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A part of me has become immortal, out of my control.

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

Easy Listening People
Try to make things that can become better in other people’s minds than they were in yours.
BRIAN ENO

Mind People Trying
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
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

Device Easiest Handbook Predicted Things
Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.
BRIAN ENO

Attention Interesting Listening
At 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 ENO

Ambition Art Painting
For me it’s always contingent on getting a sound-the sound always suggests what kind of melody it should be. So it’s always sound first and then the line afterwards.
BRIAN ENO

Afterward Firsts Lines Sound
The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten.
BRIAN ENO

Easily Forgotten Important
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
The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.
BRIAN ENO

Consciousness Ideas Uncool
I’ve got a feeling that music might not be the most interesting place to be in the world of things.
BRIAN ENO

Feelings Interesting World
Perhaps when music has been shouting for so long, a quieter voice seems attractive.
BRIAN ENO

Attractive Long Voice
Every increase in your knowledge is a simultaneous decrease. You learn and you unlearn at the same time. A new certainty is a new doubt as well.
BRIAN ENO

Doubt Increase Simultaneous
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
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
I see TV as a picture medium rather than a narrative medium.
BRIAN ENO

Mediums Narrative Television

A part of me has become immortal, out of my control.

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A part of me has become immortal, out of my control.

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Popular Authors

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