All cultures have these feelings about non-functional areas of activity. And the more time people have on their hands, the more they commit it to those areas.
BRIAN ENOMusic 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.
More Brian Eno Quotes
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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.
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I hate talking about music, to tell you the truth.
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What I would really like to do, if I could have a sort of kingship for a short time and organize the group of my dreams.
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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 don’t like headphones very much, and I rarely listen to music on headphones.
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Culture is everything you don’t have to do.
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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.
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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.
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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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Robert Fripp and I will be recording another LP very soon. It should be even more monotonous than the first one!
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One of the things you’re doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.
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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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I had a lot of trouble with engineers, because their whole background is learning from a functional point of view, and then learning how to perform that function.
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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.
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A part of me has become immortal, out of my control.
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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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Everything good proceeds from enthusiasm.
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The problem with computers is that there is not enough Africa in them.
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Make an exhaustive list of everything you might do & do the last thing on the list.
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The great benefit of computer sequencers is that they remove the issue of skill, and replace it with the issue of judgement
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I want to rethink surrender as an active verb.
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I’ve got a feeling that music might not be the most interesting place to be in the world of things.
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We have two different ways of working. One is completely unstructured where somebody just starts playing and somebody joins in and then the other person joins in, and something starts to happen. That’s occasionally what happens.
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People in the arts often want to aim for the biggest, most obvious target, and hit it smack in the bull’s eye.
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If I had a stock of fabulous sounds I would just always use them. I wouldn’t bother to find new ones.
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In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.
BRIAN ENO