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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

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.
BRIAN ENO

Hands People Sloppiness
People always focus on people like me who use synthesizers, right, which are explicitly electronic and therefore obvious.
BRIAN ENO

Focus People Real
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
I believe in singing.
BRIAN ENO

Believe Happen Life Magic Singing
It’s easy to forget that your best work is done when your attention is fully engaged.
BRIAN ENO

Attention Done Forget
I hate the rock music tradition. I can’t bear it!
BRIAN ENO

Bears Hate Rocks
I got interested in the idea of music that could make itself, in a sense, in the mid 1960s really, when I first heard composers like Terry Riley, and when I first started playing with tape recorders.
BRIAN ENO

Compose Firsts Heard Ideas Tape
Being completely free to choose what to do is actually quite difficult
BRIAN ENO

Being Choose Completely Difficult
Everything good proceeds from enthusiasm.
BRIAN ENO

Enthusiasm Everything Good
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
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.
BRIAN ENO

Combination Form Kind Magic
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.
BRIAN ENO

Mexican Nice Track
Every collaboration helps you grow.
BRIAN ENO

Collaboration Grows Helping
Be the first to not do what nobody has ever thought of not doing before.
BRIAN ENO

Doing Firsts Nobody
Painting, I think it’s like jazz.
BRIAN ENO

Jazz Painting Thinking
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

Differences Musician Playing Thinking Watching

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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