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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

I’m very good with technology, I always have been, and with machines in general. They seem not threatening like other people find them, but a source of fun and amusement.
BRIAN ENO

Fun People Technology
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.
BRIAN ENO

Interesting Running Track
I want to rethink surrender as an active verb.
BRIAN ENO

Surrender Verbs Want
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
Of course with everybody else aiming there as well that makes it very hard and expensive to hit. I prefer to shoot the arrow, then paint the target around it. You make the niches in which you finally reside.
BRIAN ENO

Everybody Expensive Plant Riches
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.
BRIAN ENO

Atmosphere Matters References What Writing
Set up a situation that presents you with something slightly beyond your reach.
BRIAN ENO

Beyond Reach Situation
The time I like listening to music most on headphones is, I have a game I play with my brother, he’s a musician as well.And he sends me MIDI files of keyboard pieces. So, these are pieces where I just get a MIDI file.
BRIAN ENO

Brother Favorite Game Hobby
Everybody is entertained to death.
BRIAN ENO

Death Entertained Everybody
As soon as you externalize an idea you see facets of it that weren’t clear when it was just floating around in your head.
BRIAN ENO

Clear Floating Ideas
I think the other thing that’s important is getting to a place, which very, very rarely happens with improvising groups, where somebody can decide not to play for a while. You watch any group of musicians improvising together and they nearly all play nearly all the time.
BRIAN ENO

Differences Musician Playing Thinking Watching
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.
BRIAN ENO

Certain Messages Rich
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.
BRIAN ENO

Band Enough Play
Admirers can be a tremendous force for conservatism.
BRIAN ENO

Admirer Conservatism Force
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
The handbook always tells you what it does, and you can be quite sure that if it’s a complex device it can do at least fifteen other things that weren’t predicted in the handbook, or that they didn’t consider desirable. It’s normally those other things that interest me.
BRIAN ENO

Device Easiest Handbook Predicted Things

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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