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It’s actually very easy for democracy to disappear.

Brian Eno

The vinyl commands a certain kind of reverence because it’s a big object and quite fragile so you handle it rather carefully, and it’s expensive so you pay attention to how it’s looked after.
BRIAN ENO

Carefully Look Reverences Vinyl
Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that’s what the music is about.
BRIAN ENO

Music People Thinking
Every increase in your knowledge is a simultaneous decrease. You learn and you unlearn at the same time. A new certainty is a new doubt as well.
BRIAN ENO

Doubt Increase Simultaneous
I’m not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.
BRIAN ENO

Paper Song Structure
In England and Europe, we have this huge music called ambient – ambient techno, ambient house, ambient hip-hop, ambient this, ambient that.
BRIAN ENO

Country Hip Hop House Person
What happens with notation is that it reduces things to a language which isn’t necessarily appropriate to them. In the same way that words do, you get a much cruder version of what was actually intended.
BRIAN ENO

Appropriate Language Notation
I prefer to shoot the arrow, then paint the target around it. You make the niches in which you finally reside.
BRIAN ENO

Arrows Niche Target
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
You know that in order to copyright material somebody has to write it down for you. Any piece of recorded material has to be scored in order for it to be copyrighted.
BRIAN ENO

Copyright Giving Writing
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
If I tried to make a commercial album, it would be a complete flop. I have no idea what the world at large likes.
BRIAN ENO

Albums Commercial Ideas
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
The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one’s furniture.
BRIAN ENO

Detachable Furniture Thinking
People always focus on people like me who use synthesizers, right, which are explicitly electronic and therefore obvious.
BRIAN ENO

Focus People Real
Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.
BRIAN ENO

Attention Interesting Listening
The handbook always tells you what it does, and you can be quite sure that if it’s a complex device it can do at least fifteen other things that weren’t predicted in the handbook, or that they didn’t consider desirable. It’s normally those other things that interest me.
BRIAN ENO

Device Easiest Handbook Predicted Things

It’s actually very easy for democracy to disappear.

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It’s actually very easy for democracy to disappear.

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