If you grow up in a very strong religion like Catholicism you certainly cultivate in yourself a certain taste for the intensity of ideas.
BRIAN ENOThe 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.
More Brian Eno Quotes
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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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It’s amazing how quickly people get used to bad quality.
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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.
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Anything popular is populist, and populist is rarely a good adjective.
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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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In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.
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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.
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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.
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Everybody is entertained to death.
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I despise computers in many ways. I think they’re hopelessly underevolved and overrated.
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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.
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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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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?
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Not many people bought Velvet Underground LPs, but those who did, started a band.
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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.
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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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Perhaps when music has been shouting for so long, a quieter voice seems attractive.
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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.
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Being completely free to choose what to do is actually quite difficult
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In England and Europe, we have this huge music called ambient – ambient techno, ambient house, ambient hip-hop, ambient this, ambient that.
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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.
BRIAN ENO