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It’s amazing how quickly people get used to bad quality.

Brian Eno

People in the arts often want to aim for the biggest, most obvious target, and hit it smack in the bull’s eye.
BRIAN ENO

Arrows Art Eye Smack
Saying that cultural objects have value is like saying that telephones have conversations.
BRIAN ENO

Conversation Object Telephone
Anything popular is populist, and populist is rarely a good adjective.
BRIAN ENO

Adjectives Populism Populist
In fact, quite a lot of what I do has to do with sound texture, and, you can’t notate that. You can’t notate the sound of “St. Elmo’s Fire.” There’s no way of writing that down. That’s because musical notation arose at a time when sound textures were limited.
BRIAN ENO

Mean Musical Sound Writing
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.
BRIAN ENO

Mean Moving Play Playing Somebody
When I work there are two distinct phases: the phase of pushing the work along, getting something to happen, where all the input comes from me, and phase two, where things start to combine in a way that wasn’t expected or predicted by what I supplied.
BRIAN ENO

Come Happen Identity Moving Something Term
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 ENO

Feelings Hands People
I’m fascinated by musicians who don’t completely understand their territory; that’s when you do your best work.
BRIAN ENO

Best Musician Territory Work
If you think of the way a composer or say a pop arranger works – he has an idea and he writes it down, so there’s one transmission loss. Then he gives the score to a group of musicians who interpret that, so there’s another transmission loss.
BRIAN ENO

Down Loss Thinking Transmission Writing
So, I try to make signs, graphically and visually, to say to people “Okay, this is this department of my work and this is this other department of my work.” And of course I’m very pleased if people like all of them, but I don’t want them to feel deceived at any point.
BRIAN ENO

Departments Graphical People Pleased
I’m not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.
BRIAN ENO

Paper Song Structure
If I had a stock of fabulous sounds I would just always use them. I wouldn’t bother to find new ones.
BRIAN ENO

Fabulous Sound Use
The whole history of pop music had rested on the first person singular, with occasional intrusions of the second person singular.
BRIAN ENO

Firsts Intrusion Occasional
Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature… The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
BRIAN ENO

Black Events Signature White
Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing – ‘Oh, let’s put that sentence there, let’s get rid of this’ – have become commonplace in films and music too.
BRIAN ENO

Earth Editing Film Sentence
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

Easy Listening People
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

Play Running Years
Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that’s what the music is about.
BRIAN ENO

Music People Thinking
Most game music is based on loops effectively.
BRIAN ENO

Games Loops Music
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
Human development thus far has been fueled and guided by the feeling that things could be, and are probably going to be, better.
BRIAN ENO

Development Feelings Human
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.
BRIAN ENO

Avant Done Garde Research
One of the great breakthroughs of evolution theory is that you start with simple things and they will grow into complexity.
BRIAN ENO

Evolution Simple Theory
I think the idea that people walk around to music is very interesting. They are actually creating the soundtrack to their lives as they walk around to it.
BRIAN ENO

Creating Ideas Thinking
You know that in order to copyright material somebody has to write it down for you. Any piece of recorded material has to be scored in order for it to be copyrighted.
BRIAN ENO

Copyright Giving Writing
Set up a situation that presents you with something slightly beyond your reach.
BRIAN ENO

Beyond Reach Situation
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

Down Finger High Low Play

It’s amazing how quickly people get used to bad quality.

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It’s amazing how quickly people get used to bad quality.

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Popular Authors

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