Anything popular is populist, and populist is rarely a good adjective.
BRIAN ENOAnything popular is populist, and populist is rarely a good adjective.
BRIAN ENOThere 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.
BRIAN ENOI 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 ENOWhen 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.
BRIAN ENOI 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 ENOBecause if someone does that, you can find your own position in relation to it: what is it that I don’t agree with? In the studio I want to articulate a position clearly enough so that other people can use it – or chuck it away if they don’t want it.
BRIAN ENOAll 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 ENOI often work by avoidance.
BRIAN ENOI occasionally meet people and they say, ‘Oh, I was born to Discreet Music’… They always have very weird eyes, those people.
BRIAN ENOOne of the great breakthroughs of evolution theory is that you start with simple things and they will grow into complexity.
BRIAN ENOGiven the chance, i’ll die like a baby, on some faraway beach, when the season’s over.
BRIAN ENOThe biology of purpose keeps my nose above the surface.
BRIAN ENOWhen I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. Not, he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought I should know how it’s done so I would recognise when I was being lied to.
BRIAN ENOI wanted quite the opposite of that. I wanted them to accent their styles, so that they pulled away.
BRIAN ENOAt 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.
BRIAN ENOIn terms of what has been happening recently, there have been, I think, some really interesting new instruments that have come out that sort of show me the direction of the future. Korg has introduced the – they’ve had a whole series now of these things called Kaoss Pads.
BRIAN ENO