Brian Eno - Quodid

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Picture of Brian Eno

Brian Eno ( EE-no; born Brian Peter George Eno, 15 May 1948) is an English musician, record producer and artist. He is known for his pioneering contributions to ambient, electronic and generative music, and for producing, recording, and writing works in rock and pop music. He describes himself as a "non-musician" uninterested in virtuosity, and advocates for using the studio as a compositional tool. He has been described as one of popular music's most influential and innovative figures.

Quotes from Brian Eno

Beautiful things grow out of shit. Nobody ever believes that. Everyone thinks that Beethoven had his string quartets completely in his head—they somehow appeared there and formed in his head—and all he had to do was write them down and they would be manifest to the world. But what I think is so interesting, and would really be a lesson that everybody should learn, is that things come out of nothing. Things evolve out of nothing. You know, the tiniest seed in the right situation turns into the most beautiful forest. And then the most promising seed in the wrong situation turns into nothing. I think this would be important for people to understand, because it gives people confidence in their own lives to know that's how things work. If you walk around with the idea that there are some people who are so gifted—they have these wonderful things in their head but and you're not one of them, you're just sort of a normal person, you could never do anything like that—then you live a different kind of life. You could have another kind of life where you could say, well, I know that things come from nothing very much, start from unpromising beginnings, and I'm an unpromising beginning, and I could start something.

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I'm struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity. The transfer is not paying off. Sure, muscles are unreliable, but they represent several million years of accumulated finesse.