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Once 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 Eno

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
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.
BRIAN ENO

Compose Firsts Heard Ideas Tape
I’m not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.
BRIAN ENO

Paper Song Structure
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
American television really is pathetic.
BRIAN ENO

Country Pathetic People Television
The thing that obsesses me more than anything is waste – the waste of human intelligence and creativity.
BRIAN ENO

Creativity Humans Waste
I’ve got a feeling that music might not be the most interesting place to be in the world of things.
BRIAN ENO

Feelings Interesting World
The great benefit of computer sequencers is that they remove the issue of skill, and replace it with the issue of judgement
BRIAN ENO

Issues Judgement Skills
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.
BRIAN ENO

Computer Driven Technology
Try to make things that can become better in other people’s minds than they were in yours.
BRIAN ENO

Mind People Trying
I see TV as a picture medium rather than a narrative medium.
BRIAN ENO

Mediums Narrative Television
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.
BRIAN ENO

Afterward Firsts Lines Sound
Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature… The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
BRIAN ENO

Black Events Signature White
Music in itself carries a whole set of messages which are very, very rich and complex, and the words either serve to exclude certain ones or point up certain others.
BRIAN ENO

Certain Messages Rich
The most important thing in a piece of music is to seduce people to the point where they start searching.
BRIAN ENO

Important People Pieces Searching
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

Combination Form Kind Magic

Once 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.

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Once 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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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