I occasionally meet people and they say, ‘Oh, I was born to Discreet Music’… They always have very weird eyes, those people.
BRIAN ENOThe artists of the past who impressed me were the ones who really focused their work.
More Brian Eno Quotes
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People always focus on people like me who use synthesizers, right, which are explicitly electronic and therefore obvious.
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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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Avant-garde music is sort of research music. You’re glad someone’s done it but you don’t necessarily want to listen to it.
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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.
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It’s easy to forget that your best work is done when your attention is fully engaged.
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When people censor themselves they’re just as likely to get rid of the good bits as the bad bits.
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I’m fascinated by musicians who don’t completely understand their territory; that’s when you do your best work.
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So, that means you can only play either very high or very low or both. And we’re going to stay there until I take my finger down.
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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.
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Of course with everybody else aiming there as well that makes it very hard and expensive to hit. I prefer to shoot the arrow, then paint the target around it. You make the niches in which you finally reside.
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The Marshall guitar amplifier doesn’t just get louder when you turn it up. It distorts the sound to produce a whole range of new harmonics, effectively turning a plucked string instrument into a bowed one.
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The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.
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I had an interesting day. I was in the studio with a group of musicians, who shall remain nameless, and I said to them “Our exercise today is not to use ‘undo’ at all. So, there’s no second takes. Or, if you do a second take, you have to do the whole take.
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There are certain sounds that I’ve found work well in nearly any context. Their function is not so much musical as spatial: they define the edges of the territory of the music.
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I see TV as a picture medium rather than a narrative medium.
BRIAN ENO