Avant Garde Music Quotes

I like doing things in a very minimal, unconventional way as a personal way of saying, 'Look, I made a career out of carefully and craftfully, though unconventionally, making records on laptops and blown speakers.'

I always believed that my work should be unfinished in the sense that I encourage people to add their creativity to it, either conceptually or physically. Back in the 1960s, I was calling for 'Unfinished Music,' number one, and number two, with my artwork - I was taking unfinished work into the gallery. And that's how I was looking at it.

There is a long and interesting tradition of really marginal left-field music that becomes commercially successful. And I will, for a brief minute, fit into that tradition.

I don't think all music that is considered 'avant-garde' is bad, but it's definitely elitist. I hope my music is not that.

I'm coming from a place that's more experimental and indulgent already, so for the last 10 years, it's been more like, "How can I defend my own sensibilities by writing a nugget of a little catchy pop song?" That's how I'm stretching myself, by writing something really simple.

OPN is completely off the grid. Its like the slime underneath techno and other synth-oriented music.

I think some of the musicians are more like punk rock musicians. It's like an art as opposed to being a musician. It's definitely more radical psychedelic bands, more than anything.

Once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music - not like a record that you'd put on, which would play for a while and finish.

'Europe '72' was a super influential record full of fantastic songs and amazing experimental musicianship. I always valued both of those aspects in what Sonic Youth has done through the years - being able to get very abstract and very concrete within the same song.

Sound as medium has an incredible elasticity. So, of course, it is tempting for artists of other fields to try something with sounds. Why not? We are living in the age when there is no limit in gathering all forms of art and music to mix it together if you so desire.

The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band

I have loved Elliott Carter's music for many years.

We were like psychedelic folk combined with Sonic Youth's noise.

When I was a kid. I started writing when I was 13. I got my first electric guitar when I was 13, but I'd always been singing. I had my first little acoustic when I was six. But I started being in bands when I was 13. Crappy rock bands, avant-garde things where we'd, like, 'wanna go against the norm, man.'

I'm not so interested in being indie just for the sake of being indie.

I picked up the bass kind of postpunk-style. There's a real art to not learning how to play an instrument and being able to still play it.

Erik Satie does not say the opposite of Debussy; he says the same thing only the other way round.

You want to embrace what the idea of pop music is. Not necessarily the stereotype of pop music; there was a time when you'd say 'pop music' and conjure up images of the Sweet, or Marc Bolan. That, to me, can be avant-garde still.

I love truly forward-thinking music, and I'm not even sure I'd describe my work as that, even.

I was a regular kind of academic music student. I was at Juilliard. I had to study all the contemporary music of the time, and changing that language very radically was just a sign or a signal that I was going to try to do something very different. I find that that's what I feel closest to. I found no real inner response in me in a non-tonal language.

We made music that wouldn't be in synch.

I know we play a part in the story of progressive music, but for us those influences are the real fathers, the ones that we were interested in.

When I was growing up, I was always looking for the most willfully uncommercial music: Whether it was Captain Beefheart or Frank Zappa or King Crimson, that's what attracted me.

As a DJ, it's my job to break new music. And instead of it just being the stuff that's coming from the major labels or the big pop records, I've always gravitated to something that's just different, you know?

Using something that is really painful, generally, as the percussive element for a beat, I think is cool.