I wanted to get rid of the element that had been considered essential in pop music: the voice.
BRIAN ENOThe 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.
More Brian Eno Quotes
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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.
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When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. Not, he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought I should know how it’s done so I would recognise when I was being lied to.
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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.
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The problem with computers is that there is not enough Africa in them.
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I’m very good with technology, I always have been, and with machines in general. They seem not threatening like other people find them, but a source of fun and amusement.
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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.
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There’s a kind of edge to what you’re doing, the kind of leading edge of what you’re doing. Inside that edge [are elements you] are familiar with, and are probably becoming slightly bored with, as well, over a period of time. “I’ve pulled that one out before. Oh, no, I can’t I’m just fed up with that.
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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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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.
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Culture is everything you don’t have to do.
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I’m not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.
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Cultural objects have no notable identity outside of that which we confer upon them. Their value is entirely a product of the interaction that we have with them.
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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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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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The time I like listening to music most on headphones is, I have a game I play with my brother, he’s a musician as well.And he sends me MIDI files of keyboard pieces. So, these are pieces where I just get a MIDI file.
BRIAN ENO