Brian Eno
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.Collection: Eye
In art, you CAN crash your plane and walk away from itCollection: Art
People who are very confident in themselves aren't hurt by criticism. They make use of it.Collection: Hurt
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Sweet
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.Collection: Yoga
Good teachers realise that the students are the antenna; they are sensing things that the teachers don't yet sense.Collection: Teacher
Genius is individual, scenius is communal.Collection: Genius
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.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Nice
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.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Proud
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Song
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.Collection: Moving
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.Collection: Ends
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.Collection: Real
There is a sort of convergence starting to happen between the computer and musical instruments, but it's still quite a long way off.Collection: Long
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.Collection: Interesting
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.Collection: Culture
I prefer to shoot the arrow, then paint the target around it. You make the niches in which you finally reside.Collection: Arrows
When people censor themselves they're just as likely to get rid of the good bits as the bad bits.Collection: People
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 nothingCollection: Wine
The only value of ideology is to stop things becoming showbiz.Collection: Becoming
You don't have to act as if you know what you're doingCollection: Knows
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.Collection: Teacher
I occasionally meet people and they say, 'Oh, I was born to Discreet Music'... They always have very weird eyes, those people.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Hands
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.Collection: Differences
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.Collection: Sports
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.Collection: Brother
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Moving
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.Collection: People
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.Collection: Couple
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.Collection: Language
One of the great breakthroughs of evolution theory is that you start with simple things and they will grow into complexity.Collection: Simple
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.Collection: Doubt
I despise computers in many ways. I think they’re hopelessly underevolved and overrated.Collection: Thinking
Admirers can be a tremendous force for conservatism.Collection: Admirer
Any constraint is part of the skeleton that you build the composition on - including your own incompetence.Collection: Skeletons
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 resultsCollection: Roles
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.Collection: Water
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.Collection: Technology
I hate the way CDs just drone on for bloody hours and you stop caring.Collection: Hate