I prefer to shoot the arrow, then paint the target around it. You make the niches in which you finally reside.
BRIAN ENOI often work by avoidance.
More Brian Eno Quotes
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I occasionally meet people and they say, ‘Oh, I was born to Discreet Music’… They always have very weird eyes, those people.
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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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The great benefit of computer sequencers is that they remove the issue of skill, and replace it with the issue of judgement
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What I would really like to do, if I could have a sort of kingship for a short time and organize the group of my dreams.
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In my normal life I’m a very unadventurous person.
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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.
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For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.
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You don’t have to act as if you know what you’re doing
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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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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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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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A part of me has become immortal, out of my control.
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In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.
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I hate the way CDs just drone on for bloody hours and you stop caring.
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Think inside the work – outside the work
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People in the arts often want to aim for the biggest, most obvious target, and hit it smack in the bull’s eye.
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I think the idea that people walk around to music is very interesting. They are actually creating the soundtrack to their lives as they walk around to it.
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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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The reason I don’t tour is that I don’t know how to front a band. What would I do? I can’t really play anything well enough to deal with that situation.
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I’m not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.
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Saying that cultural objects have value is like saying that telephones have conversations.
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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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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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What matters in modern music is not the part you can write down, the words and the tune, but the rest – the texture, the atmosphere, the references and associations.
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I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant.
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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.
BRIAN ENO