Ambient Music Quotes

• A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.

  Leopold Stokowski

  Inspirational, Music, Art

  Leopold Stokowski's address to an audience at Carnegie Hall, as quoted in The New York Times, May 11, 1967.

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• Ambient music must be as ignorable as it is interesting.

  Brian Eno

  Interesting, Ambient

  "Brian Eno: The Ship review - epic eeriness" by Paul Mardles, www.theguardian.com. May 1, 2016.

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• 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.

  Brian Eno

  Doors, Musical, Different

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• 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.

  Brian Eno

  Interesting, Listening, Attention

  "Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice". Book by Robert Fink, 2005.

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

  Brian Eno

  Thinking, Space, Calm

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

  Brian Eno

  Letting Go, Listening, Want

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• If I don't already know a song's chord progression, I'll stop writing and try to figure it out. I can occasionally listen to unstructured, amelodic ambient music, but I prefer no music. I don't need silence - I can write just about anywhere - but music is a major distraction.

  F. Paul Wilson

  Song, Writing, Silence

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• In England and Europe, we have this huge music called ambient - ambient techno, ambient house, ambient hip-hop, ambient this, ambient that.

  Brian Eno

  Europe, House, Hip Hop

  "Q and A With Brian Eno". Interview with Joel Selvin, www.sfgate.com. June 2, 1996.

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• If there's loads of material going by you don't notice the individual things quite so much. Also it really foregrounds the sonic dimensions like electronic ambient music, it's pushes all of that colour to the foreground so you hear little every atom of sound.

  Max Richter

  Sound, Atoms, Littles

  Source: thequietus.com

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• When I first started out, I was a bad actor.

  Harrison Ford

  Actors, Firsts

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• 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.

  Brian Eno

  People, Listening, Easy

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• There's some ambient music that doesn't do anything. I wouldn't say that that's narrative. It is narrative in that it creates a sort of world where nothing happens, where really nothing happens, so you become a different person after hearing eight minutes of exactly the same thing. Yes, I hear music all the time in which one idea is strung together to another idea, and I feel that such music is non-narrative.

  Missy Mazzoli

  Eight, Ideas, Together

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I knew what real instruments I wanted and, in some cases, who I wanted to play them. I had started listening to a lot of ambient music and jazz and I wanted to incorporate stuff like that, too.

  Dan Bejar

  Real, Play, Listening

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• COIL would very much like to see the creation of a newsgroup for minimal musics. We enjoy a wide spectrum of such musics, from La Monte Young, Alvin Lucier, Arvo Part, Nurse With Wound's Solilique For Lilith,The Dream Syndicate (orig.concept not the newer group who plundered the name) to Synus, Earth and so on.and on and on. Some new so called ambient musics fall between genres and so between newsgroups: some of our own music has certainly been deeply inspired by and informed by such musics,from Partch to Subotnic.

  John Balance

  Dream, Fall, Names

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• I think early on I was really into ambient music and like American original Emo.

  Matthew Healy

  Emo, Thinking, Originals

  Source: killingthecabinet.com

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