Experimental Music Quotes

I like doing things in a very minimal, unconventional way as a personal way of saying, 'Look, I made a career out of carefully and craftfully, though unconventionally, making records on laptops and blown speakers.'

There's this weird game called 'Blueberry Garden.' For that game an artist recorded some piano music, but evidently he only had a really terrible microphone on top of the piano, and I really liked it and wanted to experiment with that. So, I made piano recording and really mangled it, and kept experimenting with the technique.

For more than 10 years, Daniel Snaith has been playing mad scientist with pop and psychedelic music. As Manitoba, and more recently as Caribou, he's pushed the genres' limits with electronics and studio trickery.

When I first started making ambient music, I was setting up systems using synthesizers that generated pulses more or less randomly. The end result is a kind of music that continuously changes. Of course, until computers came along, all I could actually present of that work was a piece of its output.

You know, I'm a fan of Laurie Anderson. One of my favorite records is 'The Ugly One With the Jewels,' a spoken-word record. It's an extraordinary album.

I always believed that my work should be unfinished in the sense that I encourage people to add their creativity to it, either conceptually or physically. Back in the 1960s, I was calling for 'Unfinished Music,' number one, and number two, with my artwork - I was taking unfinished work into the gallery. And that's how I was looking at it.

I think my music is experimental, playful, challenging, focused, fun. I don't want it to be thought of as trying to appeal to a certain type of person or being very cerebral.

There is a long and interesting tradition of really marginal left-field music that becomes commercially successful. And I will, for a brief minute, fit into that tradition.

I don't think all music that is considered 'avant-garde' is bad, but it's definitely elitist. I hope my music is not that.

I've been into Sonic Youth since junior high school. I think I kind of have ADD, so it's good music for ADD because it just throws you in different directions all the time. I really like Kim Gordon's voice and Thurston Moore's voice, and I like the guitars going off on tangents.

I really want to do a book on the history of the no-wave music scene in New York, how it extended out and formed lots of other things. It was such a great visual culture.

I grew up listening to bands like the Cure, Joy Division, Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance - these are the bands that I actually grew up with, and I always had these things in my taste, too. And I always loved industrial music as well: I listened to Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Cabaret Voltaire. And shoegaze bands like Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine.

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.

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

We were totally confident that we would make it internationally. We had no money or instruments. We used cake tins or bottles with water in them - anything to make sounds.

We're all about trying to play better every night, not just singing hit songs ... we ad lib, and every night there's jamming .. it's almost like the Grateful Dead meets Buck Owens some nights, because we'll go off on little adventures and sometimes we do crash the bus!.

Bjork, I'd love to do something with her. I'd love to do some sort of crazy orchestral choir thing with her.

'Supafunkrock' is a musical gumbo. We throw all those musical influences into the pot and put it out there.

Obviously, Sonic Youth has been a huge part of my life for many, many years, and I love all those guys dearly.

By the time Sonic Youth formed in 1981, my musical tastes had left the Dead behind, but I was always very proud of the fact that we had three different singers singing individually from different points of view, like the Dead.

I don't see myself as a pop artist. Like, when you hear 'pop,' you're like, 'Oh, bubblegum, jumpy little girly stuff,' and I feel like, 'Uh-uh. That's not me.'

A lot of improvisation and freedom went into 'Pinata.'

I love pop music, but I also love noise music, IDM - anything really, I get something out of most kinds of music. I just need to enjoy the process.

Our live set's become increasingly complex recently; we've been doing stuff that's been vastly too much information for most people to deal with and I think it's quite interesting watching how people behave in those situations, under those circumstances.

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.