Robert Fripp and I will be recording another LP very soon. It should be even more monotonous than the first one!
Perhaps when music has been shouting for so long, a quieter voice seems attractive.
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.
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.
One of the great breakthroughs of evolution theory is that you start with simple things and they will grow into complexity.
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.
When people censor themselves they’re just as likely to get rid of the good bits as the bad bits.
I don’t like headphones very much, and I rarely listen to music on headphones.
When I started making my own records, I had this idea of drowning out the singer and putting the rest in the foreground. It was the background that interested me.
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.
Songs that don’t depend on composition depend instead on performance – so the fire has to be there in the playing.
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 had a lot of trouble with engineers, because their whole background is learning from a functional point of view, and then learning how to perform that function.
The artists of the past who impressed me were the ones who really focused their work.
The basis of computer work is predicated on the idea that only the brain makes decisions and only the index finger does the work.
Agressive music can only shock you once. Afterwards its impact declines. It’s inevitable.
I’m very opinionated.
You don’t have to act as if you know what you’re doing.
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.
Nearly all the things I do that are of any merit at all start off just being good fun.