I don't like headphones very much, and I rarely listen to music on headphones.
— Brian Eno
I think one of my pursuits over the years is trying to answer the question of, 'What else can you do with a voice other than stand in front of a microphone and sing?'
I set up situations that involve abandoning control and finding out what happens.
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.
I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant.
If you grow up in a very strong religion like Catholicism you certainly cultivate in yourself a certain taste for the intensity of ideas.
Law is always better than war.
I think we're about ready for a new feeling to enter music. I think that will come from the Arabic world.
The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another.
The computer brings out the worst in some people.
I've got a feeling that music might not be the most interesting place to be in the world of things.
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.
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.'
I believe in singing.
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.
I'm always interested in what you can do with technology that people haven't thought of doing yet.
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.
I love good, loud speakers.
I think audiences are quite comfortable watching something coming into being.
I want to rethink 'surrender' as an active verb.
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.
Pop is totally results-oriented and there is a very strong feedback loop.
Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that's what the music is about.
It's actually very easy for democracy to disappear.
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.
Even though I'm known as a pop musician, I have a seriousness about what I do.
Everybody thinks that when new technologies come along that they're transparent and you can just do your job well on it. But technologies always import a whole new set of values with them.
I make a lot of pieces of music that I never release as CDs.
I think most artists would be happy to have bigger audiences rather than smaller ones. It doesn't mean that they are going to change their work in order necessarily to get it, but they're happy if they do get it.
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.
Honor thy error as a hidden intention.
My kind of composing is more like the work of a gardener. The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow where and when - and he won't necessarily be able to reproduce it again afterwards either.
Most game music is based on loops effectively.
I see TV as a picture medium rather than a narrative medium.
Well, there are some things that I just can't get out of my head, and they start to annoy me after a while. Sometimes they're of my own creation, as well - and they're just as annoying. It's not only other people's ear worms that bug me, it's my own, as well.
My shows are not narratives.
If you've spent a long time developing a skill and techniques, and now some 14 year-old upstart can get exactly the same result, you might feel a bit miffed I suppose, but that has happened forever.
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.
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.
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.
I'd love it if American kids were listening to Muslim music.
Everybody is entertained to death.
The artists of the past who impressed me were the ones who really focused their work.
In England and Europe, we have this huge music called ambient - ambient techno, ambient house, ambient hip-hop, ambient this, ambient that.
It must be quite mysterious to some people why I bother to carry on. Because, you know, I don't sell that many records.
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.
When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That's one of the great feelings - to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.
People tend to play in their comfort zone, so the best things are achieved in a state of surprise, actually.
Anything popular is populist, and populist is rarely a good adjective.
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.
