Brian Eno (quotes)

I believe in singing.
I’m very opinionated.
I often work by avoidance.
I love good, loud speakers.
My shows are not narratives.
Law is always better than war.
Repetition doesn’t really exist
Painting, I think it’s like jazz.
Everybody is entertained to death.
I’m bloody awful at multi-tasking.
Being an artist is a job for life.
Every collaboration helps you grow.
I’m kind of an evangelical atheist.
Honor thy error as a hidden intention.
American television really is pathetic.
Think inside the work – outside the work
Everything good proceeds from enthusiasm.
I take sounds and change them into words.
Genius is individual, scenius is communal.
Culture is everything you don’t have to do.
Cooking is a way of listening to the radio.
I want to rethink surrender as an active verb.
Listening to something is an act of surrender.
Most game music is based on loops effectively.
All the best lyrics are written in ten minutes.
One often makes music to supplement one’s world.
Emotion creates reality, reality demands action.
The computer brings out the worst in some people.
I hate the rock music tradition. I can’t bear it!
I hate talking about music, to tell you the truth.
In my normal life I’m a very unadventurous person.
You can’t really imagine music without technology.
I do love being in my studio. Especially at night.
Art is not an object, but a trigger for experience.
I’ve never used a PC in my life; I don’t like them.
It’s actually very easy for democracy to disappear.
A part of me has become immortal, out of my control.
I believe in singing. I believe in singing together.
Admirers can be a tremendous force for conservatism.
Possessions are a way of turning money into problems.
In art, you CAN crash your plane and walk away from it
You don’t have to act as if you know what you’re doing
The biology of purpose keeps my nose above the surface.
It’s amazing how quickly people get used to bad quality.
Ambient music must be as ignorable as it is interesting.
As struggles go, being an artist isn’t that much of one.
Nothing so dates an era as its conception of the future.
As soon as I hear a sound, it always suggests a mood to me.
I’d love it if American kids were listening to Muslim music.
The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten.
Of all the things you can now do, which do you choose to do?
I make a lot of pieces of music that I never release as CDs.
I see TV as a picture medium rather than a narrative medium.
The trouble with New Age music is that there’s no evil in it.
Ambient music is intended to induce calm and a space to think.
The only value of ideology is to stop things becoming showbiz.
It’s not the destination that matters. It’s the change of scene.
Look closely at the most embarrassing details, and amplify them.
I’m always interested in something when it isn’t familiar to me.
The problem with computers is that there is not enough Africa in them.
I hate the way CDs just drone on for bloody hours and you stop caring.
All music has political dimensions because it suggests a way of being.
Anything popular is populist, and populist is rarely a good adjective.
Being completely free to choose what to do is actually quite difficult
Composition is a way of living out your philosophy and calling it art.
Put out as much as you can. It doesn’t do anything sitting on a shelf.
More and more I find I want to be living in a Big Here and a Long Now.
Be the first to not do what nobody has ever thought of not doing before.
Pop is totally results-oriented and there is a very strong feedback loop.
For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.
I think audiences are quite comfortable watching something coming into being.
Complexity and intelligence grow from simplicity, not from greater complexity.
I don’t like headphones very much, and I rarely listen to music on headphones.
Even though I’m known as a pop musician, I have a seriousness about what I do.
It’s nice, I think, when people use your music for things you didn’t think of.
Set up a situation that presents you with something slightly beyond your reach.
When you make something you are always offering some choices and denying others.
The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another.
Not many people bought Velvet Underground LPs, but those who did, started a band.
I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant.
I set up situations that involve abandoning control and finding out what happens.
A culture is the sum of all the things about which humanity can choose to differ.
Make an exhaustive list of everything you might do & do the last thing on the list.
Perhaps when music has been shouting for so long, a quieter voice seems attractive.
Lyrics are the only thing to do with music that haven’t been made easier technically.
The artists of the past who impressed me were the ones who really focused their work.
