Luc Ferrari Quotes

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.

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

'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.

Music, in the past few years... anything singable or understandable is square.

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.

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

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.

Making 13-minute tracks is pretty alternative, I think!

We used to have endless discussions with journalists about that: 'Why are you calling it noise? It's not noise, it's music,' and make references to everybody from John Cage to whoever.

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.

We made music that wouldn't be in synch.

More recently, I used guitar synthesizer extensively on the two albums I did with Robert Fripp.

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.

I've always tried different stuff in the studio. I use rakes, spoons, cans... I'm a surround-sound type of guy.

The academic area of new music or modern music festivals is not something which attracts me at all.

Webern was a kind of 'Kamchatka of music,' an unknown country of music. That's true; for me and people of my generation, he was a radical - you couldn't be more radical than he was.

Having the facility to have this multitrack at home, I could try experiments with sort of all of the instruments, giving them different treatments so they didn't actually sound, necessarily, like the instrument itself.

When you hear a banjo through stutter edit, it's the coolest thing you ever heard.

I played a guitar with a file, and a synthesizer.

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

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.

I thought it would be interesting to play classical music on rock instruments.

If I wanted to make big, bombastic, distorted, echo-y, trippy music, the atmospheric stuff, a studio is nice. But it's nice to know that it's not necessary.

Working with Timbaland, you know it's not gonna sound like anything else out there today. The sound is very next-level.