Ambient Soundscapes Quotes

I'd been making music that was intended to be like painting, in the sense that it's environmental, without the customary narrative and episodic quality that music normally has. I called this 'ambient music.' But at the same time I was trying to make visual art become more like music, in that it changed the way that music changes.

The thing I don't want to do as a film composer is reiterate. I prefer to subtextualize or to underline rather than to say, 'This is what you should be feeling.'

Brian Eno records and music got me through. It made me feel like there were other people out there who had the same questions and fears and unhappiness. Particularly those kinds of artists who were writing songs about exactly those things.

Enya is a very matriarchal musical force. Her music is very feminine and she layers her voice a lot. It leaks into my music secretly on the side. There's a lot of lush layers of my voice hiding in the cracks.

I still feel like I have a lot to learn in the realm of sound experimentation, and I think I would like things to get noisier and weirder and more distressed and more aggressive, but I don't know if that's something that would be suitable for public consumption.

I dread naming pieces of music because being instrumental, most of the time the songs that I write are instrumental, I want the listener to make up their own story as to what it is and get the emotion pure without using logic.

I saw Double Leopards play at my school and realized there were other ways to approach noisy music that weren't necessarily aggressive. That became a very important concept for me as a musician. I don't think I would have been that interested in creating and performing my own music if it wasn't for this group.

I think as I get older, I'm just going to start making smooth, new age music - no joke.

I naturally like that dreamy, shoegazey sound on my vocals. A lot of reverb helps, and so do a lot of delay effects on everything.

Our music would probably be a really dark ocean, so you may not know where you are. It's not so literal. It's like a David Lynch movie.

A lot of my favourite songs have Eno involved, but I love the work he does on the first two Roxy Music albums. He's creating atmospheres as opposed to composition, and it's a beautiful mixture with everything else in that band.

If there's loads of material going by you don't notice the individual things quite so much. Also it really foregrounds the sonic dimensions like electronic ambient music, it's pushes all of that colour to the foreground so you hear little every atom of sound.

Throughout the evening I would be recording these long saxophone delays and about four hours into the concert, if I wanted to take a break I would just play back the saxophone.

I don't think our music has much to do with math rock.

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.

We let the lyrics be the focus of the song. Which is not what you hear with some of the zeitgeisty bands, like the War on Drugs, who I love, their lyrics are usually buried and The National, one of my favorite bands, Matt Berninger writes in fragments, in a very impressionistic way.

Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.