacy To Making Music Because The Assumption Is That Everything Important Is Happening In Your Head; The Muscles Are There Simply To Serve The Head. But That Isn't How Traditional Players Work At All; Musicians Know That Their Muscles Have A Lot Of Stuff Going On As Well. They're Using Their Whole Body To Make Music, In Fact.

Avant-garde Music Is Sort Of Research Music. You're Glad Someone's Done It But You Don't Necessarily Want To Listen To It.

The Basis Of Computer Work Is Predicated On The Idea That Only The Brain Makes Decisions And Only The Index Finger Does The Work.

My Lyrics Are Generated By Various Peculiar Processes. Very Random And Similar To Automatic Writing.

Think Inside The Work - Outside The Work

I Wish There Was A Serious Investigation Into Flying Saucers That Wasn't Conducted By Crackpots. Unfortunately Nearly All Of The People Who Are Interested In Them Kind Of Manufacture The Evidence To Fit The Theories Rather Than The Other Way Around. So It's Very Hard To Find Any Dispassionate Treatment Of Them. Maybe There Isn't Any Scientific Basis In Which Case That's Why You Never See Any Scientific Evidence.

When I Was Young, An Eccentric Uncle Decided To Teach Me How To Lie. Not, He Explained, Because He Wanted Me To Lie, But Because He Thought I Should Know How It's Done So I Would Recognise When I Was Being Lied To.

A Culture Is The Sum Of All The Things About Which Humanity Can Choose To Differ.

Ambient Music Is Intended To Induce Calm And A Space To Think.

Feelings Are More Dangerous Than Ideas, Because They Aren't Susceptible To Rational Evaluation. They Grow Quietly, Spreading Underground, And Erupt Suddenly, All Over The Place.

I've Never Used A Pc In My Life; I Don't Like Them.

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.

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.

In The Wake Of The Events Of 11 September 2001, It Now Seems Clear That The Shock Of The Attacks Was Exploited In America.

Instead Of Shooting Arrows At Someone Elses Target, Which Ive Never Been Very Good At, I Make My Own Target Around Wherever My Arrow Happens To Have Landed. You Shoot Your Arrow And Then You Paint Your Bulls Eye Around It, And Therefore You Have Hit The Target Dead Centre.

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.

Stop Thinking About Art Works As Objects, And Start Thinking About Them As Triggers For Experiences.

Don't Be Ashamed Of Your Own Ideas. Most Musicians Get Applauded For Sounding Like Someone Else.

Be The First To Not Do What Nobody Has Ever Thought Of Not Doing Before.

Any Constraint Is Part Of The Skeleton That You Build The Composition On - Including Your Own Incompetence.

Painting, I Think It's Like Jazz.

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.

I Got An Amazing 10-cd Set, It's The Music That Alan Lomax Recorded In Haiti In 1936. And What's Incredible Is How Fantastic The Drummers Are And How Off-the-grid They Are. The Liveliness Is Astonishing; They're Just Totally Alive, These Recordings. It's Very Interesting, To Me, To Be Reminded Of That, That There Was A Time When Things Were Not That Tight.

Complexity And Intelligence Grow From Simplicity, Not From Greater Complexity.

So I Believe In Singing To Such An Extent That If I Were Asked To Redesign The British Educational System, I Would Start By Insisting That Group Singing Become A Central Part Of The Daily Routine. I Believe It Builds Character And, More Than Anything Else, Encourages A Taste For Co-operation With Others. This Seems To Be About The Most Important Thing A School Could Do For You.

Possessions Are A Way Of Turning Money Into Problems.

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.

Songs That Don't Depend On Composition Depend Instead On Performance - So The Fire Has To Be There In The Playing.

I Had Wanted A Tape Recorder Since I Was Tiny. I Thought It Was A Magic Thing. I Never Got One Until Just Before I Went To Art School.

I Think Very Often Producers Are Really Trying To Repeat Things. When They Hear Something In The New Songs That They Recognize As Being A Bit Like Something That Was A Success On A Previous Record, They're Inclined To Encourage That.

What Happens With Notation Is That It Reduces Things To A Language Which Isn't Necessarily Appropriate To Them. In The Same Way That Words Do, You Get A Much Cruder Version Of What Was Actually Intended.

I Don't Like Headphones Very Much, And I Rarely Listen To Music On Headphones.

Listening To Music

I Know That If I Had A Television In My Flat I Would Convince Myself That Everything On It Was Really Interesting. I Would Say, 'i'm A Celebrity - Get Me Out Of Here!' Is So Sociologically Fascinating That I Think I'd Better Watch.

