A Year With Swollen Appendices Quotes

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”
― Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices

“Records made ‘at one sitting’ sound so fresh now – because the rate of discovery and the emotional tempo match those of the listener. What’s infuriating, though, is how fragile those fabrics are. I’ve noticed that, trying to work on improvisations that have ‘something’, they very quickly dissolve into nothing the more attention they get. It’s almost like trying to reconstruct a very funny dinner party – you had to be there, and it’s impossible to isolate the chemistry of what really made it work.”
― Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno's Diary

“Yesterday, before the meeting with U2, I took the precaution of putting tiny sections of each of the 44 pieces of music we have in hand on to a single tape. All this means is that when somebody says ‘Drum Loop 14’ and someone else says ‘Which one was that?’ I can readily go to it without having to change tapes (which takes only a few more seconds but is annoying). This little precaution (which however took me nearly three hours to put together beforehand) expedited the whole thing so much, and changed the whole quality of the decisions being made. I tend to spend more and more of my time thinking how to set up situations so that they work – so that they can actually take less and less time. My ideal is probably based on that story I heard years ago of how the Japanese calligraphers used to work – a whole day spent grinding inks and preparing brushes and paper, and then, as the sun begins to go down, a single burst of fast and inspired action.”
― Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno's Diary

“Tommy Cooper finds a painting and a violin in the attic; takes them to an expert who says, ‘You’ve got a Stradivarius and a Rembrandt. Unfortunately Stradivarius was a terrible painter and Rembrandt made awful violins.”
― Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno's Diary

“Questions for U2: ‘What record would you like to make – i.e. how would you like this to be read? How would you like to get there? Does it bother you if the result is ‘undemocratic’? How much cheating is allowed? How much me?’ Lincoln’s axe: ‘This is Lincoln’s original axe. The head has been replaced three times and the handle twice.”
― Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno's Diary

“culture is the sum of all the things about which humanity can choose to differ – all the things by which people can recognize each other as being voluntarily distinguished from each other.”
― Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno's Diary

“Let’s start here: ‘culture’ is everything we don’t have to do. We have to eat”
― Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno's Diary

“Whereas the extant canned-music companies proceed from the basis of regularizing environments by blanketing their acoustic and atmospheric idiosyncrasies”
― Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno's Diary

“And”
― Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno's Diary

“And the artifice part is another interesting transition – when something moves away from being ‘byproduct’ or ‘spin-off’ or ‘accidental side-effect’ and becomes instead part of the available vocabulary”
― Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno's Diary

“said I thought that we had learned three things from African music. The first was pushed rhythm”
― Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno's Diary

“Howie B. came over in the afternoon. We talked about the new U2 record. There’s a lot of chefs in that kitchen – he”
― Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno's Diary

“Retroherence: the tendency of clusters of events to be logically connectable after they’ve happened (‘He gave a retroherent account of events”
― Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno's Diary

“I also asked Anthea how many mature oaks she thought it would have taken to build a top-of-the-line ship in Nelson’s day. She guessed ten. The astonishing answer (from Brewer’s) is about 3,500 – 900 acres of oak forest. She said”
― Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno's Diary

“I can see the use and value of religion”
― Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno's Diary

“Saying that cultural objects have value is like saying that telephones have conversations.”
― Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno's Diary

“Must be the central problem of politics – do you paint simplistic pictures that make people act (and leave them with too simple a view of the world) or do you paint bafflingly shaded and contingent scenes that leave people paralysed by indecision?”
― Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno's Diary

“The contrast between America and Canada is for me that between an upper-case and lower-case culture. I can’t imagine the Canadians talking about Good Government with capital letters”
― Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno's Diary

“Hollywood usually makes me puke”
― Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno's Diary

“Stewart said that installations that depend on cutting-edge technology are fine the first year”
― Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno's Diary

“Interesting mirror: as the future is unpredictable”
― Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno's Diary

“Perhaps I should accept that he’s the hunter to my pastoralist – he hangs round for a long time and then springs for the kill”
― Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno's Diary

“Generally my feeling is towards less: less shopping”
― Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno's Diary

“Earlier I was thinking ‘What the fuck am I here for?”
― Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno's Diary

“always admire people who marvel at things that anyone could have noticed before but didn’t.”
― Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno's Diary

“Strange that one remains gripped by the same fantasies throughout life. Perhaps stranger that new ones keep getting added (my old maxim: ‘Old ideas don’t go away – new ones just get added’)”
― Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno's Diary