Jonny Greenwood Quotes

Once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music - not like a record that you'd put on, which would play for a while and finish.

Synthesizers were looked at as stealing the soul of music, but then there were these new bands who used it to contradict that idea.

When I first started out, I was making really slow, psychedelic ambient music because it was all I could do.

To some degree, yeah, because I have to play a certain number of originals that might be considered avant-garde material. I realize though, that only a few people in the audience actually know what that music is, or understand it.

So the ideology was that: use sounds as instruments, as sounds on tape, without the causality. It was no longer a clarinet or a spring or a piano, but a sound with a form, a development, a life of its own.

I'm the renegade of funk. I've made house, techno, rock, funk, reggae... That's why I've been on so many different labels.

This is something special. You can attempt to have a kind of non-living music.

I'm also very impressed with the best people in experimental electronic world, like Peta and Eckart Aillers and Finez and Jim O'Rourke and Oren Umbarci and Francesco Lopez. Most of them use the computer as their main instrument.

There's a lot for us to achieve and a lot more music to explore. I'm not saying we want to start doing experimental prog or something, where it turns into elevator music after a few records, but I don't think we've even scratched the surface.

The 11-minute 'Colouring of Pigeons' takes The Knife's experimental, cerebral side to new heights.

We consolidated the style of 4Minute by experimenting with different sounds throughout the years.

I hate it when bands keep making the same record over and over, so we're pushing ourselves to try new things and experiment in our writing approach.

When I was at the Group for Musical Research, with this idea of discovering electronic music, I quickly realized that that it was a very interesting and exciting approach to music, but I also saw that it was very intellectual and quite dogmatic.

I feel just as passionately about experimental electronic music as I do about folk music.

When the musical keyboard was created in the 1970's, you had electronic geeks that had no background in music created these devises and gave them to musicians that had no background in electronics. The result was some of the wierd sounds that came out in the '70s.

I feel like that's what's going to be most respected at the end of the day, that I'm able to do so many different things and become less of a rapper and just more as a musician.

I was always interested in mixing experimentation with pop music, and Brian Eno, Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream - we were all doing it at the same time, just very isolated from each other, all in our different cellars, in different worlds, without the Internet - underground in every sense.

I thought we had opposite visions of electronic music. Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk had a very robotic, mechanical approach. I had a more impressionist vision - a Ravel/Debussy approach.

I don't use conventional voices for my compositions.

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

Whether it's a song that might deviate from an artists' usual sound or even if it's still very much in their world, I think the more people opening themselves up creatively to collaborate with others, the better.

As an artist, you tend to gravitate to the opposite. I know, when I finish a song or an album, I'm interested in doing something completely new. It doesn't always happen, but that's the idea. My poor fans - I don't know if they love that or hate that.

I wasn't embraced as an Irish artist back in the Moloko days. Modern electronica isn't what you think of when you think of Irish music.

OPN is completely off the grid. Its like the slime underneath techno and other synth-oriented music.