Given the chance, i’ll die like a baby, on some faraway beach, when the season’s over.
I’m not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.
Nearly all the things I do that are of any merit at all start off just being good fun.
Ideas reflect the moment, and so you have to use them. If you store ideas, they wither.
If something is good, you must torture it mercilessly until it is either dead or great.
I wanted to use the studio like a microscope for sound, which is what good engineers do.
Agressive music can only shock you once. Afterwards its impact declines. It’s inevitable.
Saying that cultural objects have value is like saying that telephones have conversations.
I despise computers in many ways. I think they’re hopelessly underevolved and overrated.
People who are very confident in themselves aren’t hurt by criticism. They make use of it.
Try to make things that can become better in other people’s minds than they were in yours.
I wanted to get rid of the element that had been considered essential in pop music: the voice.
Of course, like anybody I repeat myself endlessly, but I don’t know that I’m doing it, usually.
You can’t do anything interesting with cutting-edge technology except not make it cutting-edge.
The trouble begins with a design philosophy that equates ‘more options’ with ‘greater freedom.’
Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that’s what the music is about.
Don’t be ashamed of your own ideas. Most musicians get applauded for sounding like someone else.
When people censor themselves they’re just as likely to get rid of the good bits as the bad bits.
I’m always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven’t thought of doing yet.
I’ve noticed a terrible thing, which is I will agree to anything if it’s far enough in the future.
I’ve got a feeling that music might not be the most interesting place to be in the world of things.
I don’t like celebrity programmes – but I do like programmes about how ideas are formed and evolve.
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
My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.
If I had a stock of fabulous sounds I would just always use them. I wouldn’t bother to find new ones.
The reason conservatives cohere and radicals fight: everyone agrees about fears, no one about visions.
The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.
The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don’t set out to say anything very important.
Everything is an experiment until it has a deadline. That gives it a destination, context, and a reason.
The thing that obsesses me more than anything is waste – the waste of human intelligence and creativity.
I’ve discovered this new electronic technique that creates new speech out of stuff that’s already there.
The most important thing in a piece of music is to seduce people to the point where they start searching.
The point about working is not to produce great stuff all the time, but to remain ready for when you can.
With all fashion, what we do is play at being somebody else. We play at inhabiting another kind of world.
I think we’re about ready for a new feeling to enter music. I think that will come from the Arabic world.
Any constraint is part of the skeleton that you build the composition on – including your own incompetence.
I’ve got nothing against records – I’ve spent my life making them – but they are a kind of historical blip.
Some people are very good at being ‘stars’ and it suits them. I’m grudging about it and I find it annoying.
People tend to play in their comfort zone, so the best things are achieved in a state of surprise, actually.
John Cage made you realise that there wasn’t a thing called noise, it was just music you hadn’t appreciated.
I never wanted to write the sort of song that said, ‘Look at how abnormal and crazy and out there I am, man!’
I prefer to shoot the arrow, then paint the target around it. You make the niches in which you finally reside.
I suppose I am reluctant about being any sort of ‘star’ and I didn’t particularly want to be portrayed as one.
I want to make things that put me in the position of innocence, that recreate the feeling of innocence in you.
I think that sex, drugs, art and religion very much overlap with one another and sometimes one becomes another.
I’m fascinated by musicians who don’t completely understand their territory; that’s when you do your best work.
Robert Fripp and I will be recording another LP very soon. It should be even more monotonous than the first one!
Some people say Bowie is all surface style and second-hand ideas, but that sounds like a definition of pop to me.
If I tried to make a commercial album, it would be a complete flop. I have no idea what the world at large likes.
I would like to see a future where artists think that they have a right to contemplate things like global warming.
I think it’s a myth that American public or any other public is so stupid that they need to be constantly pricked.
Songs that don’t depend on composition depend instead on performance – so the fire has to be there in the playing.
Good teachers realise that the students are the antenna; they are sensing things that the teachers don’t yet sense.
I’d rather hold one note for an hour and modulate it so that it means something than play 3,000 notes in 15 seconds.
