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.
BRIAN ENOThe 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.
More Brian Eno Quotes
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I do sometimes look back at things I’ve written in the past, and think, ‘I just don’t remember being the person who wrote that.’
BRIAN ENO -
All the best lyrics are written in ten minutes.
BRIAN ENO -
I can see the use and value of religion, just as I can see the use of mud wrestling, yoga, astronomy and sadomasochism. but I reject the idea that you can’t be a deep human being without it or any of them.
BRIAN ENO -
Robert Fripp and I will be recording another LP very soon. It should be even more monotonous than the first one!
BRIAN ENO -
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.
BRIAN ENO -
We’re going through this super-uptight era, which I think comes entirely from literacy, actually. It’s the result of machines that were designed as word processors being used for making music.
BRIAN ENO -
Composition is a way of living out your philosophy and calling it art.
BRIAN ENO -
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.
BRIAN ENO -
So, that means you can only play either very high or very low or both. And we’re going to stay there until I take my finger down.
BRIAN ENO -
When I went back to England after a year away, the country seemed stuck, dozing in a fairy tale, stifled by the weight of tradition.
BRIAN ENO -
One of the great breakthroughs of evolution theory is that you start with simple things and they will grow into complexity.
BRIAN ENO -
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 -
People do dismiss ambient music, don’t they? They call it ‘easy listening,’ as if to suggest that it should be hard to listen to.
BRIAN ENO -
I thought it was magic to be able to catch something identically on tape and then be able to play around with it, run it backwards; I thought that was great for years.
BRIAN ENO -
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







