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When I work there are two distinct phases: the phase of pushing the work along, getting something to happen, where all the input comes from me, and phase two, where things start to combine in a way that wasn’t expected or predicted by what I supplied.

Brian Eno

My 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 ENO

Chord Cutting Guitar Play
I wanted quite the opposite of that. I wanted them to accent their styles, so that they pulled away.
BRIAN ENO

Away Pulled Quite Wanted
A responsible designer might try to overcome this limitation – probably the engineers at Marshall tried, too. But that sound became the sound of, among others, Jimi Hendrix. That sound is called electric guitar.
BRIAN ENO

Celebrity Electric Guitar Music Overcome Responsible
Being completely free to choose what to do is actually quite difficult
BRIAN ENO

Being Choose Completely Difficult
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.
BRIAN ENO

Atmosphere Matters References What Writing
Set up a situation that presents you with something slightly beyond your reach.
BRIAN ENO

Beyond Reach Situation
I don’t want to do free jazz! Because free jazz – which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering – isn’t actually free at all. It’s just constrained by what your muscles can do.
BRIAN ENO

Free Jazz Musical Want
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.
BRIAN ENO

Human Self Smart Thinking
One often makes music to supplement one’s world.
BRIAN ENO

Creativity Supplement World
Try to make things that can become better in other people’s minds than they were in yours.
BRIAN ENO

Mind People Trying
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.
BRIAN ENO

Differences Musician Playing Thinking Watching
The thing that obsesses me more than anything is waste – the waste of human intelligence and creativity.
BRIAN ENO

Creativity Humans Waste
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.
BRIAN ENO

Interesting Running Track
Not many people bought Velvet Underground LPs, but those who did, started a band.
BRIAN ENO

People Underground Velvet
I felt extremely uncomfortable as the focal point, in the spotlight. I really like the behind the scenes role, because all my freedom is there.
BRIAN ENO

Behind Roles Scenes Spotlight
The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten.
BRIAN ENO

Easily Forgotten Important

When I work there are two distinct phases: the phase of pushing the work along, getting something to happen, where all the input comes from me, and phase two, where things start to combine in a way that wasn’t expected or predicted by what I supplied.

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When I work there are two distinct phases: the phase of pushing the work along, getting something to happen, where all the input comes from me, and phase two, where things start to combine in a way that wasn’t expected or predicted by what I supplied.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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