You shoot your arrow and then you paint your bulls eye around it, and therefore you have hit the target dead centre.
If you want to make someone feel emotion, you have to make them let go. Listening to something is an act of surrender.
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.
It must be quite mysterious to some people why I bother to carry on. Because, you know, I don’t sell that many records.
As soon as you externalize an idea you see facets of it that weren’t clear when it was just floating around in your head.
In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.
In the wake of the events of 11 September 2001, it now seems clear that the shock of the attacks was exploited in America.
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.
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.
One of the great breakthroughs of evolution theory is that you start with simple things and they will grow into complexity.
The great benefit of computer sequencers is that they remove the issue of skill, and replace it with the issue of judgement
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.
I occasionally meet people and they say, ‘Oh, I was born to Discreet Music’… They always have very weird eyes, those people.
Once you’ve grown to accept something and it becomes part of the system you’ve inherited, you don’t even notice it any longer.
Most of those melodies are me trying to find out what notes fit, and then hitting ones that don’t fit in a very interesting way.
I cant duplicate my own successes, because part of the creation of that effect is making something happen that you didn’t expect
Human development thus far has been fueled and guided by the feeling that things could be, and are probably going to be, better.
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.’
The basis of computer work is predicated on the idea that only the brain makes decisions and only the index finger does the work.
The whole history of pop music had rested on the first person singular, with occasional intrusions of the second person singular.
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.
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.
I’m actually an evangelical atheist, but there is something I recognise about religion: that it gives people a chance to surrender.
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.
There is a sort of convergence starting to happen between the computer and musical instruments, but it’s still quite a long way off.
W]hat makes a work of art good’ for you is not something that is already ‘inside’ it, but something that happens inside you.
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.
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.
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.
If you grow up in a very strong religion like Catholicism you certainly cultivate in yourself a certain taste for the intensity of ideas.
In England and Europe, we have this huge music called ambient – ambient techno, ambient house, ambient hip-hop, ambient this, ambient that.
The dominant theory coming out of Hollywood is that peoples’ attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and they need more stimulation.
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.
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.
Every increase in your knowledge is a simultaneous decrease. You learn and you unlearn at the same time. A new certainty is a new doubt as well.
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 have lived in countries that were coming out of conflict: Ireland, South Africa, the Czech republic. People there are overflowing with energy.
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.
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.
When I’ve finally got the title, I think, “Okay, yes, now I know where we are. Now I know what it is. Fine, that must be finished or nearly finished.
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.
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.
The reason I don’t tour is that I don’t know how to front a band. What would I do? I can’t really play anything well enough to deal with that situation.
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.
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.
Every band I’ve worked with also wants to be countercultural in the sense that they want to feel that they’ve gone somewhere that nobody else has been.
Attention is what creates value. Artworks are made as well by how people interact with them – and therefore by what quality of interaction they can inspire.
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.
At the party, Rob Partridge said to me, “You gave hope to other balding men.” My new epitaph: “Co-wrote a couple of decent songs and went bald shamelessly.”
All cultures have these feelings about non-functional areas of activity. And the more time people have on their hands, the more they commit it to those areas.
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.
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.
Cultural objects have no notable identity outside of that which we confer upon them. Their value is entirely a product of the interaction that we have with them.
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.
I had a lot of trouble with engineers, because their whole background is learning from a functional point of view, and then learning how to perform that function.
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.
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.
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 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?’
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.
I thought it was magic to be able to catch something identically on tape and then be able to play around with it, run it backwards; I thought that was great for years.
One of the things you’re doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.
Sometimes you recognize that there is a category of human experience that has not been identified but everyone knows about it. That is when I find a term to describe it.
Every collaboration helps you grow. With Bowie, it’s different every time. I know how to create settings, unusual aural environments. That inspires him. He’s very quick.
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.
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.
If you’re in a forest, the quality of the echo is very strange because echoes back off so many surfaces of all those trees that you get this strange, itchy ricochet effect.
