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Brian Eno Quotes

Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno, RDI is an English musician, composer, record producer, singer, writer, and visual artist. He is best known for his pioneering work in rock, ambient, pop, and electronic music. A self-described "non-musician", Eno has helped to introduce a variety of unique conceptual approaches and recording techniques into contemporary music, advocating a methodology of "theory over practice" throughout his career. He has been described as one of popular music's most influential and innovative figures.

Born in Suffolk, Eno studied painting and experimental music at art school in the late 1960s before joining glam rock group Roxy Music as synthesizer player in 1971. After recording two albums with the band, he departed in 1973 to record a number of solo albums, contributing to and ultimately coining the concept of ambient music with works such as Another Green World , Discreet Music , and Music for Airports . He took part in frequent collaborations with artists such as Robert Fripp, Harold Budd, Cluster, David Bowie on his "Berlin Trilogy", and David Byrne on 1981's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. During the 1970s, Eno would also begin a parallel career as a producer, which included work on albums by Talking Heads and Devo, the no wave compilation No New York , and recordings by avant-garde artists such as John Cale, Jon Hassell, Laraaji, and Harold Budd, among others.

In subsequent decades, Eno continued to record solo albums, collaborate, and produce for other artists, including U2, Coldplay, Laurie Anderson, James, Grace Jones, and Slowdive. Dating back to his time as a student, he has also pursued a variety of multimedia projects in parallel with his music career, including sound installations and his mid-70s co-development of Oblique Strategies, a deck of cards featuring cryptic aphorisms intended to spur creative thinking. He continues to release music, produce, and write, and maintains a regular column in Prospect Magazine.

✵ 15. May 1948
Brian Eno photo
Brian Eno: 13   quotes 1   like

Famous Brian Eno Quotes

“My friend Peter Schmidt used to talk about ‘not doing the things that nobody had ever thought of not doing’, which is an inverse process – where you leave out an assumption that everybody has always made and see what happens (e. g. music has to be made of intentionally produced sounds was the assumption that Cage left out). In that version of this process, you discover a value in the absence of something ­– in fact you discover that the absence of something is the revelation of something else (Buñuel, the film-maker, said, "Every object conceals another"”

Brian Eno

a message that I often relay in the studio when overdubbing starts).
December 15, 1995, p. 178
A Year With Swollen Appendices (1996)

“Honor your mistake as a hidden intention.”

Brian Eno

“Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable [sic] as it is interesting.”

Brian Eno

September, 1978, Linear notes from the initial American release of Brian Eno's "Music for Airports / Ambient 1", PVC 7908 (AMB 001)
A Year With Swollen Appendices (1996)

“Saying that cultural objects have value is like saying that telephones have conversations.”

Brian Eno

March 23, 1995, p. 81
A Year With Swollen Appendices (1996)

“As struggles go, being an artist isn't that much of one.”

Brian Eno

October 25, 1995, p. 233
A Year With Swollen Appendices (1996)

“Rationality is what we do to organize the world, to make it possible to predict. Art is the rehearsal for the inapplicability and failure of that process.”

Brian Eno

December 7, 1995, p. 272
A Year With Swollen Appendices (1996)

Brian Eno Quotes

“If you don’t call it art, you’re likely to get a better result.”

Brian Eno

March 24, 1995, p. 83
A Year With Swollen Appendices (1996)

Art

“The only value of ideology is to stop things becoming showbiz.”

Brian Eno

June 2, 1995, p. 126
A Year With Swollen Appendices (1996)

“Try to make things that can become better in other people’s minds than they were in yours.”

Brian Eno

August 2, 1995, p. 165
A Year With Swollen Appendices (1996)

People

“Ideas worth questioning: "Being an artist is a job for life."”

Brian Eno

June 25, 1995, p. 140
A Year With Swollen Appendices (1996)

Life , Idea , Question

“At the party, Rob Partridge said to me, "You gave hope to other balding men." My new epitaph: "Co-wrote a couple of decent songs and went bald shamelessly."”

Brian Eno

Source: A Year With Swollen Appendices (1996), p. 285

Men , Hope

“The reason conservatives cohere and radicals fight: everyone agrees about fears, no one about visions.”

Brian Eno

July 19, 1995, p. 159
A Year With Swollen Appendices (1996)

Fear , Fight

“I, I wish you could swim
Like the dolphins
Like dolphins can swim Though nothing, nothing will keep us together
We can beat them, forever and ever
Oh, we can be heroes just for one day.”

Brian Eno

"Heroes", written with Brian Eno

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