I don’t like headphones very much, and I rarely listen to music on headphones.
BRIAN ENOOne often makes music to supplement one’s world.
More Brian Eno Quotes
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Composition is a way of living out your philosophy and calling it art.
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I wanted to use the studio like a microscope for sound, which is what good engineers do.
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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.
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For instance, I’m always fascinated to see whether, given the kind of fairly known and established form called popular music, whether there is some magic combination that nobody has hit upon before.
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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.
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I believe that singing is the key to long life, a good figure, a stable temperament, increased intelligence, new friends, super self-confidence , heightened sexual attractiveness, and a better sense of humor.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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If you grow up in a very strong religion like Catholicism you certainly cultivate in yourself a certain taste for the intensity of ideas.
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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.
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The biology of purpose keeps my nose above the surface.
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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.
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If I had a stock of fabulous sounds I would just always use them. I wouldn’t bother to find new ones.
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Some people are very good at being ‘stars’ and it suits them. I’m grudging about it and I find it annoying.
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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.
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Be the first to not do what nobody has ever thought of not doing before.
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Robert Fripp and I will be recording another LP very soon. It should be even more monotonous than the first one!
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For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.
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People who are very confident in themselves aren’t hurt by criticism. They make use of it.
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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.
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Painting, I think it’s like jazz.
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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.
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When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. Not, he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought I should know how it’s done so I would recognise when I was being lied to.
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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?
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Saying that cultural objects have value is like saying that telephones have conversations.
BRIAN ENO