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.
A big ego isn’t necessarily a bad thing. A big ego means that you have some confidence in your abilities, really, and that you’re prepared to take the risk of trying them out.
There are certain sounds that I’ve found work well in nearly any context. Their function is not so much musical as spatial: they define the edges of the territory of the music.
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.
If you watch any good player, they’re using different parts of their body and working with instruments that respond to those movements. They’re moving in many dimensions at once.
I enjoy working with complicated equipment. A lot of my things started just with a rhythm box, but I feed it through so many things that what comes out sounds very complex and rich.
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.
I don’t want to do free jazz! Because free jazz – which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering – isn’t actually free at all. It’s just constrained by what your muscles can do.
The problem with improvisation is, of course, that everyone just slips into their comfort zone and does sort of the easy thing to do, the most obvious thing to do with your instrument.
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 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.
The difficulty of always feeling that you ought to be doing something is that you tend to undervalue the times when you’re apparently doing nothing, and those are very important times.
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.
I love San Francisco and Brighton has something of San Francisco about it. It’s by the sea, there’s a big gay community, a feeling of people being there because they enjoy their life there.
We’re going through this super-uptight era, which I think comes entirely from literacy, actually. It’s the result of machines that were designed as word processors being used for making music.
I think, if you spend a day or – as many people do – a life working only with that aspect of your being, the cerebrum connected to a finger, I feel that the rest of you atrophies, essentially.
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.
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.
If you’ve spent a long time developing a skill and techniques, and now some 14 year-old upstart can get exactly the same result, you might feel a bit miffed I suppose, but that has happened forever.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think that there’s something that I still like about the fact of a package, like the latest report from somebody. “Okay, this is what they’re up to now; this is what they’re doing; who’s working with them?
I believe that singing is the key to long life, a good figure, a stable temperament, increased intelligence, new friends, super self-confidence , heightened sexual attractiveness, and a better sense of humor.
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.
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.
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.
When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. Not, he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought I should know how it’s done so I would recognise when I was being lied to.
Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing – ‘Oh, let’s put that sentence there, let’s get rid of this’ – have become commonplace in films and music too.
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.
Musicians are there in front of you, and the spectators sense their tension, which is not the case when you’re listening to a record. Your attention is more relaxed. The emotional aspect is more important in live music.
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
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 know that if I had a television in my flat I would convince myself that everything on it was really interesting. I would say, ‘I’m a Celebrity – Get Me Out of Here!’ is so sociologically fascinating that I think I’d better watch.
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 interest in making music has been to create something that does not exist that I would like to listen to. I wanted to hear music that had not yet happened, by putting together things that suggested a new thing which did not yet exist.
Most big concerts sound disgusting and awful and insultingly bad. It’s like going to the cinema and been shown a scratchy film which is upsidedown and the bulb had gone on the projector. The quality of large-scale live music is so shocking.
Things that are very popular are not taken seriously, because the snobbish side of one says, “Well, if everyone likes it it can’t be that good.” Whereas if only I and a couple of other people like it, then it must be really something special.
Something I’ve realized lately, to my shock, is that I am an optimist, in that I think humans are almost infinitely capable of self-change and self-modification, and that we really can build the future that we want if we’re smart about it.
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.
A studio is an absolute labyrinth of possibilities – this is why records take so long to make because there are millions of permutations of things you can do. The most useful thing you can do is to get rid of some of those options before you start
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 often say to people that producing is the best paid form of cowardice. When you produce things you almost always get credit, if it’s a good record, but you hardly ever get the blame if it’s not! You don’t really take responsibility for your work.
Once music ceases to be ephemeral – always disappearing – and becomes instead material… it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a painting, existing as material in space, not immaterial in time.
My kind of composing is more like the work of a gardener. The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow where and when – and he won’t necessarily be able to reproduce it again afterwards either.
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.

