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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

You don’t have to act as if you know what you’re doing
BRIAN ENO

Act Doing Knows
Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing – ‘Oh, let’s put that sentence there, let’s get rid of this’ – have become commonplace in films and music too.
BRIAN ENO

Earth Editing Film Sentence
I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant.
BRIAN ENO

Atheist Choir Knows
I always use the same guitar; I got this guitar years and years ago for nine pounds. It’s still got the same strings on it.
BRIAN ENO

Guitar Pounds Years
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.
BRIAN ENO

Decide Done Lying Teach Uncles
As struggles go, being an artist isn’t that much of one.
BRIAN ENO

Artist Being One Struggle
Emotion creates reality, reality demands action.
BRIAN ENO

Action Demand Reality
As soon as you externalize an idea you see facets of it that weren’t clear when it was just floating around in your head.
BRIAN ENO

Clear Floating Ideas
Culture is everything you don’t have to do.
BRIAN ENO

Culture Everything Happen
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.
BRIAN ENO

Down Loss Thinking Transmission Writing
I don’t live in the past at all; I’m always wanting to do something new. I make a point of constantly trying to forget and get things out of my mind.
BRIAN ENO

Life Mind Past Singular
Let’s do something else.”And you always think “Oh my God I’ve never done anything at all like that before.” But, of course, in retrospect, and to an outsider, they’ll say, “Oh, yeah that’s typical Eno.
BRIAN ENO

Anything End never Outsider Something Think
A big ego isn’t necessarily a bad thing. A big ego means that you have some confidence in your abilities, really, and that you’re prepared to take the risk of trying them out.
BRIAN ENO

Ego Mean Risk
Every collaboration helps you grow.
BRIAN ENO

Collaboration Grows Helping
With all fashion, what we do is play at being somebody else. We play at inhabiting another kind of world.
BRIAN ENO

Fashion Play World
In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.
BRIAN ENO

People Song Track
Perhaps when music has been shouting for so long, a quieter voice seems attractive.
BRIAN ENO

Attractive Long Voice
Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that’s what the music is about.
BRIAN ENO

Music People Thinking
I love the sort of ambivalence of this, the ambiguity of something – being, for instance, in a quite busy Mexican restaurant with one of these very gentle tracks playing I remember as being particularly nice.
BRIAN ENO

Mexican Nice Track
Lyrics are the only thing to do with music that haven’t been made easier technically.
BRIAN ENO

Easier Made Technically Things
It’s nice, I think, when people use your music for things you didn’t think of.
BRIAN ENO

Nice People Thinking
I occasionally meet people and they say, ‘Oh, I was born to Discreet Music’… They always have very weird eyes, those people.
BRIAN ENO

Born Eye Occasionally People
I want to rethink surrender as an active verb.
BRIAN ENO

Surrender Verbs Want
I’m not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.
BRIAN ENO

Paper Song Structure
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
I think that there’s something that I still like about the fact of a package, like the latest report from somebody. “Okay, this is what they’re up to now; this is what they’re doing; who’s working with them?
BRIAN ENO

Facts Okay Thinking
I think very often producers are really trying to repeat things. When they hear something in the new songs that they recognize as being a bit like something that was a success on a previous record, they’re inclined to encourage that.
BRIAN ENO

Song Thinking Trying

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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