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Human development thus far has been fueled and guided by the feeling that things could be, and are probably going to be, better.
Brian Eno
Feelings are more dangerous than ideas, because they aren't susceptible to rational evaluation. They grow quietly, spreading underground, and erupt suddenly, all over the place.
If you're in a forest, the quality of the echo is very strange because echoes back off so many surfaces of all those trees that you get this strange, itchy ricochet effect.
I think everyone's inherently snobbish. Things that are very popular are not taken seriously, because the snobbish side of one says, 'Well, if everyone likes it it can't be that good.' Whereas if only I and a couple of other people like it, then it must be really something special.
When governments rely increasingly on sophisticated public relations agencies, public debate disappears and is replaced by competing propaganda campaigns, with all the accompanying deceits. Advertising isn't about truth or fairness or rationality, but about mobilising deeper and more primitive layers of the human mind.
'Two Voices', from my album with Peter Schwalm, is an intact dream-poem. I awoke one night with an image of a piece of paper and all the words of the poem written on it, so I just blundered down to the kitchen table and 'copied it out.'
My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.
For me it's always contingent on getting a sound-the sound always suggests what kind of melody it should be. So it's always sound first and then the line afterwards.
Lyrics are the only thing to do with music that haven't been made easier technically.
I don't like headphones very much, and I rarely listen to music on headphones.
One of the things you do when you make a piece of art is you try to make the world you'd rather be in.
Anything popular is populist, and populist is rarely a good adjective.
Most people have no idea what something would sound like if it wasn't an MP3.
The big message of gospel is that you don't have to keep fighting the universe; you can stop, and the universe is quite good to you. There is a loss of ego.
I know that if I had a television in my flat I would convince myself that everything on it was really interesting. I would say, 'I'm a Celebrity - Get Me Out of Here!' is so sociologically fascinating that I think I'd better watch.
Although designers continue to dream of 'transparency' - technologies that just do their job without making their presence felt - both creators and audiences actually like technologies with 'personality.'
I hate talking about music, to tell you the truth.
I'm an atheist, and the concept of god for me is all part of what I call 'the last illusion.' The last illusion is someone knows what is going on. Nearly everyone has that illusion somewhere, and it manifests not only in the terms of the idea that there is a god but that it knows what's going on but that the planets know what's going on.
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 I've committed the one really bad English crime, which is I've risen above my station. I was supposed to be a pop star, and suddenly I'm claiming that I'm an artist of some kind.
I wanted to get rid of the element that had been considered essential in pop music: the voice.
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.
I would like to see a future where artists think that they have a right to contemplate things like global warming.
All cultures have these feelings about non-functional areas of activity. And the more time people have on their hands, the more they commit it to those areas.
Pop music can absorb so many peculiar talents, ranging from the completely nonmusical poseur who just uses music as a kind of springboard for a sense of style, to people who just love putting all that complicated stuff together, brick by brick, on their computers, to people like me who like playing conceptual games and being surprised.
I don't want to do free jazz! Because free jazz - which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering - isn't actually free at all. It's just constrained by what your muscles can do.
I think we're about ready for a new feeling to enter music. I think that will come from the Arabic world.
I don't like celebrity programmes - but I do like programmes about how ideas are formed and evolve.
The biggest crime in England is to rise above your station. It's fine to be a pop star. 'Oh, it's great, lots of fun, aren't they sweet, these pop stars! But to think you have anything to say about how the world should work? What arrogance!'
The reason I don't tour is that I don't know how to front a band. What would I do? I can't really play anything well enough to deal with that situation.
Gospel music is never pessimistic, it's never 'oh my god, its all going down the tubes', like the blues often is.
The way 'Lux' was made is that there are 12 sections in here, though two of them are joined together. So there are really 11 sections, in a sense, and each one uses five notes out of a palette of seven notes, and my palette is all the white notes on the piano. That was the original palette.
Even though I'm known as a pop musician, I have a seriousness about what I do.
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.
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.
Something I've realized lately, to my shock, is that I am an optimist, in that I think humans are almost infinitely capable of self-change and self-modification, and that we really can build the future that we want if we're smart about it.
For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.
A part of me has become immortal, out of my control.
I'd been making music that was intended to be like painting, in the sense that it's environmental, without the customary narrative and episodic quality that music normally has. I called this 'ambient music.' But at the same time I was trying to make visual art become more like music, in that it changed the way that music changes.
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.
Agressive music can only shock you once. Afterwards its impact declines. It's inevitable.
I've discovered this new electronic technique that creates new speech out of stuff that's already there.
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.
You either believe that people respond to authority, or that they respond to kindness and inclusion. I'm obviously in the latter camp. I think that people respond better to reward than punishment.
The problem with fine art is that in most cases people have to make a special excursion to go and look at it: they can't afford to own it. So it isn't really part of their life in the way that music can be.
Most game music is based on loops effectively.
If you want to make computers that really work, create a design team composed only of healthy, active women with lots else to do in their lives, and give them carte blanche.
I believe that singing is the key to long life, a good figure, a stable temperament, increased intelligence, new friends, super self-confidence, heightened sexual attractiveness, and a better sense of humor.
I love San Francisco and Brighton has something of San Francisco about it. It's by the sea, there's a big gay community, a feeling of people being there because they enjoy their life there.
I have lived in countries that were coming out of conflict: Ireland, South Africa, the Czech republic. People there are overflowing with energy.
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