“The basis of computer work is predicated on the idea that only the brain makes decisions and only the index finger does the work.”
– Brian Eno
“Law is always better than war.”
– Brian Eno
“I hate talking about music, to tell you the truth.”
– Brian Eno
“I’m always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven’t thought of doing yet.”
– Brian Eno
“You can’t really imagine music without technology.”
– Brian Eno
“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.”
– 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.”
– Brian Eno
“If you grow up in a very strong religion like Catholicism you certainly cultivate in yourself a certain taste for the intensity of ideas.”
– Brian Eno
“I’m actually an evangelical atheist, but there is something I recognise about religion: that it gives people a chance to surrender.”
– Brian Eno
“Once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music – not like a record that you’d put on, which would play for a while and finish.”
– Brian Eno
“One often makes music to supplement one’s world.”
– Brian Eno
“I’ve got a feeling that music might not be the most interesting place to be in the world of things.”
– Brian Eno
“Most game music is based on loops effectively.”
– Brian Eno
“In England and Europe, we have this huge music called ambient – ambient techno, ambient house, ambient hip-hop, ambient this, ambient that.”
– Brian Eno
“Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that’s what the music is about.”
– 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.”
– Brian Eno
“The whole history of pop music had rested on the first person singular, with occasional intrusions of the second person singular.”
– Brian Eno
“I don’t like headphones very much, and I rarely listen to music on headphones.”
– 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.”
– Brian Eno
“I think we’re about ready for a new feeling to enter music. I think that will come from the Arabic world.”
– Brian Eno
“Perhaps when music has been shouting for so long, a quieter voice seems attractive.”
– Brian Eno
“People do dismiss ambient music, don’t they? They call it ‘easy listening,’ as if to suggest that it should be hard to listen to.”
– Brian Eno
“Lyrics are the only thing to do with music that haven’t been made easier technically.”
– Brian Eno
“I hate talking about music, to tell you the truth.”
– 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.”
– Brian Eno
“Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing – ‘Oh, let’s put that sentence there, let’s get rid of this’ – have become commonplace in films and music too.”
– 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.”
– Brian Eno
“There are certain sounds that I’ve found work well in nearly any context. Their function is not so much musical as spatial: they define the edges of the territory of the music.”
– 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.”
– Brian Eno
“I wanted to get rid of the element that had been considered essential in pop music: the voice.”
– Brian Eno