Brian Eno Quotations

Brian Eno is an electronic musician, producer, and music theorist.

Unsourced

I look at the variety of the world, and of the organisms and so on within it, and instead of saying "well, each one of these is an entirely seperate phenomenon," I say, "each one of these is a product of quite a small number of forces and constraints reconfiguring in different ways." So that basic thought about how the universe is made can run through into how I decide to work on music.

I'm terribly attracted to women with ocular damage.

Well, I've always thought that art is a lie, an interesting lie. And I'll sort of listen to the "lie" and try to imagine the world which makes that lie true... what that world must be like, and what would have to happen for us to get from this world to that one.

Although i'm not too skilled in the matter, taxidermy is terribly good fun.

I'm afraid to say that admirers can be a tremendous force for conservatism, for consolidation. Of course it's really wonderful to be acclaimed for things you've done - in fact it's the only serious reward, because it makes you think "it worked! I'm not isolated!" or something like that, and it makes you feel gratefully connected to your own culture. But on the other hand, there's a tremendously strong pressure to repeat yourself, to do more of that thing we all liked so much. I can't do that - I don't have the enthusiasm to push through projects that seem familiar to me ( - this isn't so much a question of artistic nobility or high ideals: I just get too bloody bored), but at the same time I do feel guilt for 'deserting my audience' by not doing the things they apparently wanted. I'd rather not feel this guilt, actually, so I avoid finding out about situations that could cause it. The problem is that people nearly always prefer what I was doing a few years earlier - this has always been true. The other problem is that so, often, do I! Discovering things is clumsy and sporadic, and the results don't at first compare well with the glossy and lauded works of the past. You have to keep reminding yourself that they went through that as well, otherwise they become frighteningly accomplished. That's another problem with being made to think about your own past - you forget its genesis and start to feel useless awe towards your earlier self: "How did I do it? Wherever did these ideas come from?". Now, the workaday everyday now, always looks relatively less glamorous than the rose-tinted then (except for those magic hours when your finger is right on the pulse, and those times only happen when you've abandoned the lifeline of your own history).

Since the age of 18 I've been in a midlife crisis... I've spent a long time trying to figure out what the point of being an artist is. I'm not intellectually dishonest enough to always come out in my own favour... The element of risk may play some part in our idea of the beautiful. If you're taking a risk, all your antennae are out. One day I'd rent a cello, one day a marimba. I couldn't play any of them. I'd have two ideas, I'm going to dangle a mic from the ceiling and I'm going to hire a trombone.

I've actually just finished a new album which is all songs... Songwriting is now actually the most difficult challenge in music... Lyrics are really the last very hard problem in music. Software and hardware have changed the rest of music dramatically in the last thirty or forty years. It's very very easy to make pretty good music... Pretty good isn't very interesting, but pretty good is possible. But writing songs is pretty much in the same place as it was in the days of Chaucer. Apart from hip hop, hip hop is the only breakthrough in a way, rap, because it breaks away from the strict adherence to melody and beat structure and so on... I'd love to try doing this really hard thing [songwriting] and see if I can.

An important aspect of design is the degree to which the object involves you in its own completion.

On creating the Windows 95 start-up sound for Microsoft:

The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I'd been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, "Here's a specific problem -- solve it." The thing from the agency said, "We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah-blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional," this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said "and it must be 3¼ seconds long." I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It's like making a tiny little jewel. In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I'd finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.

"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."

On David Bowie's Low album:

It's really a new feeling about urban industrial society. It's hard and tough and thrilling at the same time. It's a picture of a sort of street-level harshness, but exciting. It makes you dance, you know. That's a new feeling.

Defining culture:

Culture is everything that you don't have to do.

On playing music live with Roxy Music"

We could never hear what we were doing. I had no idea what we played in all those Roxy Music concerts-just this clatter of noise.

When I went back to England after a year away, the country seemed stuck, dozing in a fairy tale, stifled by the weight of tradition.

People assume that the meaning of a song is vested in the lyrics. To me, that has never been the case. There are very few songs that I can think of where I remember the words.

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.

As soon as I hear a sound, it always suggests a mood to me.

In the 1970s people started having fairly decent hi-fi's instead of record players, and this changed the way we listen. People started noticing the aural surface, the richness of the textures.

Music in itself carries a whole set of messages which are very, very rich and complex, and the words either serve to exclude certain ones or point up certain others.

One of the interesting things about having little musical knowledge is that you generate surprising results sometimes; you move to places you wouldn't if you knew better.

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.

The idea of a unified world is so naive, so boring. I don't want a planet where everyone agrees. I am favor of the proliferation of differences, individualities.

Classical music is founded on a very clear distinction between music and noise. In rock, as in electronic music, these barriers are coming down.

I wanted to get rid of the element that had been considered essential in pop music: the voice.

Strictly speaking, I'm a non-musician. None of my skills are manual, they're more to do with ingenuity, I suppose.

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.

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.

I think generally playing live is a crap idea. So much of stage work is the presentation of personality, and I've never been interested in that.

I hate the rock music tradition. I can't bear it!

For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.

When you study music in the classical system, you are always on the inside. When someone is composing a song, they write in C minor, or with a diminished seventh... to offset that, you need a lateral approach.

Does one want to make music that draws on one's whole being-physical, intellectual, emotional, aesthetic, spiritual-or only on a small part of it? I've always wanted to include as much as I could.

After the concert, several people told me that it had them crying on the first few bars.

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.

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.

I'm struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity.

My position in Roxy Music was always halfway between the musical and the theoretical. I was never the sort of person who could sit down at the piano and hammer out a song.

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.

Nearly all the things I do that are of any merit at all start off just being good fun, and I think I'm sort of building up to doing something else quite soon.

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.

A part of me has become immortal, out of my control.

Agressive music can only shock you once. Afterwards its impact declines. It's inevitable.

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.

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 don't live in the past at all; I'm always wanting to do something new. I make a point of constantly trying to forget and get things out of my mind.

I have lived in countries that were coming out of conflict: Ireland, South Africa, the Czech republic. People there are overflowing with energy.

I take sounds and change them into words.

It's not the destination that matters. It's the change of scene.

Zen methods, breaking habits, that makes people mad. My way is the opposite of that. I have always learned things out of fascination.

The preoccupations that manifest are not ones that you're necessarily conscious of at any earlier point.

I was aiming for impersonal music, without contrast. This was because the airport music I had heard always had a human voice singing, which I found very irritating.

If you leave your personality out of the frame, you are inviting the listener to enter it instead.