Background Image

...

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.

-Brian Eno

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

The Tools Are Evolving,

Brian Eno

...

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.

Views: 8

Topic

More From Brian Eno

The Biology Of Purpose Keeps My Nose Above The Surface.

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.

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.

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.

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

Most Game Music Is Based On Loops Effectively.

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

Painting, I Think It's Like Jazz.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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 Believe In Singing. I Believe In Singing Together.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Culture Is Everything You Don't Have To Do.

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Listening To 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.'

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Listening To Something Is An Act Of Surrender.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

I Love Good, Loud Speakers.

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

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 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.

When Our Governments Want To Sell Us A Course Of Action, They Do It By Making Sure It's The Only Thing On The Agenda, The Only Thing Everyone's Talking About. And They Pre-load The Ensuing Discussion With Highly Selected Images, Devious And Prejudicial Language, Dubious Linkages, Weak Or False 'intelligence' And Selected 'leaks'.

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

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 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 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.

It's Actually Very Easy For Democracy To Disappear.

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

Being An Artist

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.

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.

All The Best Lyrics Are Written In Ten Minutes.

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

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.

Genius Is Individual, Scenius Is Communal.

One Often Makes Music To Supplement One's World.

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.

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.

Ambient Music Must Be As Ignorable As It Is Interesting.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 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?'

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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."

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 Cant Duplicate My Own Successes, Because Part Of The Creation Of That Effect Is Making Something Happen That You Didn't Expect

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.

When You Sing With A Group Of People, You Learn How To Subsume Yourself Into A Group Consciousness Because A Capella Singing Is All About The Immersion Of The Self Into The Community. That's One Of The Great Feelings - To Stop Being Me For A Little While And To Become Us. That Way Lies Empathy, The Great Social Virtue.

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

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.

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.

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

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

The Computer Brings Out The Worst In Some People.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

I Take Sounds And Change Them Into Words.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Everything Good Proceeds From Enthusiasm.

Another Way Of Working Is Setting Deliberate Constraints That Aren't Musical Ones - Like Saying, "well, This Piece Is Going To Be Three Minutes And Nineteen Seconds Long And It's Going To Have Changes Here, Here And Here, And There's Going To Be A Convolution Of Events Here, And There's Going To Be A Very Fast Rhythm Here With A Very Slow Moving Part Over The Top Of It." Those Are The Sort Of Visual Ideas That I Can Draw Out On Graph Paper. I've Done A Lot Of Film Music This Way.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Being An Artist Is A Job For Life.

Being An Artist

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

Velvet Underground

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Trending Author

M. Night Shyamalan

Gwendolyn Brooks

Nicolas Sarkozy

Category