Reggie Watts is a most unusual talent: a huge vocal range, a natural musicality, and a sidesplitting wit. Is he a comedian? A singer? A performance artist? I’ve seen him a few times since then and I still can’t decide. Whatever, he ain’t like nobody else.

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.
Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature… The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
Instead of shooting arrows at someone elses target, which Ive never been very good at, I make my own target around wherever my arrow happens to have landed. You shoot your arrow and then you paint your bulls eye around it, and therefore you have hit the target dead centre.
In the 19th century, a lot of people were against outlawing child labour, because to do so would be against the very foundations of a free market economy: ‘These children want to work, these people want to employ them… what is your problem? It’s not as if anyone has kidnapped them…’
I remember when in the early days of rock’n’roll, when everything sounded totally different, all amazing and blah blah blah blah blah. Now you can play me one second of any record from that time, and I’ll say “1959” or “1961.” I can hear precisely. It’s like it has a huge date stamp on it.
Sometimes something intrigues me about particular sounds, how they work together, and I think “Okay, I’ve found something here; I’m going to take it somewhere.” And sometimes just to find a name for that sound, whatever it is, ends up becoming a title of the piece or becoming part of the title.
When you build a building, you finish a building. You don’t finish a garden; you start it, and then it carries on with its life. So my analogy was really to say that we composers or some of us should think of ourselves as people who start processes rather than finish them. And there might be surprises.
You just make different music on a computer. And you can make wonderful music on a computer, but don’t pretend that the machinery is transparent. It makes as much difference to what you’re doing as it does if you play an acoustic guitar as opposed to a kettledrum. You’re not going to make the same music.
The micro-compositions are the pieces themselves, but the macro-composition is the whole set of them and how it moves from track to track and how the titles relate to one another, for example. Always when I do records like this of a selection of instrumental pieces – the titles, to me, are very important.
You can hear the profile of a sound, in retrospect, so much more clearly than you did at the time. And I think one of the things that’s going to be nauseatingly characteristic about so much music of now is its glossy production values and its griddedness, the tightness of the way everything is locked together.
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.
Since I have always preferred making plans to executing them, I have gravitated towards situations and systems that, once set into operation, could create music with little or no intervention on my part. That is to say, I tend towards the roles of planner and programmer, and then become an audience to the results
When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That’s one of the great feelings – to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.
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.
I always have wanted to know how the whole thing was done, what the process involved. And I don’t particularly enjoy that my music is stripped of ancillary details, and it just sort of comes out of this big tap called the Internet like water. I like some of my water to be neatly presented in a bottle. With a label on it.
People in the arts often want to aim for the biggest, most obvious target, and hit it smack in the bull’s eye. Of course with everybody else aiming there as well that makes it very hard and expensive to hit. I prefer to shoot the arrow, then paint the target around it. You make the niches in which you finally reside.
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’.
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.
The tools are evolving, and people’s interests are evolving as well. So, suddenly people like to hear bands, people like Devendra Banhart or the xx, bands that make a kind of virtue of sloppiness. That isn’t what they would describe what they’re doing, but the fact is they make a virtue of the sort of hand-made nature of what they’re doing.
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.
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.
The whole point of art, as far as I’m concerned, is that art doesn’t make any difference. And that’s why it’s important. Take film: you can have quite extreme emotional experiences watching a movie, but they stop as soon as you walk out of the cinema. You can see people being hurt, but even though you feel those things strongly, you know they’re not real.
Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences… That solves a lot of problems … Art is something that happens, a process, not a quality, and all sorts of things can make it happen … [W]hat makes a work of art ‘good’ for you is not something that is already ‘inside’ it, but something that happens inside you.
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.
So I believe in singing to such an extent that if I were asked to redesign the British educational system, I would start by insisting that group singing become a central part of the daily routine. I believe it builds character and, more than anything else, encourages a taste for co-operation with others. This seems to be about the most important thing a school could do for you.
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.
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.
