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.
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.
If you watch any good player, they’re using different parts of their body and working with instruments that respond to those movements. They’re moving in many dimensions at once.
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.
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.
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.
What people call unemotional just doesnt have a single overriding emotion to it. The things that I like best are the ones that ambiguous on the emotional level.
Instead of shooting arrows at someone elses target, which Ive never been very good at, I make my own target around wherever my arrow happens to have landed. You shoot your arrow and then you paint your bulls eye around it, and therefore you have hit the target dead centre.
A big ego isn’t necessarily a bad thing. 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.
Not many people bought Velvet Underground LPs, but those who did, started a band.
I take sounds and change them into words.
Everything good proceeds from enthusiasm.
Admirers can be a tremendous force for conservatism.
It’s amazing how quickly people get used to bad quality.
All music has political dimensions because it suggests a way of being.
With all fashion, what we do is play at being somebody else. We play at inhabiting another kind of world.
Ambient music must be as ignorable as it is interesting.
Art is not an object, but a trigger for experience.
I often work by avoidance.
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.