Top 161 Sonic Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

When I was super young, I had an Atari and used to play 'Space Invaders.' Then I fell in love with 'Mario Bros.,' 'Sonic the Hedgehog' and 'Yoshi' on Super Nintendo. I was quite a bit of a gamer as a kid when I think about it.

[Students] they did the sonic meditations, I would observe them in their ensembles, and the ensembles improved incredibly. So I knew I had something to do and something to say.

Every once in a while I'll find a new way of playing something, it will suggest itself. But generally speaking, there's a set sonic potential, and that's in concert with a set instrumental technique.

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 think that certainly, whenever you have a new band, the first record always has a certain energy to it before you know what you're doing. I think some of the early Sonic Youth stuff was maybe like that.

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.

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.

Today all sounds belong to a continuous field of possibilities lying within the comprehensive dominion of music. Behold the new orchestra: the sonic universe! And the musicians: anyone and anything that sounds!

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 am voice actor Roger Craig Smith. You may know me as Batman, Captain America, Sonic the Hedgehog, Ezio from Assassin's Creed, Transformers: RID, or narrator of “Say Yes To the Dress” (among many other things). AMA!

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.

Working in theoretical systems can take away the juice. It can also be very beautiful, but when you're trying to satisfy a theoretical principle rather than a sonic reality, then it can become dry.

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.

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.

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.

Essentially a joke is creating an idea, whether sonic or visual, whether it's something musical or a traditional joke.

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.

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.

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.

In Sonic Youth, at the end of 'Expressway to Yr. Skull,' we'd tap on the backs of our guitars to get this low-level feedback, and if I leaned forward, and the guitar hung off my body, it would resonate differently.

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.

'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.

Sonic Youth played one show before we even had a drummer. It was just me, Kim, and Thurston. The lights slowly went down, and the set was just 30 minutes of feedback.

I'm hugely into video games; I always have been. I started on the Sega with games like Sonic, Battletoads, and Tetris... all those old-school games.

It's about the stories. If I write 14 stories that I love, then the next step is to get the environment of music around it to best envelop the story and all kinds of sonic goodness.

I take inspiration from books, movies, television, music - it all goes in the hopper. Depending on the project, I'm drawing from this or that piece of art that has stayed with me. Toni Morrison, George Romero, Sonic Youth - they are all in there.

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.

I was a rapper and a DJ, and if you wanted to be involved in hip-hop, you had to be involved in the sonic, the kinetic and the visual aspects. The visual was graffiti.

Sensitivity isn't about being wimpy. It's about being so painfully aware that a flea landing on a dog is like a sonic boom

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 think science fiction and sound is a really interesting thing. You might as well think of it as sonic fiction.

A sonic logo on its own isn't going to do very much. We get frustrated with smaller brands who come to us and say, 'We need a bing-bong'. You just can't encapsulate a brand for £500 in a three-second sound. It doesn't work.

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.

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.

Sonic Youth, for better or worse, is/was a machine that carried me along through pregnancy, motherhood, and creative opportunities I never would have achieved on my own. I'm grateful and surprised that we were listened to, loved, ignored, and overrated.

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 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.

When I was super young, I had an Atari and used to play Space Invaders. Then I fell in love with Mario Bros., Sonic the Hedgehog and Yoshi on Super Nintendo. I was quite a bit of a gamer as a kid when I think about it.

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 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.

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.

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.

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?

I've waited for the day my debut album is released my entire life, so naturally I've designed it to be listened to from start to finish - so every song flows into each other in a way that tells a sonic story.

With animated film, you have to create the sonic world; there's nothing there. You get to color things in more and you're allowed to overreach yourself a little bit more, and it's great fun.

R. Murray Shcafer is a Canadian composer with a twist. Aside from writing incredibly ethereal music, he is also an acousitc ecologist, fighting for the sonic space on this planet to be beautiful - a rare and shamefully underrated cause.

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.

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.

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.

I'm really good at melodic and sonic things, but I don't really think I have anything to say. But I really enjoy the puzzle-making of taking words and adding a melody to them.

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.

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.

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.

But really important, perhaps most important is the craft; how you make your record, the creation of these sonic worlds you want your listener to hear.

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.

Sonic the hedgehog is a beautiful statement on capitalism. You spend your whole life collecting yellow rings and then hit one spike and lose them all. And there is a fat man who wants to kill you.

In terms of tone and style, I've always been influenced by a lot of different players. I love Nick Drake, Mike Bloomfield and Sonic Boom. I like those three a lot!

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.

The SynthAxe enables you to achieve a whole world of sonic textures that you cannot get with a guitar. There was nothing like it before and nothing like it since.

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.