As struggles go, being an artist isn’t that much of one.
BRIAN ENOOnce 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.
More Brian Eno Quotes
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In England and Europe, we have this huge music called ambient – ambient techno, ambient house, ambient hip-hop, ambient this, ambient that.
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If something is good, you must torture it mercilessly until it is either dead or great.
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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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The philosophical idea that there are no more distances, that we are all just one world, that we are all brothers, is such a drag! I like differences.
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It infuriates me that stuff from the Internet routinely doesn’t include all the credits. Because as soon as I listen to something, if I like it, I want to know, “Who’s the bass player?” “Who did that?” “Who’s the engineer on this?
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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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At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.
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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.
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One often makes music to supplement one’s world.
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I thought it was magic to be able to catch something identically on tape and then be able to play around with it, run it backwards; I thought that was great for years.
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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.
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When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. Not, he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought I should know how it’s done so I would recognise when I was being lied to.
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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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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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The time I like listening to music most on headphones is, I have a game I play with my brother, he’s a musician as well.And he sends me MIDI files of keyboard pieces. So, these are pieces where I just get a MIDI file.
BRIAN ENO