Anthony Fantano Quotes

So the ideology was that: use sounds as instruments, as sounds on tape, without the causality. It was no longer a clarinet or a spring or a piano, but a sound with a form, a development, a life of its own.

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've put out records over the years, whether it's with Blackfield or No-Man or Bass Communion or Porcupine Tree, that are pop records, ambient records, metal records, singer-songwriter records.

I'm the renegade of funk. I've made house, techno, rock, funk, reggae... That's why I've been on so many different labels.

I'm starting to play all the melodies with kind of keyboard sound but playing it from the bass guitar.

I am a massive fan of early electronica like Steve Reich, Pat Metheny and Thomas Dolby. I used to be a big raver, too, so anything dance. I love ambient music like Tunng. I love acoustic and classical, too.

I have no interest in making music that's built for an antique shop.

There will be some tracks on the next album which that will consist of mostly noise and feedback, whereas others may just have guitar parts and samples.

So dance music is now pop music. So now, as a dance producer, what do I have to do? So I'm starting to do alien music, because pop is not pop anymore; we need to go alien to be independent.

I was using tape loops for dancers and dance production. I had very funky primitive equipment, in fact technology wasn't very good no matter how much money you had.

I was greatly influenced by musique concrete when I was, like, 10. I was completely mesmerized by the idea that you could make music out of sounds. So that's been a constant influence on all my work.

I'm into heavy duty, psychedelic, foreign music. That's what I like listening to.

Musicians like James Blake were a big influence on me. How he uses his vocals is amazing. And then Yeasayer and Animal Collective, who aren't pop bands exactly, but they do something that is so catchy and undeniable and so much fun.

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

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

Prince turned experimental music into pop music. 'When Doves Cry,' the whole 'Purple Rain' soundtrack - he was inspired by the Cocteau Twins and new wave pop and brought it into R&B when he first started, and then it became this cool, next-level, kind of hard-to-digest music. Which is what I felt 'House of Balloons' was.

PC Music is a really post-modern attempt at pop.

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

I wanted to create a bridge between experimental music and pop.

What's incredible with Trent Reznor is how he took all the alienation and the rejection of traditional rock and found a way to encapsulate it in a form that made the public finally get industrial music.

You hear ten seconds of a song, and you know it's OutKast. There's a strangeness about it because it's catchy, but it's not just pop for the sake of pop. They're pushing the envelope.

I think it was inevitable that I get into synthesizer music. I always wanted to deal with sound more than anything else. I couldn't get the sounds I wanted out of the piano.

I'm a rapper and, obviously, hip hop rap is my main thing. But I also like to dive into different genres and kind of be a bit more experimental and open myself up a bit, whether that's taking influence from jazz or soul or electronic.

Technology was changing just as we were getting started. You had these records by people like David Bowie and Talking Heads and Brian Eno that took production into a whole new direction. That really influenced us, and pushed us to find that early sound we had.

In the old days, maybe we'd come across Captain Beefheart, buy a record, go, 'This is great!' and notice how his music is evolving, changing, and becoming more complex, more radical. And we would follow that progression and see it reflected in the alternative culture it came from.