Top 376 Quotes & Sayings by Brian Eno - Page 5

Ambient music is intended to induce calm and a space to think.

Put out as much as you can. It doesn't do anything sitting on a shelf.

One way of working is just bring a group of totally different musicians together and encourage them to stick to their guns, not to do the thing that normally happens in a working situation where everyone homogenizes and concedes certain points - so eventually they're all playing in roughly the same style. I wanted quite the opposite of that. I wanted them to accent their styles, so that they pulled away. So there would be a kind of space in the middle where I could operate, and attempt to make these things coalesce in some way. In fact quite a lot of my stuff has arisen from that.

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.

Since I have always preferred making plans to executing them, I have gravitated towards situations and systems that, once set into operation, could create music with little or no intervention on my part. That is to say, I tend towards the roles of planner and programmer, and then become an audience to the results

I hate the way CDs just drone on for bloody hours and you stop caring.

I always have wanted to know how the whole thing was done, what the process involved. And I don't particularly enjoy that my music is stripped of ancillary details, and it just sort of comes out of this big tap called the Internet like water. I like some of my water to be neatly presented in a bottle. With a label on it.

Culture is everything you don't have to do.

I despise computers in many ways. I think they’re hopelessly underevolved and overrated.

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.

You can hear the profile of a sound, in retrospect, so much more clearly than you did at the time. And I think one of the things that's going to be nauseatingly characteristic about so much music of now is its glossy production values and its griddedness, the tightness of the way everything is locked together.

I'm struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity.

We're going through this super-uptight era, which I think comes entirely from literacy, actually. It's the result of machines that were designed as word processors being used for making music.

The problem with computers is that there is not enough Africa in them.

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.

People who are very confident in themselves aren't hurt by criticism. They make use of it.

Frequently, I go straight into the studio and see what's around. I might hire a couple of instruments that I've never used - maybe a particular type of electronic organ or an echo unit. Then I just dabble with sounds until something starts to happen that suggests a texture. The texture suggests some kind of mood, and the mood suggests some kind of lyric. That's like working in reverse, often quite the other way around, from sound to song. Although often they stop before they get to the song stage.

The only value of ideology is to stop things becoming showbiz.

Listening to something is an act of surrender.

Composition is a way of living out your philosophy and calling it art.

Possessions are a way of turning money into problems.

I want to make things that put me in the position of innocence, that recreate the feeling of innocence in you.

The whole point of art, as far as I’m concerned, is that art doesn’t make any difference. And that’s why it’s important. Take film: you can have quite extreme emotional experiences watching a movie, but they stop as soon as you walk out of the cinema. You can see people being hurt, but even though you feel those things strongly, you know they’re not real.

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

Any constraint is part of the skeleton that you build the composition on - including your own incompetence.

Complexity and intelligence grow from simplicity, not from greater complexity.

Being completely free to choose what to do is actually quite difficult

Every band I’ve worked with also wants to be countercultural in the sense that they want to feel that they’ve gone somewhere that nobody else has been.

What people call unemotional just doesnt have a single overriding emotion to it. The things that I like best are the ones that ambiguous on the emotional level.

I still do mostly listen to CDs. I think that every format really is a different way of listening. If you take a different sort of psychological stance to it - like, I think the transition from vinyl to CD definitely marked a difference in the way people treated music. 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.

You don't have to act as if you know what you're doing

I've always thought that art is a lie, an interesting lie. And I'll sort of listen to the "lie" and try to imagine the world which makes that lie true...what that world must be like, and what would have to happen for us to get from this world to that one.

You can't do anything interesting with cutting-edge technology except not make it cutting-edge.

I believe in singing. I believe in singing together.

Repetition doesn't really exist

Every collaboration helps you grow.

Not many people bought Velvet Underground LPs, but those who did, started a band.

The trouble begins with a design philosophy that equates 'more options' with 'greater freedom.'

You shoot your arrow and then you paint your bulls eye around it, and therefore you have hit the target dead centre.

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. What more often happens is that we settle on some sort of - a few sort of structural ideas, like, "Okay, when I put my finger up, we're all going to move to the extremes of our instruments. 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.

I cant duplicate my own successes, because part of the creation of that effect is making something happen that you didn't expect

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. A responsible designer might try to overcome this limitation - probably the engineers at Marshall tried, too. But that sound became the sound of, among others, Jimi Hendrix. That sound is called electric guitar.

When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone's talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false 'intelligence' and selected 'leaks'.

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. I've seen the scores of my things and they don't resemble the music in any way. If you give them to somebody who has never heard the music and say, "What does this sound like to you?" they'll play you something that has no relationship with the music it derives from. Notation simply isn't adequate.

A culture is the sum of all the things about which humanity can choose to differ.

One night, I pissed into an empty wine bottle so I could continue watching Monty Python, and suddenly thought 'I've never tasted my own piss,' so I drank a little. It looked just like Orvieto Classico and tasted of nearly nothing

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

A studio is an absolute labyrinth of possibilities - this is why records take so long to make because there are millions of permutations of things you can do. The most useful thing you can do is to get rid of some of those options before you start

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.

Cultural objects have no notable identity outside of that which we confer upon them. Their value is entirely a product of the interaction that we have with them.

Ambient music must be as ignorable as it is interesting.

Most big concerts sound disgusting and awful and insultingly bad. It's like going to the cinema and been shown a scratchy film which is upsidedown and the bulb had gone on the projector. The quality of large-scale live music is so shocking.

Reggie Watts is a most unusual talent: a huge vocal range, a natural musicality, and a sidesplitting wit. Is he a comedian? A singer? A performance artist? I've seen him a few times since then and I still can't decide. Whatever, he ain't like nobody else.

With devices my technique is always to hide the handbook in the drawer until I've played with it for a while. 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.

Whenever there's a new music, there's a new way of listening. And whenever there's a new way of listening, there are new musics that follow from that. And people start listening differently - that can either mean in different places or at different volumes or in different social groups or through different technologies.

If you had a sign above every studio door saying ‘This Studio is a Musical Instrument’ it would make such a different approach to recording.

I describe things in terms of body movements. I dance a bit to describe what sort of movement it ought to make, and that's a good way of talking to musicians. Particularly bass players.

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature... The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.

When you make something you are always offering some choices and denying others.

Think inside the work - outside the work