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 ENOQuite 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?”
More Brian Eno Quotes
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I want to rethink surrender as an active verb.
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The biology of purpose keeps my nose above the surface.
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Everybody is entertained to death.
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People do dismiss ambient music, don’t they? They call it ‘easy listening,’ as if to suggest that it should be hard to listen to.
BRIAN ENO -
I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant.
BRIAN ENO -
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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I do sometimes look back at things I’ve written in the past, and think, ‘I just don’t remember being the person who wrote that.’
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We have two different ways of working. One is completely unstructured where somebody just starts playing and somebody joins in and then the other person joins in, and something starts to happen. That’s occasionally what happens.
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I hate the thought that someone had picked up one of my song records and was really excited about it, and walks [out of] a record shop with On Land and is disappointed because it isn’t what they wanted.
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The thing that obsesses me more than anything is waste – the waste of human intelligence and creativity.
BRIAN ENO -
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.
BRIAN ENO -
American television really is pathetic.
BRIAN ENO -
Once you’ve grown to accept something and it becomes part of the system you’ve inherited, you don’t even notice it any longer.
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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.
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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