Brian Eno Quotes

Everybody thinks that when new technologies come along that they're transparent and you can just do your job well on it. But technologies always import a whole new set of values with them.

Software options proliferate extremely easily - too easily, in fact - because too many options create tools that can't ever be used intuitively. Intuitive actions confine the detail work to a dedicated part of the brain, leaving the rest of one's mind free to respond with attention and sensitivity to the changing texture of the moment.

You feel as if you're not living a full life. Which, of course, is why it's my theory about why so many people who are heavily into computers are also into extreme sports and S&M. It's because their bodies are crying out for some kind of action.

I set up situations that involve abandoning control and finding out what happens.

One of the great breakthroughs of evolution theory is that you start with simple things and they will grow into complexity.

If you want to make someone feel emotion, you have to make them let go. Listening to something is an act of surrender.

Of course, like anybody I repeat myself endlessly, but I don't know that I'm doing it, usually.

The computer brings out the worst in some people.

Given the chance, i'll die like a baby, on some faraway beach, when the season's over.

I hardly ever go into the studio with a work complete in my head. It emerges from communal activity.

Think inside the work - outside the work

Everything is an experiment until it has a deadline. That gives it a destination, context, and a reason.

I believe in singing. I believe in singing together.

In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.

Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that's what the music is about.

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.

Of all the things you can now do, which do you choose to do?

I think the idea that people walk around to music is very interesting. They are actually creating the soundtrack to their lives as they walk around to it.

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 are part of a religion that very strongly insists that you believe then to decide not to do that is quite a big hurdle to jump over. You never forget the thought process you went through. It becomes part of your whole intellectual picture.

Well, there are some things that I just can't get out of my head, and they start to annoy me after a while. Sometimes they're of my own creation, as well - and they're just as annoying. It's not only other people's ear worms that bug me, it's my own, as well.

The whole history of pop music had rested on the first person singular, with occasional intrusions of the second person singular.

Robert Fripp and I will be recording another LP very soon. It should be even more monotonous than the first one!

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

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

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.

I think it's a myth that American public or any other public is so stupid that they need to be constantly pricked.

I think very often producers are really trying to repeat things. When they hear something in the new songs that they recognize as being a bit like something that was a success on a previous record, they're inclined to encourage that.

My shows are not narratives.

Repetition doesn't really exist

It's actually very easy for democracy to disappear.

The thing that obsesses me more than anything is waste - the waste of human intelligence and creativity.

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.

You can't have a relationship with a device whose limits are unknown to you, because without limits, it keeps becoming something else.

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

Also something that you don't have to listen to from beginning to end - you can enter at any point and leave at any point.

I got an amazing 10-CD set, it's the music that Alan Lomax recorded in Haiti in 1936. And what's incredible is how fantastic the drummers are and how off-the-grid they are. The liveliness is astonishing; they're just totally alive, these recordings. It's very interesting, to me, to be reminded of that, that there was a time when things were not that tight.

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.

The earliest paintings I loved were always the most non-referential paintings you can imagine, by painters such as Mondrian. I was thrilled by them because they didn't refer to anything else. They stood alone, and they were just charged magic objects that did not get their strength from being connected to anything else.

Saying that cultural objects have value is like saying that telephones have conversations.

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

I think one of my pursuits over the years is trying to answer the question of, 'What else can you do with a voice other than stand in front of a microphone and sing?'

I think the other thing that's important is getting to a place, which very, very rarely happens with improvising groups, where somebody can decide not to play for a while. You watch any group of musicians improvising together and they nearly all play nearly all the time. In fact I often say that the biggest difference between classical music and everything else is that classical musicians sometimes shut up because they're told to, because the score tells them to. Whereas any music that's sort of based on folk or jazz, everybody plays all the time.

When I started working on ambient music, my idea was to make music that was more like painting.

When I finish something, I want it out that day. Pop music is like the daily paper. Its got to be there then, not six months later.

Human development thus far has been fueled and guided by the feeling that things could be, and are probably going to be, better.

The biology of purpose keeps my nose above the surface.

The idea that something is uncool because it's old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.

I'm not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.

I make a lot of pieces of music that I never release as CDs.

