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I occasionally meet people and they say, ‘Oh, I was born to Discreet Music’… They always have very weird eyes, those people.

Brian Eno

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.
BRIAN ENO

Country Weight Years
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.
BRIAN ENO

Decide Done Lying Teach Uncles
Painting, I think it’s like jazz.
BRIAN ENO

Jazz Painting Thinking
I prefer to shoot the arrow, then paint the target around it. You make the niches in which you finally reside.
BRIAN ENO

Arrows Niche Target
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.
BRIAN ENO

Earth Editing Film Sentence
A responsible designer might try to overcome this limitation – probably the engineers at Marshall tried, too. But that sound became the sound of, among others, Jimi Hendrix. That sound is called electric guitar.
BRIAN ENO

Celebrity Electric Guitar Music Overcome Responsible
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.
BRIAN ENO

Carefully Look Reverences Vinyl
My guitar only has five strings ’cause the top one broke and I decided not to put it back on: when I play chords I only play bar chords, and the top one always used to cut me there.
BRIAN ENO

Chord Cutting Guitar Play
Being completely free to choose what to do is actually quite difficult
BRIAN ENO

Being Choose Completely Difficult
Most game music is based on loops effectively.
BRIAN ENO

Games Loops Music
In England and Europe, we have this huge music called ambient – ambient techno, ambient house, ambient hip-hop, ambient this, ambient that.
BRIAN ENO

Country Hip Hop House Person
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.
BRIAN ENO

Down Finger High Low Play
I wanted to get rid of the element that had been considered essential in pop music: the voice.
BRIAN ENO

Aquariums Essentials Voice
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.
BRIAN ENO

Guitar Overcoming Trying
Some people are very good at being ‘stars’ and it suits them. I’m grudging about it and I find it annoying.
BRIAN ENO

People Stars Suits
I suppose I am reluctant about being any sort of ‘star’ and I didn’t particularly want to be portrayed as one.
BRIAN ENO

Stars Want

I occasionally meet people and they say, ‘Oh, I was born to Discreet Music’… They always have very weird eyes, those people.

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I occasionally meet people and they say, ‘Oh, I was born to Discreet Music’… They always have very weird eyes, those people.

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Popular Authors

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