When I was at art college, the teachers who helped me were not the ones I agreed with, or the ones who encouraged me, but the ones who took very strong positions. Because if someone does that, you can find your own position in relation to it: what is it that I don’t agree with? In the studio I want to articulate a position clearly enough so that other people can use it – or chuck it away if they don’t want it.
Quite often, and in fact more often, I would say, I’m struggling all the way through to think, “What is it I like about this? What is the personality of this thing I’m hearing that I like so much?” And it’s nearly always a sort of mixed emotion, which is why I like it. It’s something that I have mixed feelings about in the sense that it’s both, say, placid and dangerous, or bitter and sweet, or dark and bright.
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.
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.
The Marshall guitar amplifier doesn’t just get louder when you turn it up. It distorts the sound to produce a whole range of new harmonics, effectively turning a plucked string instrument into a bowed one. A responsible designer might try to overcome this limitation – probably the engineers at Marshall tried, too. But that sound became the sound of, among others, Jimi Hendrix. That sound is called electric guitar.
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.
I think that’s very significant that we’re so attached to the idea now of – it was something I advocated for years, that you can make music in studios, music doesn’t have to be made as a real-time experience. But now you see the results of that in people who are completely crippled unless they know that they have the possibility of “cut and paste” and “undo.” And “undo” and “undo” and “undo” and “undo” and “undo” again.
I had an interesting day. I was in the studio with a group of musicians, who shall remain nameless, and I said to them “Our exercise today is not to use ‘undo’ at all. So, there’s no second takes. Or, if you do a second take, you have to do the whole take. There’s no sort of drop in, change that little bit”. The session broke down in, I’d say, 40 minutes. It was impossible for people to work in that restriction any longer.
The seven white notes on the piano – each section of the piece (there are 12 sections) is five of those seven white notes. If you calculate it, there are 21 groups of five notes in any group of seven notes. And although there are 12 sections, this piece actually uses nine of those groups because some of the sections repeat earlier ones. So that’s the formula. It’s very simple as a way of generating something. It’s my inner minimalist.
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.
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.
I still do mostly listen to CDs. I think that every format really is a different way of listening. If you take a different sort of psychological stance to it – like, I think the transition from vinyl to CD definitely marked a difference in the way people treated music. The vinyl commands a certain kind of reverence because it’s a big object and quite fragile so you handle it rather carefully, and it’s expensive so you pay attention to how it’s looked after.
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.
I hate the thought that someone had picked up one of my song records and was really excited about it, and walks [out of] a record shop with On Land and is disappointed because it isn’t what they wanted. So, I try to make signs, graphically and visually, to say to people “Okay, this is this department of my work and this is this other department of my work.” And of course I’m very pleased if people like all of them, but I don’t want them to feel deceived at any point.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There’s a kind of edge to what you’re doing, the kind of leading edge of what you’re doing. Inside that edge [are elements you] are familiar with, and are probably becoming slightly bored with, as well, over a period of time. “I’ve pulled that one out before. Oh, no, I can’t I’m just fed up with that. Let’s do something else.”And you always think “Oh my God I’ve never done anything at all like that before.” But, of course, in retrospect, and to an outsider, they’ll say, “Oh, yeah that’s typical Eno.
In terms of what has been happening recently, there have been, I think, some really interesting new instruments that have come out that sort of show me the direction of the future. Korg has introduced the – they’ve had a whole series now of these things called Kaoss Pads. They’re wonderful because they do get your muscles working again. And what DJs do, of course, with their DJ turntables now, the CD turntables, which have pitch change and speed change and everything else. They’re doing something that I think is interestingly physical.
We have two different ways of working. One is completely unstructured where somebody just starts playing and somebody joins in and then the other person joins in, and something starts to happen. That’s occasionally what happens. What more often happens is that we settle on some sort of – a few sort of structural ideas, like, “Okay, when I put my finger up, we’re all going to move to the extremes of our instruments. So, that means you can only play either very high or very low or both. And we’re going to stay there until I take my finger down.
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.
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.
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.
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.

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