We’re going through this super-uptight era, which I think comes entirely from literacy, actually. It’s the result of machines that were designed as word processors being used for making music.
BRIAN ENOI often work by avoidance.
More Brian Eno Quotes
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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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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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Saying that cultural objects have value is like saying that telephones have conversations.
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Quite often, and in fact more often, I would say, I’m struggling all the way through to think, “What is it I like about this? What is the personality of this thing I’m hearing that I like so much?”
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I prefer to shoot the arrow, then paint the target around it. You make the niches in which you finally reside.
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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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I want to rethink surrender as an active verb.
BRIAN ENO -
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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I’m not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.
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Feelings are more dangerous than ideas, because they aren’t susceptible to rational evaluation. They grow quietly, spreading underground, and erupt suddenly, all over the place.
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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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Composition is a way of living out your philosophy and calling it art.
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I do sometimes look back at things I’ve written in the past, and think, ‘I just don’t remember being the person who wrote that.’
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Rationality is what we do to organize the world, to make it possible to predict. Art is the rehearsal for the inapplicability and failure of that process.
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You don’t have to act as if you know what you’re doing
BRIAN ENO






