The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.
BRIAN ENOAnything popular is populist, and populist is rarely a good adjective.
More Brian Eno Quotes
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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.
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Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences.
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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.
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I hate the way CDs just drone on for bloody hours and you stop caring.
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When people censor themselves they’re just as likely to get rid of the good bits as the bad bits.
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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.
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The artists of the past who impressed me were the ones who really focused their work.
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Well, there are some things that I just can’t get out of my head, and they start to annoy me after a while.
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I don’t like headphones very much, and I rarely listen to music on headphones.
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I believe in singing.
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Painting, I think it’s like jazz.
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It’s easy to forget that your best work is done when your attention is fully engaged.
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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.
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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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American television really is pathetic.
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Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that’s what the music is about.
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The seven white notes on the piano – each section of the piece (there are 12 sections) is five of those seven white notes.
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I hate the rock music tradition. I can’t bear it!
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Perhaps when music has been shouting for so long, a quieter voice seems attractive.
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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.
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Most game music is based on loops effectively.
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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.
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One often makes music to supplement one’s world.
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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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Being completely free to choose what to do is actually quite difficult
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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.
BRIAN ENO