Electronic Music Quotes

I do it live on tape with a band. It's not like I'm doing electronic music with a laptop.

In my teenage years I was as addicted to great pop as I was to free jazz, electronic music, and hardcore blues.

Electronic music was just discovery about sound, all our sound options. The core percussions and melodies, they forget about it, they didn't think about those those for a good four, five years, because they were just discovering the new tools and what they could do with them, you know? The big folk revival, I think is a backlash against that. And now, I think they'll probably try to find somewhere in the middle. It's interesting. It's like push-and-pull. It's always like that, you know? Music history is always like that, this repeating evolution of music.

I think a lot of electronic musicians are drawn to starting with texture because the whole reason we're working with electronics is to try to create new sounds or sounds that cannot be created acoustically. When you're doing that, it's nice to be able to just create a different palette for every single song. I feel like a lot of electronic music sounds like...Each album sounds like a compilation more than it does a band.

A lot of people see electronic music as a flavor of the week, but it can be more than that - has to be more than that.

I've been a fan of electronic music since the beginning.

Everybody has their own approach to songwriting. When you're an electronic musician, the whole writing process just depends. Some people have a very live way of writing electronic music, very improvisational. They set up a lot of gear and do live takes. I'm concerned with having a specific kind of sound. There's not one second that I haven't put thought into. I put almost as much time into my live shows as I do into writing music, but they're two completely different processes. Some people think the way I perform live is how I write songs, which isn't true at all.

I think what's made electronic music so fascinating is that it came up through the underground and always moved and pivoted so quickly that you could never keep a handle on it. That continues to happen. Sure, the stuff on the very top moves slower and is marketed for Spotify. But there are still going to be undercurrents that flow freely and move around, simply because there's too much of a base with this music.

It's good to listen to electronic music when you're stressed out because you will feel a release afterwards.

You come out of doing that kind of side of electronic music, you're gonna take that knowledge with you and not ignore it. That'd be ridiculous to spend 10 years on something and not use that as an influence.

With most electronic music I hear now, the things I like will be the things that have soul. It has to have a feeling in it, where it feels warm, or feels epic. I like to play with that in my music as well, there will always be a piano chord or something underneath it to make you feel at home. I always try and make sure even with vocals and layering that you still feel like you know me, no matter whether you're into grime or hip hop.

I'll listen to pretty much anything good, but I probably listen to more "electronic" music than anything else.

At the end of the '90s and into 2000, electronic music was still an underground phenomenon, especially in America.

I would never say I will stay in electronic music for the rest of my life. I will always do whatever I feel like at that moment.

Independence has been key to the success and sustained growth of electronic music over the past 25 years.

It is the element I miss in electronic music - no performance, no loving immersion. Maybe that is why I was never particularly drawn to electronic music.

In some ways it's hard to see electronic music as a genre because the word "electronic" just refers to how it's made. Hip-hop is electronic music. Most reggae is electronic. Pop is electronic. House music, techno, all these sorts of ostensibly disparate genres are sort of being created with the same equipment.

I think that the audience intuitively understands the idea of sampling and remixing stories. That's why electronic music is global.

Electronic music used pure sounds, completely calibrated. You had to think digitally, as it were, in a way that allowed you to extend serial ideas into other parameters through technology.

The good thing, really, is that electronic music started as a fringe subculture, and now it's the biggest youth culture in the world. People pretty much everywhere go crazy for electronic music.

What we call music is what reminds us of ourselves. And sometimes electronic music helps lead the imagination to a space that seems outside of ourselves. But it never really is.

I love music more than I love people.

Electronic music is innately tied to the technology used to create it - as the tools evolve, so will the art.

Electronic music, for me, has been the only real pioneering music that actually does push boundaries and is constantly futuristic.

Computers and electronic music are not the opposite of the warm human music. It's exactly the same.

I find it so amazing when people tell me that electronic music has no soul. You can't blame the computer. If there's no soul in the music, it's because nobody put it there.

What I like about electronic music is you don't really need to be that learned or educated in any particular context. You can just make sound, noise even, whatever it may be.

I turn on the radio now and I don't have anything against a lot of sequenced and programmed and electronic music, a lot of it is dope and it's the future. It's what popular music has evolved to.

