Top 193 Sonic The Hedgehog Quotes & Sayings - Page 3

Dave Guy, the trumpet player, is an incredible musician. He came into the studio one day, and they had just cut a cover of "Sign, Seal, Deliver" for something with Sharon Jones, and I just was blown away by how they got that sonic. I mean, it was just so much the real deal.

Each member does whatever they want with the song and it totally changes it from whatever idea I hear around it. It turns it into a Sonic Youth song and completely away from it being a solo song.

You have to love writing a song and architecture. You have to give it a form. It is my job to create a sonic landscape. I like to create ambiance and atmosphere. The writing is the intimate part of it. It is a sketch. The production is the whole painting.

When the ice of winter holds the house in its rigid grip, when curtains are drawn against that vast frozen waste of landscape, almost like a hibernating hedgehog I relish the security of being withdrawn from all that summer ferment that is long since past. Then is the time for reappraisal: to spread out, limp and receptive, and let garden thoughts rise to the surface. They emerge from some deep source of stillness which the very fact of winter has released.

I'm not technical. When I listen to music, I gravitate more toward the sonic aspect of it. The technical stuff of it, I get bored with it. These long solos? OK, already. You know your scales, big deal. I know it, too, but I don't want to do that.

I think Thurston's and my weird tunings lent Sonic Youth a very different sound from the get-go. In the band's 30 years - aside from covers - there are maybe two or three songs we wrote using traditional tuning.

I got really passionate about music with early Smiths and Joy Division. And New Order, Sonic Youth, Cramps...kind of right across the board, whatever fell underground. Kraftwerk...it was really mixed. Quite confusing, I suppose, but it just felt good.

I wanted to challenge myself and move into something new. I felt that using the name Swans and the sonic attitude that that engenders was what I needed to move forward musically, and it's led to lots of new things.

I am a very, very fortunate and blessed guitar player to always be surrounded by musical monsters, so my life has been a nonstop jam session. I crave the musical adventure of sonic creativity and am powerfully inspired everytime I grab a guitar.

I'm not really much of an actor, so when I started on 'The Daily Show,' I was just trying to adopt the faux authority of a newsperson. Having a British accent definitely gave me a sonic leg up on that because there is a faux authority to the British accent in and of itself.

I went to see Alison Krauss and Union Station at Disney Hall and I would say it was one of the most astonishing sonic experiences I have had. It's an enormous room that's acoustically perfect. My interpretation of receiving music as a layman is that the way the music kind of settled on me in that room was perfection.

The group disbanded prematurely in 1983, but its records made a sizable mark: Mission of Burma became a band's band; leaving noticeable impressions on the likes of Pearl Jam, R.E.M., Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo.

My first album, 'Get Lifted,' was a hip-hop soul album that had some of its roots in the church, as far as the sonic choices, in the way that I sing and write songs. I have always had that as part of my background and part of my influence when I am making music.

Dolby stereo increases the possibility of emptiness in film sound at the same time that it enlarges the space that can be filled. It's this capacity for emptiness and not just fullness that offers possibilities yet to be explored. Kurosawa has magnificently exploited this dimension in Dreams: sometimes the sonic universe is reduced to a single point-the sound of the rain, an echo that disappears, a simple voice.

'Love' has that Kubrick tonality to it, but this is not a Stanley Kubrick movie - there will never be another. At the same time, 'Love' has a modern feel. For example: In one scene, these astronauts go through a wormhole sequence, and you feel like you're being slapped around inside your head by a sonic boom.

Sonic Youth has a very democratic process for the most part. It almost doesn't matter who brings in an initial idea; everything gets worked over by the band and kind of co-written by everyone in the end because everyone's ideas get contributed to it.

I really do prioritise humour in people. It's a sign of intelligence. One of the most important things I heard that moulded me was Derek and Clive. That sense of release when I heard them for the first time, crying and laughing, was akin to seeing Sonic Youth for the first time.

Both of my books, 'Love Is a Mix Tape' and 'Talking to Girls About Duran Duran,' are about how music gets tangled up with all our other emotional memories. Since I'm an obsessive music fan, I'm always seeking out new sonic thrills.

Suppose that you want to teach the 'cat' concept to a very young child. Do you explain that a cat is a relatively small, primarily carnivorous mammal with retractible claws, a distinctive sonic output, etc.? I'll bet not. You probably show the kid a lot of different cats, saying 'kitty' each time, until it gets the idea. To put it more generally, generalizations are best made by abstraction from experience.

