Brian Eno Quotes

Ambient music must be as ignorable as it is interesting.

Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences.

The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band

I had wanted a tape recorder since I was tiny.

I thought it was a magic thing. I never got one until just before I went to art school.

My guitar only has five strings 'cause the top one broke and I decided not to put it back on: when I play chords I only play bar chords, and the top one always used to cut me there.

Well, I am a dilettante. It's only in England that dilettantism is considered a bad thing. In other countries it's called interdisciplinary research.

Everything is an experiment until it has a deadline.

That gives it a destination, context, and a reason.

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.

Anything popular is populist, and populist is rarely a good adjective.

I felt extremely uncomfortable as the focal point, in the spotlight.

I really like the behind the scenes role, because all my freedom is there.

American television really is pathetic.

I often work by avoidance.

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

Whenever you listen to a piece of music, what you are actually doing is hearing the latest sentence in a very long story you’ve been listening to - all the pieces of music you’ve ever heard.

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.

A part of me has become immortal, out of my control.

We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music.

No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.

Every collaboration helps you grow.

I think we're about ready for a new feeling to enter music.

I think that will come from the Arabic world.

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.

The trouble with New Age music is that there's no evil in it.

I think that sex, drugs, art and religion very much overlap with one another and sometimes one becomes another.

The basis of computer work is predicated on the idea that only the brain makes decisions and only the index finger does the work.

Good teachers realise that the students are the antenna;

they are sensing things that the teachers don't yet sense.

The philosophical idea that there are no more distances, that we are all just one world, that we are all brothers, is such a drag! I like differences.

It's not the destination that matters. It's the change of scene.

If you're in a forest, the quality of the echo is very strange because echoes back off so many surfaces of all those trees that you get this strange, itchy ricochet effect.

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.

I believe in singing. I believe in singing together.

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

I have a definite talent for convincing people to try something new.

I am a good salesman. When I'm on form, I can sell anything.

Agressive music can only shock you once. Afterwards its impact declines. It's inevitable.

Rationality is what we do to organize the world, to make it possible to predict.

Art is the rehearsal for the inapplicability and failure of that process.

I don't live in the past at all; I'm always wanting to do something new. I make a point of constantly trying to forget and get things out of my mind.

For me it's always contingent on getting a sound-the sound always suggests what kind of melody it should be. So it's always sound first and then the line afterwards.

People assume that the meaning of a song is vested in the lyrics.

To me, that has never been the case. There are very few songs that I can think of where I remember the words.

Admirers can be a tremendous force for conservatism.

The reason conservatives cohere and radicals fight: everyone agrees about fears, no one about visions.

If you watch any good player, they're using different parts of their body and working with instruments that respond to those movements. They're moving in many dimensions at once.

One often makes music to supplement one's world.

Musicians are there in front of you, and the spectators sense their tension, which is not the case when you're listening to a record. Your attention is more relaxed. The emotional aspect is more important in live music.

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

Every collaboration helps you grow. With Bowie, it's different every time. I know how to create settings, unusual aural environments. That inspires him. He's very quick.

I enjoy working with complicated equipment.

A lot of my things started just with a rhythm box, but I feed it through so many things that what comes out sounds very complex and rich.

I'm very good with technology, I always have been, and with machines in general.

They seem not threatening like other people find them, but a source of fun and amusement.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.

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

Most of those melodies are me trying to find out what notes fit, and then hitting ones that don't fit in a very interesting way.

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.