Latest Brian Eno Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• Part of me likes a more ragged, jagged guitar sound or performance, but our work might not have been as innovative had we followed in the footsteps of what came before. We were very proud of what we had hit on.

  Brian Eno

  Proud, Innovative, Footsteps

  Source: pitchfork.com

• People always focus on people like me who use synthesizers, right, which are explicitly electronic and therefore obvious. "Ah, yes, that's electronic music." But they don't realize that so is the concept of actually taking a piece of extant music and literally re-collaging it, taking chunks out and changing the dynamics radically and creating new rhythmic structures with echo and all that. That's real electronic music, as far as I'm concerned.

  Brian Eno

  Real, People, Focus

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I wish there was a serious investigation into flying saucers that wasn't conducted by crackpots. Unfortunately nearly all of the people who are interested in them kind of manufacture the evidence to fit the theories rather than the other way around. So it's very hard to find any dispassionate treatment of them. Maybe there isn't any scientific basis in which case that's why you never see any scientific evidence.

  Brian Eno

  People, Flying, Wish

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I mostly used the studio devices, because I knew what they had. Generally I find I'm happy to use whatever's around. If there's nothing there I'll make something. For example, one of the things I tried doing was getting a tiny loudspeaker and feeding the instruments off the tape through this tiny speaker and then through this huge long plastic tube - about 50 feet long - that they used to clean out the swimming pool in the place where I was staying. You get this really hollow, cavernous, weird sound, a very nice sound. We didn't use it finally, but nonetheless we well could have.

  Brian Eno

  Nice, Swimming, Long

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• What I would really like to do, if I could have a sort of kingship for a short time and organize the group of my dreams - I would make one group which would be a combination of, say, Parliament and Kraftwerk - put those two together and say, "Make a record." Something that would be an extraordinary combination: the weird physical feeling of Parliament with this strange, rigid stuff over the top of it.

  Brian Eno

  Dream, Feelings, Together

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• With devices my technique is always to hide the handbook in the drawer until I've played with it for a while. The handbook always tells you what it does, and you can be quite sure that if it's a complex device it can do at least fifteen other things that weren't predicted in the handbook, or that they didn't consider desirable. It's normally those other things that interest me.

  Brian Eno

  Interest

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• There are hundreds of manufacturers always producing dvices that in general do the same things. Since they have slight structural differences if you take one and fool around with it and give it a good kick it will actually do something that it wasn't designed to do. I have this relationship with my synthesizers. I've had them for so long, and I've never had them serviced, so that now practically all of their functions operate differently from what they were designed to do. They do very interesting things now, but that means nobody else can use them either.

  Brian Eno

  Mean, Long, Giving

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• When I was working with Talking Heads what would happen typically is that they would go out and start playing a track, and I would always run the tape. I always record everything, even a run through where you're trying to get in tune. That's a principle because sometimes when the situation isn't clear interesting things happen, and they are worth listening to again.

  Brian Eno

  Running, Track, Interesting

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• If you think of the way a composer or say a pop arranger works - he has an idea and he writes it down, so there's one transmission loss. Then he gives the score to a group of musicians who interpret that, so there's another transmission loss. So he's involved with three information losses. Whereas what I nearly always do is work directly to the sound if it doesn't sound right. So there's a continuous loop going on.

  Brian Eno

  Writing, Loss, Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• You know that in order to copyright material somebody has to write it down for you. Any piece of recorded material has to be scored in order for it to be copyrighted. I've seen the scores of my things and they don't resemble the music in any way. If you give them to somebody who has never heard the music and say, "What does this sound like to you?" they'll play you something that has no relationship with the music it derives from. Notation simply isn't adequate.

  Brian Eno

  Writing, Giving, Copyright

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• In fact, quite a lot of what I do has to do with sound texture, and, you can't notate that. You can't notate the sound of "St. Elmo's Fire." There's no way of writing that down. That's because musical notation arose at a time when sound textures were limited. If you said violins and woodwind that defined the sound texture; if I say synthesizer and guitar it means nothing - you're talking about 28,000 variables.

  Brian Eno

  Writing, Mean, Musical

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• What happens with notation is that it reduces things to a language which isn't necessarily appropriate to them. In the same way that words do, you get a much cruder version of what was actually intended.

