Sometimes they’re of my own creation, as well – and they’re just as annoying. It’s not only other people’s ear worms that bug me, it’s my own, as well.
BRIAN ENOEvery collaboration helps you grow.
More Brian Eno Quotes
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Of course, like anybody I repeat myself endlessly, but I don’t know that I’m doing it, usually.
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When people censor themselves they’re just as likely to get rid of the good bits as the bad bits.
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Emotion creates reality, reality demands action.
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American television really is pathetic.
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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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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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Be the first to not do what nobody has ever thought of not doing before.
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The problem with computers is that there is not enough Africa in them.
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If you think of the way a composer or say a pop arranger works – he has an idea and he writes it down, so there’s one transmission loss. Then he gives the score to a group of musicians who interpret that, so there’s another transmission loss.
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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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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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I believe in singing.
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Look closely at the most embarrassing details, and amplify them.
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The texture suggests some kind of mood, and the mood suggests some kind of lyric. That’s like working in reverse, often quite the other way around, from sound to song. Although often they stop before they get to the song stage.
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Law is always better than war.
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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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I think we’re about ready for a new feeling to enter music. I think that will come from the Arabic world.
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I got interested in the idea of music that could make itself, in a sense, in the mid 1960s really, when I first heard composers like Terry Riley, and when I first started playing with tape recorders.
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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.
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It’s nice, I think, when people use your music for things you didn’t think of.
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The tools are evolving, and people’s interests are evolving as well. So, suddenly people like to hear bands, people like Devendra Banhart or the xx, bands that make a kind of virtue of sloppiness.
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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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Well, there are some things that I just can’t get out of my head, and they start to annoy me after a while.
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There are hundreds of manufacturers always producing dvices that in general do the same things. Since they have slight structural differences if you take one and fool around with it and give it a good kick it will actually do something that it wasn’t designed to do.
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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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For instance, I’m always fascinated to see whether, given the kind of fairly known and established form called popular music, whether there is some magic combination that nobody has hit upon before.
BRIAN ENO