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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.

Brian Eno

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Brian Eno
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: May 15
Composer
Musician
Painter
Photographer
Record Producer
Singer
Songwriter
Writer
Borough of Melton
Eno
Brian Peter George Eno
Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno
Sound
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Always
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More quotes by Brian Eno

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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?
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In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.
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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.
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If something is good, you must torture it mercilessly until it is either dead or great.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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As struggles go, being an artist isn't that much of one.
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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.
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The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.
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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.
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The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another.
Brian Eno
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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.
Brian Eno
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Anything popular is populist, and populist is rarely a good adjective.
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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.
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I have lived in countries that were coming out of conflict: Ireland, South Africa, the Czech republic. People there are overflowing with energy.
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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.
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Culture is everything you don't have to do.
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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.
Brian Eno