  Brian Eno

  Language

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• Another way of working is setting deliberate constraints that aren't musical ones - like saying, "Well, this piece is going to be three minutes and nineteen seconds long and it's going to have changes here, here and here, and there's going to be a convolution of events here, and there's going to be a very fast rhythm here with a very slow moving part over the top of it." Those are the sort of visual ideas that I can draw out on graph paper. I've done a lot of film music this way.

  Brian Eno

  Moving, Long, Musical

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• One way of working is just bring a group of totally different musicians together and encourage them to stick to their guns, not to do the thing that normally happens in a working situation where everyone homogenizes and concedes certain points - so eventually they're all playing in roughly the same style. I wanted quite the opposite of that. I wanted them to accent their styles, so that they pulled away. So there would be a kind of space in the middle where I could operate, and attempt to make these things coalesce in some way. In fact quite a lot of my stuff has arisen from that.

  Brian Eno

  Gun, Style, Together

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• A lot of the so-called systems composers have this thing that the system is always right. You don't fiddle with it at all. Well, I don't think that. I think the system is as right as you judge it to be. If for some reason you don't like a bit of it you must trust your intuition on that. I don't take a doctrinaire approach to systems.

  Brian Eno

  Thinking, Judging, Intuition

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• When I work there are two distinct phases: the phase of pushing the work along, getting something to happen, where all the input comes from me, and phase two, where things start to combine in a way that wasn't expected or predicted by what I supplied. Once phase two begins everything is okay, because then the work starts to dictate its own terms. It starts to get an identity which demands certain future moves. But during the first phase you often find that you come to a full stop.

  Brian Eno

  Moving, Identity, Term

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• Frequently, I go straight into the studio and see what's around. I might hire a couple of instruments that I've never used - maybe a particular type of electronic organ or an echo unit. Then I just dabble with sounds until something starts to happen that suggests a texture. The texture suggests some kind of mood, and the mood suggests some kind of lyric. That's like working in reverse, often quite the other way around, from sound to song. Although often they stop before they get to the song stage.

  Brian Eno

  Song, Couple, Kind

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• Except in a few cases like Music for Airports, which was a very clear case of noticing a niche [and] saying, "Okay, there's this situation in which people always play music, and nobody has written music for that situation so I'm going to." So, that was a very clear example of spotting a niche and working for it. I have done that occasionally.

  Brian Eno

  Airports, Play, People

  Interview by Mark Richardson, pitchfork.com. November 1, 2010.

• Often, I think you find that you're enjoying certain things, you've got this new way of listening, and you find that you really enjoy the way that sounds on it and the way this other thing sounds on it and the way that other thing sounds on it. So, you're finding a new pleasure that you didn't know about before.

  Brian Eno

  Thinking, Listening, Sound

  Interview by Mark Richardson, pitchfork.com. November 1, 2010.

• 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.

  Brian Eno

  Mean, Technology, People

  Interview by Mark Richardson, pitchfork.com. November 1, 2010.

• 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.

  Brian Eno

  Sound, Use, Hearing

  Interview by Mark Richardson, pitchfork.com. November 1, 2010.

• 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.

  Brian Eno

  Brother, Favorite Hobby, Games

  Interview by Mark Richardson, pitchfork.com. November 1, 2010.

• I love the sort of ambivalence of this, the ambiguity of something - being, for instance, in a quite busy Mexican restaurant with one of these very gentle tracks playing I remember as being particularly nice.

  Brian Eno

  Nice, Track, Mexican

  Interview with Mark Richardson, pitchfork.com. November 1, 2010.

• 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.

  Brian Eno

  Thinking, Creating, Ideas

  Interview with Mark Richardson, pitchfork.com. November 1, 2010.

• When you look back on a historical period of music, it seems so obvious to you what the characteristics of it are, but they're not obvious at the time. So, when I look back at my own work, I could easily write a very convincing sort of account of it that made it look like I had planned it all out from day one and that this led logically to that and then I did this and then that followed quite naturally from that. But that's not how it felt.

  Brian Eno

  Writing, Historical, Looks

  Interview with Mark Richardson, pitchfork.com. November 1, 2010.