I've been lucky enough to be in this amazing band, and to me, a band is really a collaborative unit, and that's definitely been what Sonic Youth has been.

Carl Orff's Carmina Burana has the ability to take you from placidity to power in one sonic breath. It is music of dignity and strength, with primitive, energetic passages, evoking absolute beauty from the simplest of phrases. It brings up something that has everything to do with significance - squeezing joy and motif that you just can't drop - it stays with you.

If I'm working on a set of songs, and thinking about putting them together in a collection, I start to think about what they have in common. Either on purpose or without meaning to, I shape them all in the same kind of way, because I'd rather the album feel like a galaxy of things that all have to do with each other. I do that with sonic elements, too - it's a matter of each record having its own specific identity.

I try to make it a sonic experience so that when you put your earbuds in or when you're in your room, it sounds like an enveloping feeling. I think that is the most important thing, that wherever you are, it is wrapping you up and making you feel safe and comfortable.

We never sit down before we start making a record and talk about this new sonic palette that we are going to try to explore. We always let the record kind of reveal itself to us over time.

I never really thought of myself as a musician. I'm not saying Sonic Youth was a conceptual-art project for me, but in a way, it was an extension of Warhol. Instead of making criticism about popular culture, as a lot of artists do, I worked within it to do something.

If there's loads of material going by you don't notice the individual things quite so much. Also it really foregrounds the sonic dimensions like electronic ambient music, it's pushes all of that colour to the foreground so you hear little every atom of sound.

I always like to say that the music I'd like to make is somewhere between Pan Sonic and Scott Walker. But I don't sing anything like Scott Walker.

I do try to incorporate particular rhythmic and generally sonic motifs I discover in music as such, and if one thinks of language in a narrow sense, that, perhaps, suggests a possibility for a rhythmic sensibility that enters poetry from outside of language.

All punk music is is rebellion, going against the grain. It takes different forms. Sometimes it's a band throwing their instruments around or making really violent and noisy sounds, but it doesn't have to take that sonic form. It can take more of an energy.

I had writers block for months afterwards because I was just so taken aback by all of the sounds I was hearing. It's almost like hearing the most beautiful music you've ever heard, so you're like, "What's the point of me making anything?" It was this living sonic organism so the idea of recording something just seemed like taking this living thing and mummifying it.

If someone says 'grunge' or 'punk,' you know what the sound is, but if you say 'No Wave,' it's kind of mysterious. That was the most interesting part and should have been the most inspirational thing about it... here's this collective sonic insanity, and none of it sounds anything alike.

I conceived of a concept, a project, a band. The Tide. The Tide, acting as a sonic exemplar of flow and fluidity. The way of things. The way of nature. Guitars, rock and surf music, psychedelia, transcendence from everyday bourgeois consciousness.

As sonic journalists, we were increasingly becoming bombarded with global images. It was the early idea of the cut-up, the idea of images being juxtapositioned, which we were doing with sound. That was the early days of samples.

Hip-hop has survived as a sonic practice more than anything else. It's an approach to music-making based in sampling and rhyming over beats, that's proven far more versatile than its detractors thought it would.

I think people would describe a lot of Sleater-Kinney as unsettling. And I don't think our best moments have sonic assonance to them. I think that we are best with a little bit of... a caustic attitude and tone.

I personally feel that there's a lot of music journalism that is dominated by genre, because you need a language in which to write, but actually the things that strike people about music, are very hard to write about, and its sonic connections, it's a sense of harmony that I think we all have even if we don't know how to express it - it's something musical, it's synapse connections in our brain.

'Europe '72' was a super influential record full of fantastic songs and amazing experimental musicianship. I always valued both of those aspects in what Sonic Youth has done through the years - being able to get very abstract and very concrete within the same song.

By the time Sonic Youth formed in 1981, my musical tastes had left the Dead behind, but I was always very proud of the fact that we had three different singers singing individually from different points of view, like the Dead.

I'm a little left of center, for sure, with Angels & Airwaves. But even when I get really weird, it's not that weird. It's not like some obscure Sonic Youth record or something. We don't take it quite that far. But what we do like are crescendos, and we do like when a song catches you off guard and it gives you the chills up and down your arms.

I think, as an artist, you want to keep going - you want to keep taking challenges; you want to be pushed, in a way - and I think Sonic Evolution does that, it makes me feel a little uncomfortable and get out of my comfort zone.