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.'

It must be quite mysterious to some people why I bother to carry on. Because, you know, I don't sell that many records.

I have these headphones, which pretty much exclude everything else so that you can really completely control the sound that you're hearing. I don't use them very much, I have to say. I very rarely listen on headphones.

I used to think that, given enough goodwill, anybody would be able to 'get' any music, no matter how distant the culture from which it came. And then I heard Chinese opera.

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.

You talk to me as if from a distance And I reply with impressions chosen from another time.

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 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.

Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness.

I got interested in the idea of music that could make itself, in a sense, in the mid 1960s really, when I first heard composers like Terry Riley, and when I first started playing with tape recorders.

Basically, you're still sitting there using just the muscles of your hand, really. Of one hand, actually. It's another example of the transfer of literacy to making music because the assumption is that everything important is happening in your head; the muscles are there simply to serve the head. But that isn't how traditional players work at all; musicians know that their muscles have a lot of stuff going on as well. They're using their whole body to make music, in fact.

I see TV as a picture medium rather than a narrative medium.

I don't like celebrity programmes - but I do like programmes about how ideas are formed and evolve.

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

I'm fascinated by musicians who don't completely understand their territory; that's when you do your best work.

It infuriates me that stuff from the Internet routinely doesn't include all the credits. Because as soon as I listen to something, if I like it, I want to know, "Who's the bass player?" "Who did that?" "Who's the engineer on this?"

I think most artists would be happy to have bigger audiences rather than smaller ones. It doesn't mean that they are going to change their work in order necessarily to get it, but they're happy if they do get it.

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

By the mid-'60s, recorded music was much more like painting than it was like traditional music. When you went into the studio, you could put a sound down, then you could squeeze it around, spread it all around the canvas.

People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.

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

Even though I'm known as a pop musician, I have a seriousness about what I do.

The most important thing in a piece of music is to seduce people to the point where they start searching.

Control and surrender have to be kept in balance. That's what surfers do - take control of the situation, then be carried, then take control. In the last few thousand years, we've become incredibly adept technically. We've treasured the controlling part of ourselves and neglected the surrendering part.

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.

Most people have no idea what something would sound like if it wasn't an MP3.

When governments rely increasingly on sophisticated public relations agencies, public debate disappears and is replaced by competing propaganda campaigns, with all the accompanying deceits. Advertising isn't about truth or fairness or rationality, but about mobilising deeper and more primitive layers of the human mind.

I do sometimes look back at things I've written in the past, and think, 'I just don't remember being the person who wrote that.'

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

Good teachers realise that the students are the antenna; they are sensing things that the teachers don't yet sense.

I've noticed a terrible thing, which is I will agree to anything if it's far enough in the future.

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

More and more I find I want to be living in a Big Here and a Long Now.

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'm kind of an evangelical atheist.

The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten.

I'm very opinionated.

The great benefit of computer sequencers is that they remove the issue of skill, and replace it with the issue of judgement

For instance, I'm always fascinated to see whether, given the kind of fairly known and established form called popular music, whether there is some magic combination that nobody has hit upon before.

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.

The time I like listening to music most on headphones is, I have a game I play with my brother, he's a musician as well.And he sends me MIDI files of keyboard pieces. So, these are pieces where I just get a MIDI file; I don't know what instrument he was playing them on; I know nothing about his section of the sound of the piece, and then when I'm sitting on trains I do a lot of train travel I turn them into pieces of music. And I love to do that; it's my favorite hobby.

I've got a feeling that music might not be the most interesting place to be in the world of things.

You either believe that people respond to authority, or that they respond to kindness and inclusion. I'm obviously in the latter camp. I think that people respond better to reward than punishment.

Possessions are a way of turning money into problems.

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.

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

I do like Burial; he's so curiously clumsy, you can't help but be moved. It's so un-Hollywood, and the rhythms are so un-danceable.

One often makes music to supplement one's world.

Feelings are more dangerous than ideas, because they aren't susceptible to rational evaluation. They grow quietly, spreading underground, and erupt suddenly, all over the place.

Ideas reflect the moment, and so you have to use them. If you store ideas, they wither.