Charles Hazlewood Quotes

In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.

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

Julius Eastman is the kind of American genius not enough people know about.

Also, I liked John Cage's music. I liked it for its craziness, the use of silence, the boldness-anything to get me away from writing about.. I don't know what academic poets write about.

The music that I make, the younger musicians are referring to it as 'stretch' music.

There's a bit of a new guard of contemporary classical musicians in New York, and we play a lot of different kinds of music together. We do pop studio sessions, and we'll also play John Cage and more avant-garde work. We're developing a language of music that comes with a lot of different styles, different kinds of work.

It's very schizophrenic because I like a lot of very straight pop, like Small Faces, Stones, Kinks; and on the other hand, I like a lot of avant garde things.

The big turning point, really, was the Beatles' influence on American folk music, and then Roger took it to the next step, and then along came the Lovin' Spoonful and everybody else.

The French, not the Americans, commissioned 'Einstein on the Beach.'

As a teen, I heard the second Velvet Underground album, 'White Light/White Heat,' and it was too much for my limited scope of appreciation. It was intense, but I didn't get it.

In the old days, maybe we'd come across Captain Beefheart, buy a record, go, 'This is great!' and notice how his music is evolving, changing, and becoming more complex, more radical. And we would follow that progression and see it reflected in the alternative culture it came from.

I'm definitely influenced by Animal Collective. I watched them early on.

I probably went to musique concrete concerts - though not the very first ones - at the beginning of the 50s.

Progressive rock was happening.

People like Jeff Buckley, the Mars Volta and Bjork made me listen to music differently. You learn the voice is an instrument you can do crazy things with.

Post-minimalism implies music that's genre-less. Minimalism was very important because it came at a time when contemporary music had become so complex, so experimental and detached that people turned away from it. Minimalism broke that trend and brought music back to the people.

It's no longer unusual for real avant-garde composers to have been in a band, and for bands to be interested in a wide range of music. Look at how artists like Aphex Twin are influenced by Nancarrow and Stockhausen.

Mars is really different, into art. Lydia Lunch is more energy. James Chance is more commercial in a different way, in funk and jazz. They were all doing original things, trying to create their own sound and music. I think they're all great.

I am not doing something that it is experimental music in relation to classical music.

The Zombies were really unique - they had elements of jazz and classical music in their songs and songwriting. They had a very, very different sound compared to a lot of their contemporaries at the time.

Prince turned experimental music into pop music. 'When Doves Cry,' the whole 'Purple Rain' soundtrack - he was inspired by the Cocteau Twins and new wave pop and brought it into R&B when he first started, and then it became this cool, next-level, kind of hard-to-digest music. Which is what I felt 'House of Balloons' was.

PC Music is a really post-modern attempt at pop.

In the wake of the San Francisco scene, ears were alive. It was a listening generation.

I wanted to create a bridge between experimental music and pop.

You want to embrace what the idea of pop music is. Not necessarily the stereotype of pop music; there was a time when you'd say 'pop music' and conjure up images of the Sweet, or Marc Bolan. That, to me, can be avant-garde still.