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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.

-Brian Eno

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There's A Kind Of

Brian Eno

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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.

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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.

Culture Is Everything You Don't Have To Do.

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.

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

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

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

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

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?'

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

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

Everything Good Proceeds From Enthusiasm.

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

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 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.

Whenever There's A New Music, There's A New Way Of Listening. And Whenever There's A New Way Of Listening, There Are New Musics That Follow From That. And People Start Listening Differently - That Can Either Mean In Different Places Or At Different Volumes Or In Different Social Groups Or Through Different Technologies.

I Want To Rethink Surrender As An Active Verb.

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.

The Dominant Theory Coming Out Of Hollywood Is That Peoples' Attention Spans Are Getting Shorter And Shorter And They Need More Stimulation.

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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

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...'

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.

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

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.

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

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'.

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.

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.

Admirers Can Be A Tremendous Force For Conservatism.

I'm Kind Of An Evangelical Atheist.

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

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.

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

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

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

Everybody Is Entertained To Death.

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

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

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

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."

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

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.

All The Best Lyrics Are Written In Ten Minutes.

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

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 Computer Brings Out The Worst In Some People.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Law Is Always Better Than War.

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.

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.

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

Most Game Music Is Based On Loops Effectively.

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

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

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

The Philosophical Idea That There Are No More Distances, That We Are All Just One World, That We Are All Brothers, Is Such A Drag! I Like Differences.

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

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.

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.

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

I Often Work By Avoidance.

The Most Important Thing Is The Thing Most Easily Forgotten.

Easily Forgotten

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

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

Being An Artist

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Every Increase In Your Knowledge Is A Simultaneous Decrease. You Learn And You Unlearn At The Same Time. A New Certainty Is A New Doubt As Well.

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

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.

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.

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.

Well, I Am A Dilettante. It's Only In England That Dilettantism Is Considered A Bad Thing. In Other Countries It's Called Interdisciplinary Research.

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.

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.

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.

Possessions Are A Way Of Turning Money Into Problems.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Listening To Something Is An Act Of Surrender.

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

Black And White

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

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

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

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'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.

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

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.

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

I Believe In Singing.

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

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

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

I'm Very Opinionated.

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

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.

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.

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

I'm Bloody Awful At Multi-tasking.

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 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.

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

It's Actually Very Easy For Democracy To Disappear.

I Love Good, Loud Speakers.

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

My Shows Are Not Narratives.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

I Think Most Artists Would Be Happy To Have Bigger Audiences Rather Than Smaller Ones. It Doesn't Mean That They Are Going To Change Their Work In Order Necessarily To Get It, But They're Happy If They Do Get It.

One 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

Honor Thy Error As A Hidden Intention.

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

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

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

The Biology Of Purpose Keeps My Nose Above The Surface.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Emotion Creates Reality, Reality Demands Action.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Every Collaboration Helps You Grow.

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.

Being An Artist Is A Job For Life.

Being An Artist

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Cooking Is A Way Of Listening To The Radio.

I Believe In Singing. I Believe In Singing Together.

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

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.

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

Ambient Music Must Be As Ignorable As It Is Interesting.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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G. Stanley Hall

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