Zitat des Tages von Brian Eno:
I hate the rock music tradition. I can't bear it!
I think we're about ready for a new feeling to enter music. I think that will come from the Arabic world.
The whole history of pop music had rested on the first person singular, with occasional intrusions of the second person singular.
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.
A part of me has become immortal, out of my control.
When I started making my own records, I had this idea of drowning out the singer and putting the rest in the foreground. It was the background that interested me.
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.'
One of the things you do when you make a piece of art is you try to make the world you'd rather be in.
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.
I always use the same guitar; I got this guitar years and years ago for nine pounds. It's still got the same strings on it.
Set up a situation that presents you with something slightly beyond your reach.
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.
I think I've committed the one really bad English crime, which is I've risen above my station. I was supposed to be a pop star, and suddenly I'm claiming that I'm an artist of some kind.
Most people have no idea what something would sound like if it wasn't an MP3.
When I first started making ambient music, I was setting up systems using synthesizers that generated pulses more or less randomly. The end result is a kind of music that continuously changes. Of course, until computers came along, all I could actually present of that work was a piece of its output.
If you want to make someone feel emotion, you have to make them let go. Listening to something is an act of surrender.
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.
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.
'Two Voices,' from my album with Peter Schwalm, is an intact dream-poem. I awoke one night with an image of a piece of paper and all the words of the poem written on it, so I just blundered down to the kitchen table and 'copied it out.'
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.
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.
I wouldn't call myself a synaesthete in the sense that Nabokov was. But I'll talk about a sound as being cold blue or dark brown. For descriptive purposes, yes, I often see colors when I'm listening to music and think, 'Oh, there's not enough sort of yellowy stuff in here, or not enough white.'
Once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music - not like a record that you'd put on, which would play for a while and finish.
I suppose I am reluctant about being any sort of 'star' and I didn't particularly want to be portrayed as one.
The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don't set out to say anything very important.
For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.
I often say to people that producing is the best-paid form of cowardice. When you produce things, you almost always get credit if it's a good record, but you hardly ever get the blame if it's not! You don't really take responsibility for your work.
Something I've realized lately, to my shock, is that I am an optimist, in that I think humans are almost infinitely capable of self-change and self-modification, and that we really can build the future that we want if we're smart about it.
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.
I wanted to get rid of the element that had been considered essential in pop music: the voice.
I think it's a myth that American public or any other public is so stupid that they need to be constantly pricked.
In the wake of the events of 11 September 2001, it now seems clear that the shock of the attacks was exploited in America.
In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.
I see TV as a picture medium rather than a narrative medium.
I love San Francisco and Brighton has something of San Francisco about it. It's by the sea, there's a big gay community, a feeling of people being there because they enjoy their life there.
I think everyone's inherently snobbish. Things that are very popular are not taken seriously, because the snobbish side of one says, 'Well, if everyone likes it it can't be that good.' Whereas if only I and a couple of other people like it, then it must be really something special.
