Quotes By Brian Eno

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 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.

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

I see TV as a picture medium rather than a narrative medium.

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've discovered this new electronic technique that creates new speech out of stuff that's already there.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.

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.

The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don't set out to say anything very important.

If I had a stock of fabulous sounds I would just always use them. I wouldn't bother to find new ones.

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.

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.

I take sounds and change them into words.

I'm not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.

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 often work by avoidance.

In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.

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.

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.

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.

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.