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 ENOPeople always focus on people like me who use synthesizers, right, which are explicitly electronic and therefore obvious.
More Brian Eno Quotes
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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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A big ego isn’t necessarily a bad thing. A big ego means that you have some confidence in your abilities, really, and that you’re prepared to take the risk of trying them out.
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As struggles go, being an artist isn’t that much of one.
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I’m fascinated by musicians who don’t completely understand their territory; that’s when you do your best work.
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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.
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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.
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If I tried to make a commercial album, it would be a complete flop. I have no idea what the world at large likes.
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Be the first to not do what nobody has ever thought of not doing before.
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The biology of purpose keeps my nose above the surface.
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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.
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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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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.
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One of the great breakthroughs of evolution theory is that you start with simple things and they will grow into complexity.
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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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Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing – ‘Oh, let’s put that sentence there, let’s get rid of this’ – have become commonplace in films and music too.
BRIAN ENO