*An extraordinary character. There are times when he comes across like the only guy on the planet with any common sense.
http://pitchfork.com/features/interviews/7875-brian-eno/
(...)
I think that every format really is a different way of listening. If you take a different sort of psychological stance to it– like, I think the transition from vinyl to CD definitely marked a difference in the way people treated music. The vinyl commands a certain kind of reverence because it's a big object and quite fragile so you handle it rather carefully, and it's expensive so you pay attention to how it's looked after. And, of course, very importantly, it comes in 20-minute chunks, and after 20 minutes you have to do something– listen to it again or whatever. So, I think it's a big difference from having a CD, which you can play on random shuffle and which is going to play for an hour or more. And then, of course, that's quite different from downloads, where you can listen infinitely without knowing often what you're listening to...."
(...)
"And some of the other structuring ideas are completely conceptual in the sense that I might say, "Imagine it's the year 2064 and all digital music has been destroyed in a huge digital accident, an electromagnetic pulse or something like that. So, all we know about the music between 2010 or 2030 is hearsay. There don't exist any recordings. We've read about a kind of music that existed in the suburbs of Shanghai in 2015 to 2018, and this music was played on–" then you specify a group of instruments– "was played on, say, industrial tools, such as steel hammers, and augmented with samplers and various electronic versions of some Chinese instruments. And it was intensely repetitive and played at ear-splitting volume," for example. So, we then, taking that brief, try to imagine what that music would be like, and we try to make it...."
(...)
"You know how eras always have a sound to them and you don't realize it until the era has gone? I remember when in the early days of rock'n'roll, when everything sounded totally different, all amazing and blah blah blah blah blah. Now you can play me one second of any record from that time, and I'll say "1959" or "1961." I can hear precisely. It's like it has a huge date stamp on it. And I think we're all capable of doing that. You can hear the profile of a sound, in retrospect, so much more clearly than you did at the time. And I think one of the things that's going to be nauseatingly characteristic about so much music of now is its glossy production values and its griddedness, the tightness of the way everything is locked together...."
(...)
"...whenever there's a new music, there's a new way of listening. And whenever there's a new way of listening, there are new musics that follow from that. And people start listening differently– that can either mean in different places or at different volumes or in different social groups or through different technologies. Whenever that happens, whichever one of those it is or whichever mixture, then a new music evolves for that niche, as it were. It's like a new ecological niche opens up and wham! Within no time at all, it's populated...."
