Sufjan Stevens Quotes

I'm coming from a place that's more experimental and indulgent already, so for the last 10 years, it's been more like, "How can I defend my own sensibilities by writing a nugget of a little catchy pop song?" That's how I'm stretching myself, by writing something really simple.

I want to change peoples' minds about music, I want to bring the really brutal experimental stuff to peoples' attention.

London is a dead duck, as far as innovative new music is concerned, unless you want to have your head blown off with some outrageous, rubbish, pounding dance music.

I know we play a part in the story of progressive music, but for us those influences are the real fathers, the ones that we were interested in.

Avant-garde is the one area of music that has never changed. It doesn't mean anything.

I think I'm really part of a whole generational movement in a way. I think a lot of other people since and during this time have gotten interested in writing what we can still call experimental music. It's not commercial music. And it's really a concert music, but a concert music for our time. And wanting to find the audience, because we've discovered the audience is really there. Those became really clear with Einstein on the Beach.

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

I wanted to make a record that worked against the hypnagogic paradigm, for sure.

I'm amazed at how adventurous and how dangerous the music was, and still is. I haven't heard anything like it since. I'm quite surprised, because a lot of the music on there we never heard at the time.

Anything that catches my ear, I'm into. Things that are different, that change what you're listening to.

I don't think my music's as traditional as people make it out.

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

My more risky or avant garde music is not that well known to a wider audience, but I wish it was.

Bjork has this kind of abstraction and formalism that you associate with art music or avant-garde music.

I love truly forward-thinking music, and I'm not even sure I'd describe my work as that, even.

Kraftwerk has become historic and is now exposed in museums.

We are aiming to create a one and only new music genre that exceeds the limits of pop and metal music.

I'm totally up for experimental music. I'm up for music that they don't play on the radio, and I take in all of it. But my thing, the thing that comes most natural to me, is making the stuff that has a melody; it has a soul to it, yet it's head music.

As I got more involved in music, one of the things that made me excited, from the time I was a child, was that clear link between our ancestors and the sounds we hear today.

And there are a lot of people interested in creative music, there are more and more and more.

When alternative music - which is supposed to be the standard-bearer of where white rock is headed - becomes either too cute or too manufactured, that's just really not good.

Even experimental composers, revolutionary composers, self-styled radicals are, in writing revolutionary music, recognizing the music that preceded them precisely by trying to avoid it.

I'm really attracted to music that sort of toes that line between pop and avant-garde, that pushes the envelope of what you can get in a pop song.

I just try to be more creative and come with something new because I actually care about the music.

Brian Eno and Robert Fripp's foray into some artful excursions into some ethereal electric experiments. There was a lot curious activities emerging in London, Amsterdam, and Berlin back then developing some fiercely fuzzy of synth-like effects way outside the norm which really blew the lid off things.