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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.

Brian Eno

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.
BRIAN ENO

Easy Listening People
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 ENO

Grow Up Ideas Strong
In terms of what has been happening recently, there have been, I think, some really interesting new instruments that have come out that sort of show me the direction of the future. Korg has introduced the – they’ve had a whole series now of these things called Kaoss Pads.
BRIAN ENO

Come Future Interesting Out Thinking
A big ego isn’t necessarily a bad thing. A big ego means that you have some confidence in your abilities, really, and that you’re prepared to take the risk of trying them out.
BRIAN ENO

Ego Mean Risk
So, I try to make signs, graphically and visually, to say to people “Okay, this is this department of my work and this is this other department of my work.” And of course I’m very pleased if people like all of them, but I don’t want them to feel deceived at any point.
BRIAN ENO

Departments Graphical People Pleased
Everything good proceeds from enthusiasm.
BRIAN ENO

Enthusiasm Everything Good
With all fashion, what we do is play at being somebody else. We play at inhabiting another kind of world.
BRIAN ENO

Fashion Play World
Of course, like anybody I repeat myself endlessly, but I don’t know that I’m doing it, usually.
BRIAN ENO

Courses Knows Repeats
Avant-garde music is sort of research music. You’re glad someone’s done it but you don’t necessarily want to listen to it.
BRIAN ENO

Avant Done Garde Research
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.
BRIAN ENO

Enough Position Relation Someone Use
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.
BRIAN ENO

Country Gay People Sea Something
Once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music – not like a record that you’d put on, which would play for a while and finish.
BRIAN ENO

Flirting Ideas Play
For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.
BRIAN ENO

Interesting Manipulate World
I think very often producers are really trying to repeat things. When they hear something in the new songs that they recognize as being a bit like something that was a success on a previous record, they’re inclined to encourage that.
BRIAN ENO

Song Thinking Trying
There are certain sounds that I’ve found work well in nearly any context. Their function is not so much musical as spatial: they define the edges of the territory of the music.
BRIAN ENO

Musical Sound Territory
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

Identity InterAction Notable
People always focus on people like me who use synthesizers, right, which are explicitly electronic and therefore obvious.
BRIAN ENO

Focus People Real
Saying that cultural objects have value is like saying that telephones have conversations.
BRIAN ENO

Conversation Object Telephone
If something is good, you must torture it mercilessly until it is either dead or great.
BRIAN ENO

Great Mercilessly Torture
The texture suggests some kind of mood, and the mood suggests some kind of lyric. That’s like working in reverse, often quite the other way around, from sound to song. Although often they stop before they get to the song stage.
BRIAN ENO

Although Around Suggests Tecture Way
At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.
BRIAN ENO

Ambition Art Painting
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.
BRIAN ENO

Art Imagine Interesting Lying
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.
BRIAN ENO

Mean Musical Sound Writing
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.
BRIAN ENO

Accepting Inherited Longer
Ambient music is intended to induce calm and a space to think.
BRIAN ENO

Calm Space Thinking
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.
BRIAN ENO

Appropriate Language Notation
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.
BRIAN ENO

Body Muscles Players Traditional Use Whole

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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