The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.
BRIAN ENOPeople do dismiss ambient music, don’t they? They call it ‘easy listening,’ as if to suggest that it should be hard to listen to.
More Brian Eno Quotes
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For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.
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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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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 want to rethink surrender as an active verb.
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Think inside the work – outside the work
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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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It’s actually very easy for democracy to disappear.
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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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There are hundreds of manufacturers always producing dvices that in general do the same things. Since they have slight structural differences if you take one and fool around with it and give it a good kick it will actually do something that it wasn’t designed to do.
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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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What matters in modern music is not the part you can write down, the words and the tune, but the rest – the texture, the atmosphere, the references and associations.
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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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You don’t have to act as if you know what you’re doing
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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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We’re going through this super-uptight era, which I think comes entirely from literacy, actually. It’s the result of machines that were designed as word processors being used for making music.
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I see TV as a picture medium rather than a narrative medium.
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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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Lyrics are the only thing to do with music that haven’t been made easier technically.
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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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People who are very confident in themselves aren’t hurt by criticism. They make use of it.
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Law is always better than war.
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It’s nice, I think, when people use your music for things you didn’t think of.
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With all fashion, what we do is play at being somebody else. We play at inhabiting another kind of world.
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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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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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Set up a situation that presents you with something slightly beyond your reach.
BRIAN ENO