We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.
Brian EnoRead
I think we're about ready for a new feeling to enter music. I think that will come from the Arabic world.
Interpretation
This quote suggests a need for new influences in music, specifically from Arabic culture.
Brian Eno suggests that music is due for a transformation, which he believes will be inspired by the rich and diverse sounds of the Arabic world. This reflects the idea that innovation in art often comes from incorporating and embracing different cultural elements.
In practice
Using this quote to introduce a multicultural music festival.
We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.
I think that technology is always invented for historical reasons, to solve a historical problem. But they very soon reveal themselves to be capable of doing things that aren't historical that nobody had ever thought of doing before.
When I first started making ambient music, I was setting up systems using synthesizers that generated pulses more or less randomly. The end result is a kind of music that continuously changes. Of course, until computers came along, all I could actually present of that work was a piece of its output.
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.
In the future, you won't buy artists' works; you'll buy software that makes original pieces of 'their' works, or that recreates their way of looking at things. You could buy a Shostakovich box, or you could buy a Brahms box. You might want some Shostakovich slow-movement-like music to be generated. So then you use that box.
Ambient music must be as ignorable as it is interesting.
If there’s a thing, a scene, maybe, an image that you want to see real bad, that you need to see but it doesn’t exist in the world around you, at least not in the form that you envision, then you create it so that you can look at it and have it around, or show it to other people who wouldn’t have imagined it because they perceive reality in a more narrow, predictable way. And that’s it. That’s all an artist does.
Before Turner there was no fog in London.
At the very least, noir offers an alternate reality - moments of real passion, a bleak code of honor, and a need for freedom amid corruption. At its best, noir offers a map of subversion.
No doubt the artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.
Every time you write a poem it’s apocalyptic. You’re revealing who you really are to yourself.
The alchemy of good curating amounts to this: Sometimes, placing one work of art near another makes one plus one equal three. Two artworks arranged alchemically leave each intact, transform both, and create a third thing.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.