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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.

-Brian Eno

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I Often Say To

Brian Eno

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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.

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

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

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.

In My Normal Life I'm A Very Unadventurous Person.

The Micro-compositions Are The Pieces Themselves, But The Macro-composition Is The Whole Set Of Them And How It Moves From Track To Track And How The Titles Relate To One Another, For Example. Always When I Do Records Like This Of A Selection Of Instrumental Pieces - The Titles, To Me, Are Very Important.

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.

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

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

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

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.

You Can't Really Imagine Music Without Technology.

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.

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

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

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.

When I've Finally Got The Title, I Think, "okay, Yes, Now I Know Where We Are. Now I Know What It Is. Fine, That Must Be Finished Or Nearly Finished.

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

I Got Interested In The Idea Of Music That Could Make Itself, In A Sense, In The Mid 1960s Really, When I First Heard Composers Like Terry Riley, And When I First Started Playing With Tape Recorders.

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.

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.

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

I Think That There's Something That I Still Like About The Fact Of A Package, Like The Latest Report From Somebody. "okay, This Is What They're Up To Now; This Is What They're Doing; Who's Working With Them?

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

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.

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?'

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.

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

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

The Thing That Obsesses Me More Than Anything Is Waste - The Waste Of Human Intelligence And Creativity.

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

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.

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.'

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

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.

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

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.

Listening To Something Is An Act Of Surrender.

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

One Of The Things You're Doing When You Make Art, Apart From Entertaining Yourself And Other People, Is Trying To See What Ways Of Working Feel Good, What Feels Right.

I Think It's A Myth That American Public Or Any Other Public Is So Stupid That They Need To Be Constantly Pricked.

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

With All Fashion, What We Do Is Play At Being Somebody Else. We Play At Inhabiting Another Kind Of World.

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

Genius Is Individual, Scenius Is Communal.

I Remember When In The Early Days Of Rock'n'roll, When Everything Sounded Totally Different, All Amazing And Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah. Now You Can Play Me One Second Of Any Record From That Time, And I'll Say "1959" Or "1961." I Can Hear Precisely. It's Like It Has A Huge Date Stamp On It.

Lyrics Are Always Misleading Because They Make People Think That That's What The Music Is About.

What I Would Really Like To Do, If I Could Have A Sort Of Kingship For A Short Time And Organize The Group Of My Dreams - I Would Make One Group Which Would Be A Combination Of, Say, Parliament And Kraftwerk - Put Those Two Together And Say, "make A Record." Something That Would Be An Extraordinary Combination: The Weird Physical Feeling Of Parliament With This Strange, Rigid Stuff Over The Top Of It.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I Enjoy Working With Complicated Equipment. A Lot Of My Things Started Just With A Rhythm Box, But I Feed It Through So Many Things That What Comes Out Sounds Very Complex And Rich.

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

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.

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.

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

You Just Make Different Music On A Computer. And You Can Make Wonderful Music On A Computer, But Don't Pretend That The Machinery Is Transparent. It Makes As Much Difference To What You're Doing As It Does If You Play An Acoustic Guitar As Opposed To A Kettledrum. You're Not Going To Make The Same Music.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Emotion Creates Reality, Reality Demands Action.

The Computer Brings Out The Worst In Some People.

Human Development Thus Far Has Been Fueled And Guided By The Feeling That Things Could Be, And Are Probably Going To Be, Better.

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

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.

I Don't Like Celebrity Programmes - But I Do Like Programmes About How Ideas Are Formed And Evolve.

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

I Want To Rethink Surrender As An Active Verb.

The Most Important Thing Is The Thing Most Easily Forgotten.

Easily Forgotten

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

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.

There Are Hundreds Of Manufacturers Always Producing Dvices That In General Do The Same Things. Since They Have Slight Structural Differences If You Take One And Fool Around With It And Give It A Good Kick It Will Actually Do Something That It Wasn't Designed To Do. I Have This Relationship With My Synthesizers. I've Had Them For So Long, And I've Never Had Them Serviced, So That Now Practically All Of Their Functions Operate Differently From What They Were Designed To Do. They Do Very Interesting Things Now, But That Means Nobody Else Can Use Them Either.

I Had A Lot Of Trouble With Engineers, Because Their Whole Background Is Learning From A Functional Point Of View, And Then Learning How To Perform That Function.

My Kind Of Composing Is More Like The Work Of A Gardener. The Gardener Takes His Seeds And Scatters Them, Knowing What He Is Planting But Not Quite What Will Grow Where And When - And He Won't Necessarily Be Able To Reproduce It Again Afterwards Either.

What People Call Unemotional Just Doesnt Have A Single Overriding Emotion To It. The Things That I Like Best Are The Ones That Ambiguous On The Emotional Level.

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

Repetition Doesn't Really Exist

Cooking Is A Way Of Listening To The Radio.

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

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

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.

As Soon As You Externalize An Idea You See Facets Of It That Weren't Clear When It Was Just Floating Around In Your Head.

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

I Always Use The Same Guitar; I Got This Guitar Years And Years Ago For Nine Pounds. It's Still Got The Same Strings On It.

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

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

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

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.

Quite Often, And In Fact More Often, I Would Say, I'm Struggling All The Way Through To Think, "what Is It I Like About This? What Is The Personality Of This Thing I'm Hearing That I Like So Much?" And It's Nearly Always A Sort Of Mixed Emotion, Which Is Why I Like It. It's Something That I Have Mixed Feelings About In The Sense That It's Both, Say, Placid And Dangerous, Or Bitter And Sweet, Or Dark And Bright.

Some People Are Very Good At Being 'stars' And It Suits Them. I'm Grudging About It And I Find It Annoying.

