3 December 2020 Brian Eno I would like to see a future where artists think that they have a right to contemplate things like global warming.
3 December 2020 Brian Eno 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.
3 December 2020 Brian Eno 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.
3 December 2020 Brian Eno Agressive music can only shock you once. Afterwards its impact declines. It’s inevitable.
3 December 2020 Brian Eno The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don’t set out to say anything very important.
3 December 2020 Brian Eno 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.
3 December 2020 Brian Eno 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.
3 December 2020 Brian Eno 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.
3 December 2020 Brian Eno 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.
3 December 2020 Brian Eno The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another.
3 December 2020 Brian Eno 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.
3 December 2020 Brian Eno Lyrics are the only thing to do with music that haven’t been made easier technically.
3 December 2020 Brian Eno I’m actually an evangelical atheist, but there is something I recognise about religion: that it gives people a chance to surrender.
3 December 2020 Brian Eno The basis of computer work is predicated on the idea that only the brain makes decisions and only the index finger does the work.
3 December 2020 Brian Eno Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that’s what the music is about.
3 December 2020 Brian Eno I think we’re about ready for a new feeling to enter music. I think that will come from the Arabic world.
3 December 2020 Brian Eno I wanted to get rid of the element that had been considered essential in pop music: the voice.
3 December 2020 Brian Eno 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.
3 December 2020 Brian Eno 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.
3 December 2020 Brian Eno 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.
3 December 2020 Brian Eno 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.
3 December 2020 Brian Eno I’ve got a feeling that music might not be the most interesting place to be in the world of things.
