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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.

-Brian Eno

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Sometimes You Recognize That

Brian Eno

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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.

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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.

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

Things That Are Very Popular Are Not Taken Seriously, Because The Snobbish Side Of One Says, "well, If Everyone Likes It It Can't Be That Good." Whereas If Only I And A Couple Of Other People Like It, Then It Must Be Really Something Special.

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.

I'm Always Interested In What You Can Do With Technology That People Haven't Thought Of Doing Yet.

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.

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.

A Big Ego Isn't Necessarily A Bad Thing. A Big Ego Means That You Have Some Confidence In Your Abilities, Really, And That You're Prepared To Take The Risk Of Trying Them Out.

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.

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.

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

You Can't Really Imagine Music Without Technology.

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 Do Love Being In My Studio. Especially At Night.

I Occasionally Meet People And They Say, 'oh, I Was Born To Discreet Music'... They Always Have Very Weird Eyes, Those People.

If Something Is Good, You Must Torture It Mercilessly Until It Is Either Dead Or Great.

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

Being An Artist Is A Job For Life.

Being An Artist

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

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

I Believe In Singing.

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

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

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.

Everybody Thinks That When New Technologies Come Along That They're Transparent And You Can Just Do Your Job Well On It. But Technologies Always Import A Whole New Set Of Values With Them.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Every Collaboration Helps You Grow.

Good Teachers Realise That The Students Are The Antenna; They Are Sensing Things That The Teachers Don't Yet Sense.

I'm Kind Of An Evangelical Atheist.

American Television Really Is Pathetic.

American Television

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

People In The Arts Often Want To Aim For The Biggest, Most Obvious Target, And Hit It Smack In The Bull’s Eye. Of Course With Everybody Else Aiming There As Well That Makes It Very Hard And Expensive To Hit. I Prefer To Shoot The Arrow, Then Paint The Target Around It. You Make The Niches In Which You Finally Reside.

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

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

Listening To Something Is An Act Of Surrender.

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

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

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.

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?'

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

At The Party, Rob Partridge Said To Me, "you Gave Hope To Other Balding Men." My New Epitaph: "co-wrote A Couple Of Decent Songs And Went Bald Shamelessly."

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.

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

I Believe In Singing. I Believe In Singing Together.

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.

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.

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.

The Whole Point Of Art, As Far As I’m Concerned, Is That Art Doesn’t Make Any Difference. And That’s Why It’s Important. Take Film: You Can Have Quite Extreme Emotional Experiences Watching A Movie, But They Stop As Soon As You Walk Out Of The Cinema. You Can See People Being Hurt, But Even Though You Feel Those Things Strongly, You Know They’re Not Real.

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

Ambient Music Must Be As Ignorable As It Is Interesting.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Cultural Objects Have No Notable Identity Outside Of That Which We Confer Upon Them. Their Value Is Entirely A Product Of The Interaction That We Have With Them.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

You Can't Do Anything Interesting With Cutting-edge Technology Except Not Make It Cutting-edge.

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

I Have These Headphones, Which Pretty Much Exclude Everything Else So That You Can Really Completely Control The Sound That You're Hearing. I Don't Use Them Very Much, I Have To Say. I Very Rarely Listen On Headphones.

The Reason Conservatives Cohere And Radicals Fight: Everyone Agrees About Fears, No One About Visions.

It's Actually Very Easy For Democracy To Disappear.

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.

Of All The Things You Can Now Do, Which Do You Choose To Do?

My Interest In Making Music Has Been To Create Something That Does Not Exist That I Would Like To Listen To. I Wanted To Hear Music That Had Not Yet Happened, By Putting Together Things That Suggested A New Thing Which Did Not Yet Exist.

I Can See The Use And Value Of Religion, Just As I Can See The Use Of Mud Wrestling, Yoga, Astronomy And Sadomasochism. But I Reject The Idea That You Can't Be A Deep Human Being Without It Or Any Of Them.

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.

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

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

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.

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

At The Beginning Of The 20th Century, The Ambition Of The Great Painters Was To Make Paintings That Were Like Music, Which Was Then Considered As The Noblest Art.

One Often Makes Music To Supplement One's World.

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.

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

Listening To Music

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

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

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

All The Best Lyrics Are Written In Ten Minutes.

Admirers Can Be A Tremendous Force For Conservatism.

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.

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

I'm Bloody Awful At Multi-tasking.

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

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.

Also Something That You Don't Have To Listen To From Beginning To End - You Can Enter At Any Point And Leave At Any Point.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

If You Had A Sign Above Every Studio Door Saying ‘this Studio Is A Musical Instrument’ It Would Make Such A Different Approach To Recording.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

I Often Work By Avoidance.

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

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...'

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.

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

I Don't Live In The Past At All; I'm Always Wanting To Do Something New. I Make A Point Of Constantly Trying To Forget And Get Things Out Of My Mind.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Repetition Doesn't Really Exist

Saying That Cultural Objects Have Value Is Like Saying That Telephones Have Conversations.

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.

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

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

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

Genius Is Individual, Scenius Is Communal.

I Love Good, Loud Speakers.

Everybody Is Entertained To Death.

If You Are Part Of A Religion That Very Strongly Insists That You Believe Then To Decide Not To Do That Is Quite A Big Hurdle To Jump Over. You Never Forget The Thought Process You Went Through. It Becomes Part Of Your Whole Intellectual Picture.

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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 Want To Rethink Surrender As An Active Verb.

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.

Not Many People Bought Velvet Underground Lps, But Those Who Did, Started A Band.

Velvet Underground

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

I Thought It Was Magic To Be Able To Catch Something Identically On Tape And Then Be Able To Play Around With It, Run It Backwards; I Thought That Was Great For Years.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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Stephen R. Donaldson

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