The Trouble Begins With A Design Philosophy That Equates 'more Options' With 'greater Freedom.'

The Artists Of The Past Who Impressed Me Were The Ones Who Really Focused Their Work.

Since I Have Always Preferred Making Plans To Executing Them, I Have Gravitated Towards Situations And Systems That, Once Set Into Operation, Could Create Music With Little Or No Intervention On My Part. That Is To Say, I Tend Towards The Roles Of Planner And Programmer, And Then Become An Audience To The Results

Cooking Is A Way Of Listening To The Radio.

Every Collaboration Helps You Grow.

The Reason I Don't Tour Is That I Don't Know How To Front A Band. What Would I Do? I Can't Really Play Anything Well Enough To Deal With That Situation.

For The World To Be Interesting, You Have To Be Manipulating It All The Time.

When I Was At Art College, The Teachers Who Helped Me Were Not The Ones I Agreed With, Or The Ones Who Encouraged Me, But The Ones Who Took Very Strong Positions. Because If Someone Does That, You Can Find Your Own Position In Relation To It: What Is It That I Don't Agree With? In The Studio I Want To Articulate A Position Clearly Enough So That Other People Can Use It - Or Chuck It Away If They Don't Want It.

Ambient Music Must Be As Ignorable As It Is Interesting.

I'd Love It If American Kids Were Listening To Muslim Music.

The Marshall Guitar Amplifier Doesn't Just Get Louder When You Turn It Up. It Distorts The Sound To Produce A Whole Range Of New Harmonics, Effectively Turning A Plucked String Instrument Into A Bowed One. A Responsible Designer Might Try To Overcome This Limitation - Probably The Engineers At Marshall Tried, Too. But That Sound Became The Sound Of, Among Others, Jimi Hendrix. That Sound Is Called Electric Guitar.

Being An Artist Is A Job For Life.

Being An Artist

I Believe That Singing Is The Key To Long Life, A Good Figure, A Stable Temperament, Increased Intelligence, New Friends, Super Self-confidence , Heightened Sexual Attractiveness, And A Better Sense Of Humor.

Self Confidence

The Smart Thing In The Art World Is To Have One Good Idea And Never Have Another.

I Think That Sex, Drugs, Art And Religion Very Much Overlap With One Another And Sometimes One Becomes Another.

Everything Is An Experiment Until It Has A Deadline. That Gives It A Destination, Context, And A Reason.

It's Amazing How Quickly People Get Used To Bad Quality.

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.

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.

One Night, I Pissed Into An Empty Wine Bottle So I Could Continue Watching Monty Python, And Suddenly Thought 'i've Never Tasted My Own Piss,' So I Drank A Little. It Looked Just Like Orvieto Classico And Tasted Of Nearly Nothing

Some People Say Bowie Is All Surface Style And Second-hand Ideas, But That Sounds Like A Definition Of Pop To Me.

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.

Ideas Reflect The Moment, And So You Have To Use Them. If You Store Ideas, They Wither.

Rationality Is What We Do To Organize The World, To Make It Possible To Predict. Art Is The Rehearsal For The Inapplicability And Failure Of That Process.

I Despise Computers In Many Ways. I Think They’re Hopelessly Underevolved And Overrated.

I Think, If You Spend A Day Or - As Many People Do - A Life Working Only With That Aspect Of Your Being, The Cerebrum Connected To A Finger, I Feel That The Rest Of You Atrophies, Essentially.

It Must Be Quite Mysterious To Some People Why I Bother To Carry On. Because, You Know, I Don't Sell That Many Records.

I Hate The Thought That Someone Had Picked Up One Of My Song Records And Was Really Excited About It, And Walks [out Of] A Record Shop With On Land And Is Disappointed Because It Isn't What They Wanted. So, I Try To Make Signs, Graphically And Visually, To Say To People "okay, This Is This Department Of My Work And This Is This Other Department Of My Work." And Of Course I'm Very Pleased If People Like All Of Them, But I Don't Want Them To Feel Deceived At Any Point.

A Part Of Me Has Become Immortal, Out Of My Control.

It's Not The Destination That Matters. It's The Change Of Scene.

All Cultures Have These Feelings About Non-functional Areas Of Activity. And The More Time People Have On Their Hands, The More They Commit It To Those Areas.

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.

I Wanted To Use The Studio Like A Microscope For Sound, Which Is What Good Engineers Do.

I've Got Nothing Against Records - I've Spent My Life Making Them - But They Are A Kind Of Historical Blip.

