Eugene Chadbourne Quotes

Anything can become a musical sound. The wind on telegraph wires is a great sound; get it into your machine and play it and it becomes interesting.

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

That's really where my heart is, unfortunately - I'm less interested in songwriting and more into just making noise.

There will be some tracks on the next album which that will consist of mostly noise and feedback, whereas others may just have guitar parts and samples.

I was greatly influenced by musique concrete when I was, like, 10. I was completely mesmerized by the idea that you could make music out of sounds. So that's been a constant influence on all my work.

I still feel like I have a lot to learn in the realm of sound experimentation, and I think I would like things to get noisier and weirder and more distressed and more aggressive, but I don't know if that's something that would be suitable for public consumption.

We had a simple 8-track studio set up in the record store where I worked. And just staying after work and experimenting, realizing what was possible with recording - that's why my project was called The Microphones at first. Because it wasn't even songs really. It was just sound.

My concept when making music is that there is no border between music and noise.

Clipping is a very specific, concept-y thing. We have all these rules: we don't sample drums. We create all our own sounds. I don't speak in the first person. We come from a background of experimental music like John Cage... Philip Glass.

One of the most prevalent and undermentioned genres of music is what is known as noise. You can find it all over the world happening in basements, small venues and even some festivals. Often blown off or belittled by critics, the form for the most part goes unheard and unnoticed.

I come from a background of experimental music which mingled real sounds together with musical sounds.

'Sinister' is the first score I've done in which there's no orchestra in it whatsoever. There are traditional instruments I sampled, then manipulated, so you don't even recognize the source anymore.

By the mid-'60s, recorded music was much more like painting than it was like traditional music. When you went into the studio, you could put a sound down, then you could squeeze it around, spread it all around the canvas.

I think early on in my career, I was heavily inspired by bands like Throbbing Gristle and Test Dept, and films of David Lynch, for example, where the soundscape plays a very important role in the listening experience.

I think there's something strangely musical about noise.

I take sounds and change them into words.

It's cool to play the guitar, but to me it's even cooler to scratch a guitar backward and forward, to manipulate it with a turntable. Guitars can't do that themselves.

Out of doing all that experimentation with sound I decided I wanted to do it with live musicians. To take repetition, take music fragments and make it live. Musicians would be able to play it and create this kind of abstract fabric of sound.

People who care about records are always giving me a hard time. I mean, I would destroy records in performances, and break them, and whatever I could do to them to create a sound that was something else than just the sound that was in the groove.

In Sonic Youth, at the end of 'Expressway to Yr. Skull,' we'd tap on the backs of our guitars to get this low-level feedback, and if I leaned forward, and the guitar hung off my body, it would resonate differently.

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.

Pan Sonic sound like they are playing music of the future made with the electric instruments of yesterday.

In school, I did a lot of computer work. I'd take splices from Kurt Weill songs and loop them in bars, in beats of seven, trying all different kinds of things.

Sometimes you can just record anything and slow it down hugely and you'll find all these hidden notes and frequencies that match up really nicely.