Bill Laswell Quotes

My intentions have been, and are always, to just really get behind what my ideas are musically and to just ride this thing out, cause it feels good, and I think for the most part it's good music. Even when it's not, I'd like to still search for something that could be even like a little bit mind-blowing or shocking to me.

In terms of music, I can try anything I want, even something that doesn't work at all, because I'm not putting my career in jeopardy.

The drive to create music that is pure is my highest priority. Sometimes I'll get extremely technical, and other times I'll just kind of go with the gods of music.

Music should always be an adventure.

I say most of my music is very trial-and-error.

An artist should be taking risks. That's the whole idea of being an artist.

Some song ideas absolutely require a kind of rigid discipline, and others require absolute chaotic abandon. The form is only valid if you know how to un-form it. I don't mean to sound like an intellectual here!

Being on the road is a great habitat for creating new music because there's so many different experiences.

In 2010, aside from that niche of music that I have no interest in - Black Eyed Peas territory, disposable pop stuff - there's almost an incentive to go back to making music as adventurous and groundbreaking as you can, because nobody gets a big hit anymore.

The more I compose, the more I know that I don't know it all. I think it's a good way to start. If you think you know it all, the work becomes a repetition of what you've already done. I try to make sure that I don't repeat my music.

Music is really all about experimentation and lots of trial and error. It's just mind-numbingly boring until you hit on something that works well.

From my time in 'King Crimson,' I'd describe a Progressive band as one that keeps trying to break musical barriers, and keeps trying to do new music.

The studio is a laboratory, not a factory. An exhibition is the result of your experiments, but the process is never-ending. So an exhibition is not a conclusion.

I'm not here to change the music world, but I'm definitely here to show what I can do and express myself through my music.

Being in the studio is like painting, you know, you can really take your time, and try different things, and kind of go deep into it.

Being able to take musical ideas through every iteration is attractive to me. Granted, not everyone's going to want to listen to that, but it should exist.

The studio is a place where I can experiment before I'm prepared for an idea to become a body of work, or a new way of working, or a way of working that can sustain me over a period of time.

Music is not math. It's science. You keep mixing the stuff up until it blows up on you, or it becomes this incredible potion.

I want to change things with everything I do, not for the sake of changing things, but for the sake of taking greater and greater risks, or how minimalist I might be able to be, or how I can involve elements or ingredients in music videos that are not musical, for instance.

Pop music is so structured, and I'm excited to try and challenge that in my own work.

I consider all my films experiments.

I work in whatever medium likes me at the moment.

As an artist, I feel that we must try many things - but above all we must dare to fail.

I like to think of my style as pretty versatile. And I'd like whatever I record to reflect that to be mostly genre - to be just something that people want to listen on to see what I'm going to come up with next. That's the kind of music I'm into.

I listened to the rock music of that time, but as you know and can easily hear: my music of that era had nothing to do with the common music of this era. I was experimenting, I was searching for something new.