Sonic Landscape Quotes

I feel like guitar explains a lot. You can just listen to a guitar without any lyrics over it; you can just feel what kind of track it is. If it's pain... you can feel it. It sets the mood.

Everywhere you go, there's a soundtrack. You can't really quite hear it. It's just a little out of the range of hearing.

I actually hate lyrics, and I hate it when they're quoted in reviews. I don't think they matter that much; it's the sounds of words - not the words - that I look for.

The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world.

When I'm sitting in the studio, a mix isn't done till I feel it in my gut.

When I started making my own records, I had this idea of drowning out the singer and putting the rest in the foreground. It was the background that interested me.

Music is a reservoir... of sounds.

We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.

When I listen to 'Nevermind,' I hate the production, but there's something about it that almost makes me cry at times.

However, in modern conceptual frameworks there is a more sophisticated view. I would say that the act of music exists in several worlds simultaneously.

I'm not really interested in music. Music is just a means of creating a magical state.

Obviously for some people there is a big connection between music and the way you can create a space.

People do dismiss ambient music, don't they? They call it 'easy listening,' as if to suggest that it should be hard to listen to.

I'd do a demo recording by myself, layering instruments on top of one another, and while that's fun, it doesn't have the same impact as getting some great players together in a great studio with a great engineer and producer, then waiting for the magic.

There's certain little sounds that I just like to hear.

I think space and music go hand in hand in the sense that they give a little more mystery and magic to life.

One of the rules of the road is that if you want to create the sense of silence, it frequently has more pungency if you include the tiniest of sounds. By manipulating what you hear and how you hear it and what other things you don't hear, you can not only help tell the story, you can help the audience get into the mind of the character.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

Music dominates the universe. It is the prime force. It has given shape to space.

An album is a whole universe, and the recording studio is a three-dimensional kind of art space that I can fill with sound. Just as the album art and videos are ways of adding more dimensions to the words and music. I like to be involved in all of it because it's all of a piece.

When you go to a great concert, you feel this arc, almost like the music of a well-chosen set takes you on this trip through emotions and through various forms of intellectual engagement.

You have to love writing a song and architecture. You have to give it a form. It is my job to create a sonic landscape. I like to create ambiance and atmosphere. The writing is the intimate part of it. It is a sketch. The production is the whole painting.

Being in L.A. has definitely given me the opportunity to experience how my music sounds in real life because I can drive around and listen to the mixes, which I couldn't do in New York. I get to feel how a song works in combination with a sunset and a drive through the mountains.

I believe that tracks speak to me. Some tracks make me write certain music or make me feel sad or inspire me to write a sad love song. Each track has its feeling to me.

It is very rare that I am just coming up with melodies off the top of my head. I usually am responding to something - it could be chains dragging on the floor - but I am usually responding to something.