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.
BRIAN ENOAvant-garde music is sort of research music. You’re glad someone’s done it but you don’t necessarily want to listen to it.
More Brian Eno Quotes
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Culture is everything you don’t have to do.
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Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that’s what the music is about.
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Emotion creates reality, reality demands action.
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Everybody is entertained to death.
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When you look back on a historical period of music, it seems so obvious to you what the characteristics of it are, but they’re not obvious at the time. So, when I look back at my own work.
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If something is good, you must torture it mercilessly until it is either dead or great.
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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.
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Something 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.
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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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There are hundreds of manufacturers always producing dvices that in general do the same things. Since they have slight structural differences if you take one and fool around with it and give it a good kick it will actually do something that it wasn’t designed to do.
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You don’t have to act as if you know what you’re doing
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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.
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Set up a situation that presents you with something slightly beyond your reach.
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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.
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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.
BRIAN ENO