The Difficulty Of Always Feeling That You Ought To Be Doing Something Is That You Tend To Undervalue The Times When You’re Apparently Doing Nothing, And Those Are Very Important Times.

The Great Benefit Of Computer Sequencers Is That They Remove The Issue Of Skill, And Replace It With The Issue Of Judgement

In England And Europe, We Have This Huge Music Called Ambient - Ambient Techno, Ambient House, Ambient Hip-hop, Ambient This, Ambient That.

I Often Work By Avoidance.

Whatever You Now Find Weird, Ugly, Uncomfortable And Nasty About A New Medium Will Surely Become Its Signature... The Excitement Of Grainy Film, Of Bleached-out Black And White, Is The Excitement Of Witnessing Events Too Momentous For The Medium Assigned To Record Them.

Black And White

More And More I Find I Want To Be Living In A Big Here And A Long Now.

If There Is A New Fascism, It Won't Come From Skinheads And Punks; It Will Come From People Who Eat Granola And Think They Know How The World Should Be.

I'd Rather Hold One Note For An Hour And Modulate It So That It Means Something Than Play 3,000 Notes In 15 Seconds.

I Belong To A Gospel Choir. They Know I Am An Atheist But They Are Very Tolerant.

If You Grow Up In A Very Strong Religion Like Catholicism You Certainly Cultivate In Yourself A Certain Taste For The Intensity Of Ideas.

Music In Itself Carries A Whole Set Of Messages Which Are Very, Very Rich And Complex, And The Words Either Serve To Exclude Certain Ones Or Point Up Certain Others.

It's Actually Very Easy For Democracy To Disappear.

I Hate Talking About Music, To Tell You The Truth.

I'm Bloody Awful At Multi-tasking.

The Trouble With New Age Music Is That There's No Evil In It.

Pop Is Totally Results-oriented And There Is A Very Strong Feedback Loop.

I Love Good, Loud Speakers.

The Only Value Of Ideology Is To Stop Things Becoming Showbiz.

I Have A Definite Talent For Convincing People To Try Something New. I Am A Good Salesman. When I'm On Form, I Can Sell Anything.

The Whole History Of Pop Music Had Rested On The First Person Singular, With Occasional Intrusions Of The Second Person Singular.

It Infuriates Me That Stuff From The Internet Routinely Doesn't Include All The Credits. Because As Soon As I Listen To Something, If I Like It, I Want To Know, "who's The Bass Player?" "who Did That?" "who's The Engineer On This?

I Take Sounds And Change Them Into Words.

Part Of Me Likes A More Ragged, Jagged Guitar Sound Or Performance, But Our Work Might Not Have Been As Innovative Had We Followed In The Footsteps Of What Came Before. We Were Very Proud Of What We Had Hit On.

As Struggles Go, Being An Artist Isn't That Much Of One.

Being An Artist

When You Build A Building, You Finish A Building. You Don't Finish A Garden; You Start It, And Then It Carries On With Its Life. So My Analogy Was Really To Say That We Composers Or Some Of Us Should Think Of Ourselves As People Who Start Processes Rather Than Finish Them. And There Might Be Surprises.

Everything Good Proceeds From Enthusiasm.

For Me It's Always Contingent On Getting A Sound-the Sound Always Suggests What Kind Of Melody It Should Be. So It's Always Sound First And Then The Line Afterwards.

When I Work There Are Two Distinct Phases: The Phase Of Pushing The Work Along, Getting Something To Happen, Where All The Input Comes From Me, And Phase Two, Where Things Start To Combine In A Way That Wasn't Expected Or Predicted By What I Supplied. Once Phase Two Begins Everything Is Okay, Because Then The Work Starts To Dictate Its Own Terms. It Starts To Get An Identity Which Demands Certain Future Moves. But During The First Phase You Often Find That You Come To A Full Stop.

Law Is Always Better Than War.

I Hate The Rock Music Tradition. I Can't Bear It!

I've Always Thought That Art Is A Lie, An Interesting Lie. And I'll Sort Of Listen To The "lie" And Try To Imagine The World Which Makes That Lie True...what That World Must Be Like, And What Would Have To Happen For Us To Get From This World To That One.

I Think Audiences Are Quite Comfortable Watching Something Coming Into Being.

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.

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.

I've Discovered This New Electronic Technique That Creates New Speech Out Of Stuff That's Already There.

Even Though I'm Known As A Pop Musician, I Have A Seriousness About What I Do.

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.

I'm Actually An Evangelical Atheist, But There Is Something I Recognise About Religion: That It Gives People A Chance To Surrender.

