Ambient Quotes

• Ambient music must be as ignorable as it is interesting.

  Brian Eno

  Interesting, Ambient Music

  "Brian Eno: The Ship review - epic eeriness" by Paul Mardles, www.theguardian.com. May 1, 2016.

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• If you listen to really deep ambient records that don't move too much, very still records, long after those records are finished, you might find yourself listening for hours to the sound of the room.

  Bill Laswell

  Moving, Long, Listening

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• 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.

  Brian Eno

  Interesting, Listening, Attention

  "Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice". Book by Robert Fink, 2005.

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• My favorite sounds are the high, spacey ones that are very ambient.

  Andy Summers

  Sound, My Favorite

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• I Think, Therefore I Ambient

  The Irresistible Force

  Thinking

  Written on reverse of debut LP, 1991.

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• Ambient music is intended to induce calm and a space to think.

  Brian Eno

  Thinking, Space, Calm

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• Ambient means the natural center or atmosphere of a space. All music has that in it- a space or center. I think it just means the atmosphere or what defines the environment of sound and maybe removing the more destructive, harsh elements and harder rhythmic elements and you get down to the stillness that's inherent. There's an ambient quality in every sound. You may have to enhance that to hear it or bring it out in a different way but there is that in every environmental sound.

  Bill Laswell

  Mean, Thinking, Space

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• I'm thinking of the audience as being ambient, meaning not sitting focused but being in the space and exploring it while listening to the players.

  Pauline Oliveros

  Player, Thinking, Space

  Source: www.artpractical.com

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• Is the ambient noise level of my life low enough for me to hear the whispers of the Lord?

  Bill Hybels

  Levels, Noise, Lord

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• 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.

  Brian Eno

  People, Listening, Easy

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• It simply isn't true, for example, that being big is in general better for fitness than being small except when there are effects of interacting variables; or that flying slow and high is in general better for fitness than flying fast and low except when there are effects of interacting variables; or that being monogamous is in general better for fitness than being polygamous... except when there are effects of interacting variables... It's not that the underlying generalizations are there but imperceptible in the ambient noise.

  Jerry Fodor

  Flying, Example, Variables

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• In England and Europe, we have this huge music called ambient - ambient techno, ambient house, ambient hip-hop, ambient this, ambient that.

  Brian Eno

  Europe, House, Hip Hop

  "Q and A With Brian Eno". Interview with Joel Selvin, www.sfgate.com. June 2, 1996.

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• Ambient awareness is the experience of knowing what's going on in the lives of other people - what they're thinking about, what they're doing, what they're looking at - by paying attention to the small stray status messages that people are putting online. We're now able to stitch together these fantastic details and mental maps of what is going on in other people's lives.

  Clive Thompson

  Thinking, Knowing, People

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• If you lower the ambient noise of your life and listen expectantly for those whispers of God, your ears will hear them. And when you follow their lead, your world will be rocked.

  Bill Hybels

  Ears, World, Noise

  Bill Hybels (2010). “The Power of a Whisper: Hearing God, Having the Guts to Respond”, p.11, Zondervan

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• Air travel reminds us who we are. It's the means by which we recognize ourselves as modern. The process removes us from the world and sets us apart from each other. We wander in the ambient noise, checking one more time for the flight coupon, the boarding pass, the visa. The process convinces us that at any moment we may have to submit to the force that is implied in all this, the unknown authority behind it, behind the categories, the languages we don't understand. This vast terminal has been erected to examine souls.

  Don DeLillo

  Mean, Air, Convince Us

  Don DeLillo (2012). “The Names”, p.254, Vintage

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• 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.

  Max Richter

  Sound, Atoms, Littles

  Source: thequietus.com

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• We hear the ambient noise of children singing. We hear lions and tigers roar. Hyenas laugh. Some jungle bird or howler monkey declares its existence, screeching a maniac's gibberish. Our entire world, always doing battle against the silence and obscurity of death.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Children, Laughing, Silence

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• I love to hear a cool ambient sound at runway shows. It creates a good energy.

  Theophilus London

  Energy, Sound, Runway

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• My life is really precious. I don't want to spend it watching ambient TV that just drifts through you. I've got better things to do.

  James Purefoy

  Want, Tvs, Life Is

  Source: collider.com

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• Germans grew reluctant to stay in communal ski lodges, fearing they might talk in their sleep. They postponed surgeries because of the lip-loosening effects of anesthetic. Dreams reflected the ambient anxiety. One German dreamed that an SA man came to his home and opened the door to his oven, which then repeated every negative remark the household had made against the government.

  Erik Larson

  Dream, Fear, Sleep

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• I don't want to be typecast as the 'ambient guy' or someone who only does electronic scores. I think most of the work that comes my way is because people feel they know me musically.

  Cliff Martinez

  Thinking, People, Guy

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• COIL would very much like to see the creation of a newsgroup for minimal musics. We enjoy a wide spectrum of such musics, from La Monte Young, Alvin Lucier, Arvo Part, Nurse With Wound's Solilique For Lilith,The Dream Syndicate (orig.concept not the newer group who plundered the name) to Synus, Earth and so on.and on and on. Some new so called ambient musics fall between genres and so between newsgroups: some of our own music has certainly been deeply inspired by and informed by such musics,from Partch to Subotnic.

  John Balance

  Dream, Fall, Names

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• Lithium tweaks many mood-altering chemicals in the brain, and its effects are complicated. Most interesting, lithium seems to reset the body’s circadian rhythm, its inner clock. In normal people, ambient conditions, especially the sun, dictate their humors and determine when they are tuckered out for the day. They’re on a twenty-four-hour cycle. Bipolar people run on cycles independent of the sun. And run and run.

  Sam Kean

  Running, Independent, People

  Sam Kean (2011). “The Disappearing Spoon...and other true tales from the Periodic Table”, p.252, Random House

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• A Universalist, your heart cannot but dilate, and your affections widen, until the divine expansion, like the ambient atmosphere, embraces every form, which is acted upon by an immortal spirit.

  Judith Sargent Murray

  Heart, Atmosphere, Expansion

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• You stayed around your children as long as you could, inhaling the ambient gold shavings of their childhood, and at the last minute you tried to see them off into life and hoped that the little piece of time you’d given them was enough to prevent them from one day feeling lonely and afraid and hopeless. You wouldn’t know the outcome for a long time.

  Meg Wolitzer

  Lonely, Children, Long

  Meg Wolitzer (2008). “The Ten-Year Nap”, p.375, Penguin

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