Brian Eno Quotes
I have lived in countries that were coming out of conflict: Ireland, South Africa, the Czech republic. People there are overflowing with energy.
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.
Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that's what the music is about.
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.
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.
Saying that cultural objects have value is like saying that telephones have conversations.
If there is a new fascism, it won't come from skinheads and punks; it will come from people who eat granola and think they know how the world should be.
Avant-garde music is sort of research music. You're glad someone's done it but you don't necessarily want to listen to it.
I've had quite a lot of luck with dreams. I've often awoken in the night with a phrase or even a whole song in my head.
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.
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.
I think we're about ready for a new feeling to enter music. I think that will come from the Arabic world.
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.
I would like to see a future where artists think that they have a right to contemplate things like global warming.
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 point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.
The basis of computer work is predicated on the idea that only the brain makes decisions and only the index finger does the work.
If you grow up in a very strong religion like Catholicism you certainly cultivate in yourself a certain taste for the intensity of ideas.
The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one's furniture.
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.
Don't be ashamed of your own ideas. Most musicians get applauded for sounding like someone else.
Good teachers realise that the students are the antenna; they are sensing things that the teachers don't yet sense.
In England and Europe, we have this huge music called ambient - ambient techno, ambient house, ambient hip-hop, ambient this, ambient that.
