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.
BRIAN ENOOnce 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.
BRIAN ENOThe 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.
BRIAN ENOEditing 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.
BRIAN ENOSo, 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.
BRIAN ENOI’ve noticed a terrible thing, which is I will agree to anything if it’s far enough in the future.
BRIAN ENOSometimes 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.
BRIAN ENOWe 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.
BRIAN ENOWhen 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.
BRIAN ENOIn 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.
BRIAN ENORationality 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.
BRIAN ENOAvant-garde music is sort of research music. You’re glad someone’s done it but you don’t necessarily want to listen to it.
BRIAN ENOYou 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.
BRIAN ENOI’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.
BRIAN ENOComposition is a way of living out your philosophy and calling it art.
BRIAN ENOThe 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.
BRIAN ENOAnything popular is populist, and populist is rarely a good adjective.
BRIAN ENO