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

-Brian Eno

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When I Was At

Brian Eno

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

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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.

Ambient Music Must Be As Ignorable As It Is Interesting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

When I Was Working With Talking Heads What Would Happen Typically Is That They Would Go Out And Start Playing A Track, And I Would Always Run The Tape. I Always Record Everything, Even A Run Through Where You're Trying To Get In Tune. That's A Principle Because Sometimes When The Situation Isn't Clear Interesting Things Happen, And They Are Worth Listening To Again.

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

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

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

My Shows Are Not Narratives.

All The Best Lyrics Are Written In Ten Minutes.

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.

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.

Every Collaboration Helps You Grow.

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

I'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.

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

Velvet Underground

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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 Often Work By Avoidance.

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

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

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 Bloody Awful At Multi-tasking.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 Believe In Singing. I Believe In Singing Together.

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.

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

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

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

Being An Artist Is A Job For Life.

Being An Artist

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Being An Artist

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

Most Game Music Is Based On Loops Effectively.

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.

You Can't Really Imagine Music Without Technology.

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

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

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.

Everybody Is Entertained To Death.

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

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.

Repetition Doesn't Really Exist

Law Is Always Better Than War.

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

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

Listening To Music

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

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

Everything Good Proceeds From Enthusiasm.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

The Seven White Notes On The Piano - Each Section Of The Piece (there Are 12 Sections) Is Five Of Those Seven White Notes. If You Calculate It, There Are 21 Groups Of Five Notes In Any Group Of Seven Notes. And Although There Are 12 Sections, This Piece Actually Uses Nine Of Those Groups Because Some Of The Sections Repeat Earlier Ones. So That's The Formula. It's Very Simple As A Way Of Generating Something. It's My Inner Minimalist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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 Biology Of Purpose Keeps My Nose Above The Surface.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I Think 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.

Something I’ve Realized Lately, To My Shock, Is That I Am An Optimist, In That I Think Humans Are Almost Infinitely Capable Of Self-change And Self-modification, And That We Really Can Build The Future That We Want If We’re Smart About It.

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

I 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.

One Often Makes Music To Supplement One's World.

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

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.

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

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

I'm Kind Of An Evangelical Atheist.

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 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.

I Love The Sort Of Ambivalence Of This, The Ambiguity Of Something - Being, For Instance, In A Quite Busy Mexican Restaurant With One Of These Very Gentle Tracks Playing I Remember As Being Particularly Nice.

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.

Think Inside The Work - Outside The Work

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 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.

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

Every Collaboration Helps You Grow. With Bowie, It's Different Every Time. I Know How To Create Settings, Unusual Aural Environments. That Inspires Him. He's Very Quick.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Cooking Is A Way Of Listening To The Radio.

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

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

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

The Prospect Of Music Being Detachable From Time And Place Meant That One Could Start To Think Of Music As A Part Of One's Furniture.

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

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

I Believe In Singing.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

I'm Very Opinionated.

Listening To Something Is An Act Of Surrender.

I Love Good, Loud Speakers.

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.

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 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.

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

The Computer Brings Out The Worst In Some People.

I Want To Rethink Surrender As An Active Verb.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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

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

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.

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.

Emotion Creates Reality, Reality Demands Action.

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

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

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

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