Of Course, Like Anybody I Repeat Myself Endlessly, But I Don't Know That I'm Doing It, Usually.

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

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.

The Lyrics Are Constructed As Empirically As The Music. I Don't Set Out To Say Anything Very Important.

I Prefer To Shoot The Arrow, Then Paint The Target Around It. You Make The Niches In Which You Finally Reside.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

People Always Focus On People Like Me Who Use Synthesizers, Right, Which Are Explicitly Electronic And Therefore Obvious. "ah, Yes, That's Electronic Music." But They Don't Realize That So Is The Concept Of Actually Taking A Piece Of Extant Music And Literally Re-collaging It, Taking Chunks Out And Changing The Dynamics Radically And Creating New Rhythmic Structures With Echo And All That. That's Real Electronic Music, As Far As I'm Concerned.

In The 19th Century, A Lot Of People Were Against Outlawing Child Labour, Because To Do So Would Be Against The Very Foundations Of A Free Market Economy: 'these Children Want To Work, These People Want To Employ Them... What Is Your Problem? It's Not As If Anyone Has Kidnapped Them...'

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

I Want To Make Things That Put Me In The Position Of Innocence, That Recreate The Feeling Of Innocence In You.

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

We're Going Through This Super-uptight Era, Which I Think Comes Entirely From Literacy, Actually. It's The Result Of Machines That Were Designed As Word Processors Being Used For Making Music.

I Suppose I Am Reluctant About Being Any Sort Of 'star' And I Didn't Particularly Want To Be Portrayed As One.

You Can Hear The Profile Of A Sound, In Retrospect, So Much More Clearly Than You Did At The Time. And I Think One Of The Things That's Going To Be Nauseatingly Characteristic About So Much Music Of Now Is Its Glossy Production Values And Its Griddedness, The Tightness Of The Way Everything Is Locked Together.

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

Working Together

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

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

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

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.

Culture Is Everything You Don't Have To Do.

Perhaps When Music Has Been Shouting For So Long, A Quieter Voice Seems Attractive.

One Often Makes Music To Supplement One's World.

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.

I Believe In Singing.

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.

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.

The Time I Like Listening To Music Most On Headphones Is, I Have A Game I Play With My Brother, He's A Musician As Well.and He Sends Me Midi Files Of Keyboard Pieces. So, These Are Pieces Where I Just Get A Midi File; I Don't Know What Instrument He Was Playing Them On; I Know Nothing About His Section Of The Sound Of The Piece, And Then When I'm Sitting On Trains I Do A Lot Of Train Travel I Turn Them Into Pieces Of Music. And I Love To Do That; It's My Favorite Hobby.

I Do Love Being In My Studio. Especially At Night.

Ambient Music Must Be As Ignorable As It Is Interesting.

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.

Try To Make Things That Can Become Better In Other People’s Minds Than They Were In Yours.

I Don't Want To Do Free Jazz! Because Free Jazz - Which Is The Musical Equivalent Of Free Marketeering - Isn't Actually Free At All. It's Just Constrained By What Your Muscles Can Do.

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

We Are Increasingly Likely To Find Ourselves In Places With Background Music. No Composers Have Thought To Write For These Modern Spaces, Which Represent 30% Of Our Musical Experience.

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.

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.

In Art, You Can Crash Your Plane And Walk Away From It

Most Game Music Is Based On Loops Effectively.

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.

It's Actually Very Easy For Democracy To Disappear.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Everything Good Proceeds From Enthusiasm.

People Tend To Play In Their Comfort Zone, So The Best Things Are Achieved In A State Of Surprise, Actually.

I'm Kind Of An Evangelical Atheist.

When People Censor Themselves They're Just As Likely To Get Rid Of The Good Bits As The Bad Bits.

My Shows Are Not Narratives.

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.

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

Most Of Those Melodies Are Me Trying To Find Out What Notes Fit, And Then Hitting Ones That Don't Fit In A Very Interesting Way.

Painting, I Think It's Like Jazz.

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.

Put Out As Much As You Can. It Doesn't Do Anything Sitting On A Shelf.

People Who Are Very Confident In Themselves Aren't Hurt By Criticism. They Make Use Of It.

Lyrics Are The Only Thing To Do With Music That Haven't Been Made Easier Technically.

Being Completely Free To Choose What To Do Is Actually Quite Difficult

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.

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

Look Closely At The Most Embarrassing Details, And Amplify Them.

I See Tv As A Picture Medium Rather Than A Narrative Medium.

Law Is Always Better Than War.

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

I Set Up Situations That Involve Abandoning Control And Finding Out What Happens.

Sometimes You Recognize That There Is A Category Of Human Experience That Has Not Been Identified But Everyone Knows About It. That Is When I Find A Term To Describe It.

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

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

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

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

People Assume That The Meaning Of A Song Is Vested In The Lyrics. To Me, That Has Never Been The Case. There Are Very Few Songs That I Can Think Of Where I Remember The Words.

I'm Bloody Awful At Multi-tasking.

Anything Popular Is Populist, And Populist Is Rarely A Good Adjective.

I Often Work By Avoidance.

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.

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

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

I Have Lived In Countries That Were Coming Out Of Conflict: Ireland, South Africa, The Czech Republic. People There Are Overflowing With Energy.

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'm Struck By The Insidious, Computer-driven Tendency To Take Things Out Of The Domain Of Muscular Activity And Put Them Into The Domain Of Mental Activity.

Admirers Can Be A Tremendous Force For Conservatism.

Honor Thy Error As A Hidden Intention.

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.

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.

The First Velvet Underground Album Only Sold 10,000 Copies, But Everyone Who Bought It Formed A Band

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