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I don’t like headphones very much, and I rarely listen to music on headphones.

Brian Eno

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.
BRIAN ENO

Avant Done Garde Research
What I would really like to do, if I could have a sort of kingship for a short time and organize the group of my dreams.
BRIAN ENO

Dream Feelings Together
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
Feelings are more dangerous than ideas, because they aren’t susceptible to rational evaluation. They grow quietly, spreading underground, and erupt suddenly, all over the place.
BRIAN ENO

Evaluation Feelings Ideas
I think the other thing that’s important is getting to a place, which very, very rarely happens with improvising groups, where somebody can decide not to play for a while. You watch any group of musicians improvising together and they nearly all play nearly all the time.
BRIAN ENO

Differences Musician Playing Thinking Watching
One of the great breakthroughs of evolution theory is that you start with simple things and they will grow into complexity.
BRIAN ENO

Evolution Simple Theory
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 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
The seven white notes on the piano – each section of the piece (there are 12 sections) is five of those seven white notes.
BRIAN ENO

Piano Simple White
I think we’re about ready for a new feeling to enter music. I think that will come from the Arabic world.
BRIAN ENO

Feelings Thinking World
Composition is a way of living out your philosophy and calling it art.
BRIAN ENO

Art Calling Philosophy
Try to make things that can become better in other people’s minds than they were in yours.
BRIAN ENO

Mind People Trying
Well, there are some things that I just can’t get out of my head, and they start to annoy me after a while.
BRIAN ENO

Bugs Ears People
I can see the use and value of religion, just as I can see the use of mud wrestling, yoga, astronomy and sadomasochism. but I reject the idea that you can’t be a deep human being without it or any of them.
BRIAN ENO

Ideas Wrestling Yoga
I don’t like celebrity programmes – but I do like programmes about how ideas are formed and evolve.
BRIAN ENO

Evolve Ideas Programme
When you look back on a historical period of music, it seems so obvious to you what the characteristics of it are, but they’re not obvious at the time. So, when I look back at my own work.
BRIAN ENO

Historical Looks Writing
My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.
BRIAN ENO

Peculiar Process Writing
Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that’s what the music is about.
BRIAN ENO

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

Focus People Real
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
Of course, like anybody I repeat myself endlessly, but I don’t know that I’m doing it, usually.
BRIAN ENO

Courses Knows Repeats
There are hundreds of manufacturers always producing dvices that in general do the same things. Since they have slight structural differences if you take one and fool around with it and give it a good kick it will actually do something that it wasn’t designed to do.
BRIAN ENO

Giving Long Mean
Quite often, and in fact more often, I would say, I’m struggling all the way through to think, “What is it I like about this? What is the personality of this thing I’m hearing that I like so much?”
BRIAN ENO

Dark Personality Struggle Sweet
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.
BRIAN ENO

Down Finger High Low Play
I wanted to get rid of the element that had been considered essential in pop music: the voice.
BRIAN ENO

Aquariums Essentials Voice
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

I don’t like headphones very much, and I rarely listen to music on headphones.

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I don’t like headphones very much, and I rarely listen to music on headphones.

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