I had an interesting day. I was in the studio with a group of musicians, who shall remain nameless, and I said to them “Our exercise today is not to use ‘undo’ at all. So, there’s no second takes. Or, if you do a second take, you have to do the whole take.
I love the sort of ambivalence of this, the ambiguity of something – being, for instance, in a quite busy Mexican restaurant with one of these very gentle tracks playing I remember as being particularly nice.
I hate the thought that someone had picked up one of my song records and was really excited about it, and walks [out of] a record shop with On Land and is disappointed because it isn’t what they wanted.
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.
The reason I don’t tour is that I don’t know how to front a band. What would I do? I can’t really play anything well enough to deal with that situation.
I don’t want to do free jazz! Because free jazz – which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering – isn’t actually free at all. It’s just constrained by what your muscles can do.
Music in itself carries a whole set of messages which are very, very rich and complex, and the words either serve to exclude certain ones or point up certain others.
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.
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 Quote - I hate the thought that someone had picked up one of my song records and was really excited about it, and walks [out of] a record shop with On Land and is disappointed because it isn’t what they wanted.](https://minimalistquotes.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/i-hate-the-thought-that-someone-had-picked-up-one--683x1024.jpg)
