Brian Eno Quotes

Well, I think, I certainly used backward music in Sea of Monsters. I can't remember in the Sea of Time. I would tend to do that all the time, you know? I tended to do all sorts of weird things. Just to get effects.

Well, I don't really use MIDI that much. But I do record audio around me a lot, and just layer it up and see what effect it has, without any aforethought.

There's this weird game called 'Blueberry Garden.' For that game an artist recorded some piano music, but evidently he only had a really terrible microphone on top of the piano, and I really liked it and wanted to experiment with that. So, I made piano recording and really mangled it, and kept experimenting with the technique.

I'm very lazy when it comes to making the original sound. I don't go through amplifiers and different compressors and signal parts. I just grab something, whether its an old guitar or a children's toy that happens to be lying around, and record it straight into the computer.

After a couple of failed attempts, I came up with a weird tuning where I was dropping the G string down a step so that it became a seventh, and it got me to a place where I could play all these figures fairly easily. It was not an easy thing to work out.

I enjoy working with complicated equipment. A lot of my things started just with a rhythm box, but I feed it through so many things that what comes out sounds very complex and rich.

Weirdly enough, if I'm having trouble with a guitar part - not the playing of it but the writing - I'll mess around with echo and other effects, just turn everything up and make it as crazy as can be, and it winds up taking me somewhere. I've found so many guitar parts from echo. It's limitless.

I usually create sounds and have different generators running over it. You know you can open a word-file as a picture or the other way round. I do the same with sounds.

I work a lot with sounds based on stream of consciousness. I like the way it sounds, then I turn it into something that makes more sense.

I play a little bit of everything. I beat on the walls. I whistle. I scream. I go outside and scream because it sounds cool when it's recorded. I play drums on a chair. I snap, clap... just anything to build the track and make it feel like I want it to.

I'm not the most technical producer, so the weird mixes and blown-out sound happen naturally.

If I crave a frequency in the mid, I'll just drag in a sound and try to mold it into what feels right. It happens very quickly. And if I've been making a piece of music for five hours and it sucks, I'll just throw it away.

In the studio you have pretty much carte blanche with whatever you're doing. You can turn natural instruments into electronic instruments.

In the past, I used to rely on the randomness of working with samples, which was a good way because it threw you in a completely different direction. You just thought, 'What if I take this samba drum and combined it with an '80s synth line or something from this record?'

To me everything is a material, and everything is subject to change. When I work with found sounds, I'm trying to figure out how do I make this come from me?

Really, I just sit down, mess around, and play with sounds.

Every time somebody asks me, 'Oh, when you mix your own music, what are you going to make?' And I don't know.

There are parts on 'Wind's Poem' that are literal recordings of wind. I had this old sound effects record that I got some wind from and then I figured out that distorted cymbals sound just like wind so I used that a lot.

The first time I experimented with sound design was on 'Fruitvale Station,' where I recorded the BART train and manipulated it.

Music feels so environmental to me, especially the process of working with synths or mixing. I started thinking about music as a psychological landscape as well. It's a landscape of the mind.

I'm the type of guy, I make a lot of different beats, but sometimes I might stick to a sound for a little while.

I wanted to find a bridge between Musique Concrete, electro-acoustic music, and proper rock music.

When I'm in the studio, I'm experimenting, trying things on.

To me, finding sounds, or even recording, is a compositional process. The studio is kind of an instrument.

There are some directors who don't like the set much. They like post-production, where you have all the ingredients in the can - you've got all the footage, all the music, the various effects - and then you have to do the alchemy necessary to make it all good, a long and very key process of putting everything together and making it into the cogent thing that you want.