"Dark Fantasy" was my long, backhanded apology. You know how people give a backhanded compliment? It was a backhanded apology. It was like, all these raps, all these sonic acrobatics. I was like: "Let me show you guys what I can do, and please accept me back. You want to have me on your shelves."

When a fan buys a ticket, we learn an enormous amount about them: What bands they like, where they live, how much they are willing to spend. Someday, a fan will be sitting in a bar and his cellphone will text message 'Sonic Youth are playing tonight. Do you want to go?' He'll buy his ticket over the phone and walk to the concert.

I wanna show you I can out-rap your favorite rappers. I wanna show you I can out-produce your favorite producers. So I'm constantly getting better and I understand that there's always room for growth, especially in quality, sonic quality.

I hate the hand that comes out of a car and just drops litter in the street. I hate that! For some reason, it just fills me with fury! It's just utter laziness, lack of interest in other people, lack of interest in the planet, in the hedgehog who might eat the plastic bag, it's a lack of concern.

Something that I did, and I developed out of that sonic meditations, which were pieces that I composed in the '70s that now are very well-known and used in many classrooms all over the world, but at the time were outrageous.

As a teenager my favorite band was Sonic Youth, and everything they did was always obviously them, and always so artistic. There was another layer of meaning, underneath everything, that you could search for.

If the nose has become a deeply disillusioned and grief-stricken organ in the modern world, then what of the ear? The poor little ear - such an innocent, intelligent and sensitive creature; in these times of such flagrant sonic brutality, the sense within the ear has much to contend with.

Part of the process of reading is constantly hitting the pause button, and now and then the rewind button, to ponder a word that's been chosen by the author as exquisitely as the filmmaker chooses an image or a sound editor chooses a sonic clue - the tolling of a bell in the distance to evoke memory, for instance.

It's important to me to not stay too confined to any specific sonic space. There is something really magical about straight folk music - it's not that I don't like it, it's just that I like so much music, I hear so many different things, and I want to try more. I don't want to be confined.

First, I'm trying to edit down about 7 hours of material which I made prior to the Cop days and find some way to get it out. This stuff is pretty out there, mostly sonic collages and tape manipulations.

My favorite over the years is probably 'All I Have to Give.' That's probably my favorite. It's one of the first songs that the five of us were featured on the lead, and I just think it has such a great sonic sound with all the melodies and harmonies. It has a little bit of a mixture of R&B and a pop sound. It's just a really good feel-good song.

In a mystical sense, three can become one, in the sense that two is not one; three is a way of resolving difference between two. It's about creating balance: of energies, of dispositions. Sonic balance. That's the approach for me, what it means.

Is life less thrilling if your neighbors are rational, if they don’t bomb your power stations whenever they feel you need to be admonished? Is it less rousing if they don’t rattle your windows and nerves with indiscriminate sonic booms just because they can?

Music can provide a much-needed break from life's harsh moments, but Eddy Current Suppression Ring has no interest in creating a sonic fire escape for the distraught. Instead, the band embraces the real world, wrapping its arms around the beautiful and the ugly alike.

I want to change and try new ideas - allowing your sonic identity to evolve in your music and not being afraid of that. You see musicians hit upon something that works, and then go, "Let's keep doing that for 10 years." And that idea kind of terrifies me a little bit. It becomes like a day job then.

The goal with a show is to push forward the passion in a visual and sonic way. It all comes out in a trance-like way, fast and pulsating. Then people can go home and think about the lyrics later.

For me, I always have looked at 'indie' as a term of 'independence.' Never associated a sonic gesture with that in the same way that pop music has always meant 'popular' to me; you know, it didn't define a sound.

At 18, I moved to L.A. with my heavy metal band Avant Garde, which was very much influenced by Metallica. At 19, I got a job at Tower Records, and everything started to change very quickly. I started listening to the Velvet Underground, Pixies, early Nirvana, Sonic Youth, and also earlier music like the Beatles.

Composing gives me a chance to work in multiple dimensions and helps me pare down my melodies into what is essential. Learning new skills has always energized me and scoring has opened up a world of sonic possibilities.

I've been into Sonic Youth since junior high school. I think I kind of have ADD, so it's good music for ADD because it just throws you in different directions all the time. I really like Kim Gordon's voice and Thurston Moore's voice, and I like the guitars going off on tangents.