Krzysztof Penderecki Quotes

You hear ten seconds of a song, and you know it's OutKast. There's a strangeness about it because it's catchy, but it's not just pop for the sake of pop. They're pushing the envelope.

I'm just trying to avoid any sort of generic kind of music - I don't want to do generic jazz or fusion.

If I'm left to my own devices, I will be tempted to make the most unlistenable music possible.

I think of a band like Animal Collective where they really follow their own sound and I think that's a really important thing to do. You can find an audience if you can find your voice.

Cage's Music of Changes was a further indication that the arts in general were beginning to consciously deal with the 'given' material and, to varying degrees, liberating them from the inherited, functional concepts of control.

I've realised that if I aim for a successful record, I probably won't have any success. But if I keep making weird things, then hopefully the audiences will come to us.

My favorite band of all time is The Clash. The thing I love about The Clash is they started out as guys who could barely play three chords. They dabbled in reggae, punk, rap, jazz. They came to a sound that could only be defined as The Clash. It was impossible to say what it was. I admire them for that.

The melodies I come up with, they're not normal.

Every Dirty Projectors album is a world unto itself.

Once you have an established song, you can really come out of your shell and experiment with the sound you want to make.

I know how to do music, no matter how weird I look on stage with the face paint, mask, and hospital scrubs.

We wanted to be like Radiohead. When they started experimenting with electronic music, it gave us the idea that it might be a cool idea to do.

There's so many things that Kanye does that I agree with and disagree with at times. I just say, 'You're in a different place, and what you're doing is experimental. Nobody's been there in hip-hop.'

I'm just going to sing my music; I'm going to write my songs, and I think that people get to know me in that sense.

Sometimes it's just the creative intent of an artist or band that inspires me. I'm generally drawn to artists or bands that put themselves out on a limb somewhat and do something that infuriates both the mainstream and the indie purists, but that can't necessarily be classed as either. To me it seems somewhat convenient to be on either end of that scale.

It would be nice to abandon the verse-chorus-bridge structure completely, and make it so none of these things are definable...Make up new names for them. Instead of a bridge, you can call it a highway, or an overpass...Music should never be harmless.

I was sick of fast, aggressive music; I felt like I needed to make a poppy thing. But, right now, I feel like I need to make a Hawkwind/Sabbath record. It gets boring if you just do the same thing all the time.

To be able to take music and do something as profoundly original as what we did with the Allman Brothers, you've got to put some time into it.

As a teenager my favorite band was Sonic Youth, and everything they did was always obviously them, and always so artistic. There was another layer of meaning, underneath everything, that you could search for.

We used to have endless discussions with journalists about that: 'Why are you calling it noise? It's not noise, it's music,' and make references to everybody from John Cage to whoever.

Those late '60s early '70s bands would take it really far out and get super-weird.

I think my music is experimental, playful, challenging, focused, fun. I don't want it to be thought of as trying to appeal to a certain type of person or being very cerebral.

I want to change peoples' minds about music, I want to bring the really brutal experimental stuff to peoples' attention.

I'm not belittling the art world. Not at all. I take it quite seriously, actually. But the logic of art is a vanguard logic that pressures art to incorporate the quotient of risk.

Inviting audiences to open up and hear things differently is an important part of what I do. But I still love to sing songs with words, too.