Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'd rather hold one note for an hour and modulate it so that it means something than play 3,000 notes in 15 seconds.
You shoot your arrow and then you paint your bulls eye around it, and therefore you have hit the target dead centre.
If you want to make someone feel emotion, you have to make them let go. Listening to something is an act of surrender.
I've had quite a lot of luck with dreams. I've often awoken in the night with a phrase or even a whole song in my head.
It must be quite mysterious to some people why I bother to carry on. Because, you know, I don't sell that many records.
In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.
As soon as you externalize an idea you see facets of it that weren't clear when it was just floating around in your head.
Also something that you don't have to listen to from beginning to end - you can enter at any point and leave at any point.
In the wake of the events of 11 September 2001, it now seems clear that the shock of the attacks was exploited in America.
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.
One of the great breakthroughs of evolution theory is that you start with simple things and they will grow into complexity.
The great benefit of computer sequencers is that they remove the issue of skill, and replace it with the issue of judgement
I always use the same guitar; I got this guitar years and years ago for nine pounds. It's still got the same strings on it.
W]hat makes a work of art ‘good’ for you is not something that is already ‘inside’ it, but something that happens inside you.
I occasionally meet people and they say, 'Oh, I was born to Discreet Music'... They always have very weird eyes, those people.
Once you've grown to accept something and it becomes part of the system you've inherited, you don't even notice it any longer.
I do sometimes look back at things I've written in the past, and think, 'I just don't remember being the person who wrote that.'
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.
I cant duplicate my own successes, because part of the creation of that effect is making something happen that you didn't expect
Human development thus far has been fueled and guided by the feeling that things could be, and are probably going to be, better.
The basis of computer work is predicated on the idea that only the brain makes decisions and only the index finger does the work.
The whole history of pop music had rested on the first person singular, with occasional intrusions of the second person singular.
I have a definite talent for convincing people to try something new. I am a good salesman. When I'm on form, I can sell anything.
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.
When I finish something, I want it out that day. Pop music is like the daily paper. Its got to be there then, not six months later.
I do like Burial; he's so curiously clumsy, you can't help but be moved. It's so un-Hollywood, and the rhythms are so un-danceable.
I'm actually an evangelical atheist, but there is something I recognise about religion: that it gives people a chance to surrender.
There is a sort of convergence starting to happen between the computer and musical instruments, but it's still quite a long way off.
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.
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.
A big ego means that you have some confidence in your abilities, really, and that you're prepared to take the risk of trying them out.
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.
I trust my taste. I trust it completely and I always have done, and I've always thought it isn't that different from everybody else's.
You can't have a relationship with a device whose limits are unknown to you, because without limits, it keeps becoming something else.
The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.
If you grow up in a very strong religion like Catholicism you certainly cultivate in yourself a certain taste for the intensity of ideas.
In England and Europe, we have this huge music called ambient - ambient techno, ambient house, ambient hip-hop, ambient this, ambient that.
The dominant theory coming out of Hollywood is that peoples' attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and they need more stimulation.
If you had a sign above every studio door saying ‘This Studio is a Musical Instrument’ it would make such a different approach to recording.
I felt extremely uncomfortable as the focal point, in the spotlight. I really like the behind the scenes role, because all my freedom is there.
Every increase in your knowledge is a simultaneous decrease. You learn and you unlearn at the same time. A new certainty is a new doubt as well.
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.
I have lived in countries that were coming out of conflict: Ireland, South Africa, the Czech republic. People there are overflowing with energy.
Well, I am a dilettante. It's only in England that dilettantism is considered a bad thing. In other countries it's called interdisciplinary research.
When I've finally got the title, I think, "Okay, yes, now I know where we are. Now I know what it is. Fine, that must be finished or nearly finished.
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 philosophical idea that there are no more distances, that we are all just one world, that we are all brothers, is such a drag! I like differences.
Every band I've worked with also wants to be countercultural in the sense that they want to feel that they've gone somewhere that nobody else has been.
Every band I’ve worked with also wants to be countercultural in the sense that they want to feel that they’ve gone somewhere that nobody else has been.
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.