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.’
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.
More Brian Eno Quotes
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I’m not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.
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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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So, 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.
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Try to make things that can become better in other people’s minds than they were in yours.
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I don’t like headphones very much, and I rarely listen to music on headphones.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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People do dismiss ambient music, don’t they? They call it ‘easy listening,’ as if to suggest that it should be hard to listen to.
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When you look back on a historical period of music, it seems so obvious to you what the characteristics of it are, but they’re not obvious at the time. So, when I look back at my own work.
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Every collaboration helps you grow.
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I think we’re about ready for a new feeling to enter music. I think that will come from the Arabic world.
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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.
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Everybody is entertained to death.
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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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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.
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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.
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I suppose I am reluctant about being any sort of ‘star’ and I didn’t particularly want to be portrayed as one.
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The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten.
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You know that in order to copyright material somebody has to write it down for you. Any piece of recorded material has to be scored in order for it to be copyrighted.
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People always focus on people like me who use synthesizers, right, which are explicitly electronic and therefore obvious.
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Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature… The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
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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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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.
BRIAN ENO