Brian Eno
Brian Eno
Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno, RDIis an English musician, composer, record producer, singer, writer, and visual artist. He is best known for his pioneering work in ambient and electronic music as well as his influential contributions to rock, worldbeat, chance, and generative music styles. A self-described "non-musician," Eno has advocated a methodology of "theory over practice" throughout his career, and has helped to introduce a variety of unique recording techniques and conceptual approaches into...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionMusic Producer
Date of Birth15 May 1948
In England and Europe, we have this huge music called ambient - ambient techno, ambient house, ambient hip-hop, ambient this, ambient that.
I think it's a myth that American public or any other public is so stupid that they need to be constantly pricked.
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 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.
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.
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.
All the best lyrics are written in ten minutes.
The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.
You can't do anything interesting with cutting-edge technology except not make it cutting-edge.
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.
Complexity and intelligence grow from simplicity, not from greater complexity.
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.
The trouble begins with a design philosophy that equates 'more options' with 'greater freedom.'
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.