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.

The Computer Brings Out The Worst In Some People.

One Of The Great Breakthroughs Of Evolution Theory Is That You Start With Simple Things And They Will Grow Into Complexity.

It's Easy To Forget That Your Best Work Is Done When Your Attention Is Fully Engaged.

Repetition Doesn't Really Exist

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.

I've Had Quite A Lot Of Luck With Dreams. I've Often Awoken In The Night With A Phrase Or Even A Whole Song In My Head.

There's A Kind Of Edge To What You're Doing, The Kind Of Leading Edge Of What You're Doing. Inside That Edge [are Elements You] Are Familiar With, And Are Probably Becoming Slightly Bored With, As Well, Over A Period Of Time. "i've Pulled That One Out Before. Oh, No, I Can't I'm Just Fed Up With That. Let's Do Something Else."and You Always Think "oh My God I've Never Done Anything At All Like That Before." But, Of Course, In Retrospect, And To An Outsider, They'll Say, "oh, Yeah That's Typical Eno.

W]hat Makes A Work Of Art ‘good’ For You Is Not Something That Is Already ‘inside’ It, But Something That Happens Inside You.

A Studio Is An Absolute Labyrinth Of Possibilities - This Is Why Records Take So Long To Make Because There Are Millions Of Permutations Of Things You Can Do. The Most Useful Thing You Can Do Is To Get Rid Of Some Of Those Options Before You Start

If You've Spent A Long Time Developing A Skill And Techniques, And Now Some 14 Year-old Upstart Can Get Exactly The Same Result, You Might Feel A Bit Miffed I Suppose, But That Has Happened Forever.

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.

All Music Has Political Dimensions Because It Suggests A Way Of Being.

I Hate The Way Cds Just Drone On For Bloody Hours And You Stop Caring.

A Lot Of The So-called Systems Composers Have This Thing That The System Is Always Right. You Don't Fiddle With It At All. Well, I Don't Think That. I Think The System Is As Right As You Judge It To Be. If For Some Reason You Don't Like A Bit Of It You Must Trust Your Intuition On That. I Don't Take A Doctrinaire Approach To Systems.

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.

Nothing So Dates An Era As Its Conception Of The Future.

Everybody Is Entertained To Death.

When You Make Something You Are Always Offering Some Choices And Denying Others.

We Have Two Different Ways Of Working. One Is Completely Unstructured Where Somebody Just Starts Playing And Somebody Joins In And Then The Other Person Joins In, And Something Starts To Happen. That's Occasionally What Happens. What More Often Happens Is That We Settle On Some Sort Of - A Few Sort Of Structural Ideas, Like, "okay, When I Put My Finger Up, We're All Going To Move To The Extremes Of Our Instruments. So, That Means You Can Only Play Either Very High Or Very Low Or Both. And We're Going To Stay There Until I Take My Finger Down.

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.

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.

Nearly All The Things I Do That Are Of Any Merit At All Start Off Just Being Good Fun.

I Never Wanted To Write The Sort Of Song That Said, 'look At How Abnormal And Crazy And Out There I Am, Man!'

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.

The Most Important Thing In A Piece Of Music Is To Seduce People To The Point Where They Start Searching.

I'm Kind Of An Evangelical Atheist.

Culture Is Everything You Don't Have To Do.

The Idea That Something Is Uncool Because It’s Old Or Foreign Has Left The Collective Consciousness.

When I Went Back To England After A Year Away, The Country Seemed Stuck, Dozing In A Fairy Tale, Stifled By The Weight Of Tradition.

I Wanted To Get Rid Of The Element That Had Been Considered Essential In Pop Music: The Voice.

Stop Thinking About Art Works As Objects, And Start Thinking About Them As Triggers For Experiences... That Solves A Lot Of Problems ... Art Is Something That Happens, A Process, Not A Quality, And All Sorts Of Things Can Make It Happen ... [w]hat Makes A Work Of Art 'good' For You Is Not Something That Is Already 'inside' It, But Something That Happens Inside You.

Whenever You Listen To A Piece Of Music, What You Are Actually Doing Is Hearing The Latest Sentence In A Very Long Story You’ve Been Listening To - All The Pieces Of Music You’ve Ever Heard.

I'm Fascinated By Musicians Who Don't Completely Understand Their Territory; That's When You Do Your Best Work.

