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 ENOSo, 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.
More Brian Eno Quotes
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Make an exhaustive list of everything you might do & do the last thing on the list.
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One of the interesting things about having little musical knowledge is that you generate surprising results sometimes; you move to places you wouldn’t if you knew better.
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I believe in singing.
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Every collaboration helps you grow.
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I’m not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.
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Culture is everything you don’t have to do.
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As struggles go, being an artist isn’t that much of one.
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It’s easy to forget that your best work is done when your attention is fully engaged.
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Composition is a way of living out your philosophy and calling it art.
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Painting, I think it’s like jazz.
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I’m struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity.
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Given the chance, i’ll die like a baby, on some faraway beach, when the season’s over.
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Most of those melodies are me trying to find out what notes fit, and then hitting ones that don’t fit in a very interesting way.
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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.
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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.
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When 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.
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Once you’ve grown to accept something and it becomes part of the system you’ve inherited, you don’t even notice it any longer.
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In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.
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The basis of computer work is predicated on the idea that only the brain makes decisions and only the index finger does the work.
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Something I’ve realized lately, to my shock, is that I am an optimist, in that I think humans are almost infinitely capable of self-change and self-modification, and that we really can build the future that we want if we’re smart about it.
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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.
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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.
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Music in itself carries a whole set of messages which are very, very rich and complex, and the words either serve to exclude certain ones or point up certain others.
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I don’t like headphones very much, and I rarely listen to music on headphones.
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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.
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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