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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

It infuriates me that stuff from the Internet routinely doesn’t include all the credits. Because as soon as I listen to something, if I like it, I want to know, “Who’s the bass player?” “Who did that?” “Who’s the engineer on this?
BRIAN ENO

Bass Credit Engineer Player
I wanted quite the opposite of that. I wanted them to accent their styles, so that they pulled away.
BRIAN ENO

Away Pulled Quite Wanted
Because 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 ENO

Enough Position Relation Someone Use
A responsible designer might try to overcome this limitation – probably the engineers at Marshall tried, too. But that sound became the sound of, among others, Jimi Hendrix. That sound is called electric guitar.
BRIAN ENO

Celebrity Electric Guitar Music Overcome Responsible
Look closely at the most embarrassing details, and amplify them.
BRIAN ENO

Amplify Details Looks
The Marshall guitar amplifier doesn’t just get louder when you turn it up. It distorts the sound to produce a whole range of new harmonics, effectively turning a plucked string instrument into a bowed one.
BRIAN ENO

Guitar Overcoming Trying
The basis of computer work is predicated on the idea that only the brain makes decisions and only the index finger does the work.
BRIAN ENO

Decision Hands Ideas
Well, there are some things that I just can’t get out of my head, and they start to annoy me after a while.
BRIAN ENO

Bugs Ears People
The reason I don’t tour is that I don’t know how to front a band. What would I do? I can’t really play anything well enough to deal with that situation.
BRIAN ENO

Band Enough Play
The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten.
BRIAN ENO

Easily Forgotten Important
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
Saying that cultural objects have value is like saying that telephones have conversations.
BRIAN ENO

Conversation Object Telephone
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
I’m not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.
BRIAN ENO

Paper Song Structure
The biology of purpose keeps my nose above the surface.
BRIAN ENO

Biology Noses Purpose
The most important thing in a piece of music is to seduce people to the point where they start searching.
BRIAN ENO

Important People Pieces Searching
Let’s do something else.”And you always think “Oh my God I’ve never done anything at all like that before.” But, of course, in retrospect, and to an outsider, they’ll say, “Oh, yeah that’s typical Eno.
BRIAN ENO

Anything End never Outsider Something Think
Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences.
BRIAN ENO

Art Philosophical Photography
If you grow up in a very strong religion like Catholicism you certainly cultivate in yourself a certain taste for the intensity of ideas.
BRIAN ENO

Grow Up Ideas Strong
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
Make an exhaustive list of everything you might do & do the last thing on the list.
BRIAN ENO

Last might Statistics
Quite often, and in fact more often, I would say, I’m struggling all the way through to think, “What is it I like about this? What is the personality of this thing I’m hearing that I like so much?”
BRIAN ENO

Dark Personality Struggle Sweet
It’s amazing how quickly people get used to bad quality.
BRIAN ENO

Bad People Qualities Quality
I don’t live in the past at all; I’m always wanting to do something new. I make a point of constantly trying to forget and get things out of my mind.
BRIAN ENO

Life Mind Past Singular
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
Once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music – not like a record that you’d put on, which would play for a while and finish.
BRIAN ENO

Flirting Ideas Play
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

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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