Frequently, I Go Straight Into The Studio And See What's Around. I Might Hire A Couple Of Instruments That I've Never Used - Maybe A Particular Type Of Electronic Organ Or An Echo Unit. Then I Just Dabble With Sounds Until Something Starts To Happen That Suggests A Texture. The Texture Suggests Some Kind Of Mood, And The Mood Suggests Some Kind Of Lyric. That's Like Working In Reverse, Often Quite The Other Way Around, From Sound To Song. Although Often They Stop Before They Get To The Song Stage.

One Often Makes Music To Supplement One's World.

Most Big Concerts Sound Disgusting And Awful And Insultingly Bad. It's Like Going To The Cinema And Been Shown A Scratchy Film Which Is Upsidedown And The Bulb Had Gone On The Projector. The Quality Of Large-scale Live Music Is So Shocking.

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.

I Make A Lot Of Pieces Of Music That I Never Release As Cds.

Set Up A Situation That Presents You With Something Slightly Beyond Your Reach.

All The Best Lyrics Are Written In Ten Minutes.

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.

Composition Is A Way Of Living Out Your Philosophy And Calling It Art.

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.

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.

One Way Of Working Is Just Bring A Group Of Totally Different Musicians Together And Encourage Them To Stick To Their Guns, Not To Do The Thing That Normally Happens In A Working Situation Where Everyone Homogenizes And Concedes Certain Points - So Eventually They're All Playing In Roughly The Same Style. I Wanted Quite The Opposite Of That. I Wanted Them To Accent Their Styles, So That They Pulled Away. So There Would Be A Kind Of Space In The Middle Where I Could Operate, And Attempt To Make These Things Coalesce In Some Way. In Fact Quite A Lot Of My Stuff Has Arisen From That.

I Still Do Mostly Listen To Cds. I Think That Every Format Really Is A Different Way Of Listening. If You Take A Different Sort Of Psychological Stance To It - Like, I Think The Transition From Vinyl To Cd Definitely Marked A Difference In The Way People Treated Music. The Vinyl Commands A Certain Kind Of Reverence Because It's A Big Object And Quite Fragile So You Handle It Rather Carefully, And It's Expensive So You Pay Attention To How It's Looked After.

Given The Chance, I'll Die Like A Baby, On Some Faraway Beach, When The Season's Over.

You Shoot Your Arrow And Then You Paint Your Bulls Eye Around It, And Therefore You Have Hit The Target Dead Centre.

I Believe In Singing. I Believe In Singing Together.

The Problem With Computers Is That There Is Not Enough Africa In Them.

Reggie Watts Is A Most Unusual Talent: A Huge Vocal Range, A Natural Musicality, And A Sidesplitting Wit. Is He A Comedian? A Singer? A Performance Artist? I've Seen Him A Few Times Since Then And I Still Can't Decide. Whatever, He Ain't Like Nobody Else.

If I Tried To Make A Commercial Album, It Would Be A Complete Flop. I Have No Idea What The World At Large Likes.

I've Got A Feeling That Music Might Not Be The Most Interesting Place To Be In The World Of Things.

If You Want To Make Someone Feel Emotion, You Have To Make Them Let Go. Listening To Something Is An Act Of Surrender.

Every Band I’ve Worked With Also Wants To Be Countercultural In The Sense That They Want To Feel That They’ve Gone Somewhere That Nobody Else Has Been.

I Think We're About Ready For A New Feeling To Enter Music. I Think That Will Come From The Arabic World.

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.

Agressive Music Can Only Shock You Once. Afterwards Its Impact Declines. It's Inevitable.

I'm Always Interested In Something When It Isn't Familiar To Me.

I Felt Extremely Uncomfortable As The Focal Point, In The Spotlight. I Really Like The Behind The Scenes Role, Because All My Freedom Is There.

Behind The Scenes

Often, I Think You Find That You're Enjoying Certain Things, You've Got This New Way Of Listening, And You Find That You Really Enjoy The Way That Sounds On It And The Way This Other Thing Sounds On It And The Way That Other Thing Sounds On It. So, You're Finding A New Pleasure That You Didn't Know About Before.

Attention Is What Creates Value. Artworks Are Made As Well By How People Interact With Them - And Therefore By What Quality Of Interaction They Can Inspire.

I Often Say To People That Producing Is The Best Paid Form Of Cowardice. When You Produce Things You Almost Always Get Credit, If It's A Good Record, But You Hardly Ever Get The Blame If It's Not! You Don't Really Take Responsibility For Your Work.

Robert Fripp And I Will Be Recording Another Lp Very Soon. It Should Be Even More Monotonous Than The First One!

If I Had A Stock Of Fabulous Sounds I Would Just Always Use Them. I Wouldn't Bother To Find New Ones.

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Jake Gyllenhaal

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