I hate talking about music, to tell you the truth.
BRIAN ENOSomething I’ve realized lately, to my shock, is that I am an optimist, in that I think humans are almost infinitely capable of self-change and self-modification, and that we really can build the future that we want if we’re smart about it.
More Brian Eno Quotes
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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.
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I believe it builds character and, more than anything else, encourages a taste for co-operation with others. This seems to be about the most important thing a school could do for you.
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It’s actually very easy for democracy to disappear.
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The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.
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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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Culture is everything you don’t have to do.
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Sometimes they’re of my own creation, as well – and they’re just as annoying. It’s not only other people’s ear worms that bug me, it’s my own, as well.
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American television really is pathetic.
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I see TV as a picture medium rather than a narrative medium.
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I don’t live in the past at all; I’m always wanting to do something new. I make a point of constantly trying to forget and get things out of my mind.
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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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I think the idea that people walk around to music is very interesting. They are actually creating the soundtrack to their lives as they walk around to it.
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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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I got interested in the idea of music that could make itself, in a sense, in the mid 1960s really, when I first heard composers like Terry Riley, and when I first started playing with tape recorders.
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I’ve noticed a terrible thing, which is I will agree to anything if it’s far enough in the future.
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Look closely at the most embarrassing details, and amplify them.
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It infuriates me that stuff from the Internet routinely doesn’t include all the credits. Because as soon as I listen to something, if I like it, I want to know, “Who’s the bass player?” “Who did that?” “Who’s the engineer on this?
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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.
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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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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.
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Not many people bought Velvet Underground LPs, but those who did, started a band.
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The whole history of pop music had rested on the first person singular, with occasional intrusions of the second person singular.
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Of course, like anybody I repeat myself endlessly, but I don’t know that I’m doing it, usually.
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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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One of the interesting things about having little musical knowledge is that you generate surprising results sometimes; you move to places you wouldn’t if you knew better.
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The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten.
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