In England and Europe, we have this huge music called ambient – ambient techno, ambient house, ambient hip-hop, ambient this, ambient that.
BRIAN ENOIn England and Europe, we have this huge music called ambient – ambient techno, ambient house, ambient hip-hop, ambient this, ambient that.
BRIAN ENOI think that there’s something that I still like about the fact of a package, like the latest report from somebody. “Okay, this is what they’re up to now; this is what they’re doing; who’s working with them?
BRIAN ENOThe whole history of pop music had rested on the first person singular, with occasional intrusions of the second person singular.
BRIAN ENOMy guitar only has five strings ’cause the top one broke and I decided not to put it back on: when I play chords I only play bar chords, and the top one always used to cut me there.
BRIAN ENOOnce 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 ENOI 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.
BRIAN ENOI prefer to shoot the arrow, then paint the target around it. You make the niches in which you finally reside.
BRIAN ENOI hate the rock music tradition. I can’t bear it!
BRIAN ENOBecause 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 ENOI still do mostly listen to CDs. I think that every format really is a different way of listening. If you take a different sort of psychological stance to it – like, I think the transition from vinyl to CD definitely marked a difference in the way people treated music.
BRIAN ENOWith all fashion, what we do is play at being somebody else. We play at inhabiting another kind of world.
BRIAN ENOI had an interesting day. I was in the studio with a group of musicians, who shall remain nameless, and I said to them “Our exercise today is not to use ‘undo’ at all. So, there’s no second takes. Or, if you do a second take, you have to do the whole take.
BRIAN ENOThe prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one’s furniture.
BRIAN ENOPainting, I think it’s like jazz.
BRIAN ENOComposition is a way of living out your philosophy and calling it art.
BRIAN ENOI occasionally meet people and they say, ‘Oh, I was born to Discreet Music’… They always have very weird eyes, those people.
BRIAN ENO