A lot of festivals can be a jumble of electronic music and rock and roll, and everything's all mixed up - some things are more performance art or light shows or dance parties, and then you'll have a singer-songwriter stuck in the middle to make the changeovers easier.

I've been really excited about some new cutting edge electronic music and technology.

When I was doing mainly music, I used to stick a microphone out the window, into the countryside, and create a live mix. I wanted to put air in electronic music. I record the sounds of twigs, barks, and stones. I've always been obsessed with the idea of combining the natural and the man-made. It's not because I think the technology is crap, or that I'm trying to work against it, but that juxtaposition is truly beautiful. The question of what is natural and unnatural is very open.

When I started, DJs weren't in the media, electronic music wasn't in the sales charts and a DJ was the freak in the corner who provided the music while other people had fun. So to do it, you must have been a freak and a music lover.

I think that electronic music mirrors the complexity of "information landscapes." You carry the terrain in your mind.

Electronic music right now is in its comfort zone, and it's not moving one inch.

I had invented my own system, my own way of making electronic music at the San Francisco Tape Music Centre, and I was using what is now referred to as a classical electronic music studio, consisting of tube oscillators and patch bays. There were no mixers or synthesizers. So I managed to figure out how to make the oscillators sing. I used a tape delay system using two tape recorders and stringing the tape between the two tape machines and being able to configure the tracks coming back in different ways.

I think a lot people get caught up with the synthetic quality of electronic music, but me, I've always been more interested in all those more natural sounds, in organic electricity. That's something that I want to continue to work with.

It is captivating, isn't it? England has such a great scene of electronic music, and I think that was very prominent in Pusher, and the nightlife was the beat of the film. I feel what is really great about Pusher is that it wasn't about drugs and guns and strippers. That was just all circumstantial. I felt like it was really about people and how decisions and circumstances can change relationships. Something just happens. Everything changes for a reason.

I could create music that sounded as strange as any electronic music, because you see, my opinion about electronic music is that the real composer is the guy who invented the instrument. Pressing buttons is not composing. Composing is about creating something.

Percussion music is revolution. Sound and rhythm have too long been submissive to the restrictions of nineteenth century music. Today we are fighting for their emancipation. Tomorrow, with electronic music in our ears, we will hear freedom. At the present stage of revolution, a healthy lawlessness is warranted. Experiment must necessarily be carried on by hitting anything-tin pans, rice bowls, iron pipes-anything we can lay our hands on. Not only hitting, but rubbing, scraping, making sound in every possible way...What we can't do ourselves will be done by machines which we will invent.

[David] Bowie went on to make best-selling music - funk, dance music, electronic music, while also being influenced by cabaret and jazz.

I need to do a concert to celebrate David Bowie's electronic music. And in so doing, I'm not taking a step back, I'm taking a step forward and presenting it in its entirety so people can understand this type of visionary.

Electronic music is really weird right, because it is bleeding into the mainstream, but, at the same time, it's fashion.

I started playing guitar at the age of 8 or 9 years. Very early, and I was like already into pop music and was just trying to copy what I heard on the radio. And at a very early age I started experimenting with old tape recorders from my parents. I was 11 or 12 at that time and then when I was like 14 or 15 I had a punk band. I made all the classic rock musician's evolutions and then in the early nineties I bought my first sampler and that is how I got into electronic music, because I was able to produce it on my own. That was quite a relief.

I've been making electronic music since I was 12. I was making music as soon as I knew how to make sounds on a piano. My parents had a baby grand, and the piano is still my favorite instrument. I look at it as a songwriting machine.

We always get back to old soul singers like Nina Simone, and how her recordings sound. Also new music like Tobacco, or people that use a mixture of analog and electronic music.

First of all I had to teach myself how to use the studio because there wasn't any classes in electronic music. So I'd stay there all night and leave in the morning, observe the sun rise and have a lot of different kinds of sounds in my mind. But it was a quest, it was a search. It was research, it was learning.

I'm a real big electronic music nut; when I was young I listened to musique concrète, German music from Cologne in the early 50s, all kinds of stuff.

If Pac-Man had affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in dark rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive electronic music.

Up until the rise of electronic music, if you were a musician in Portugal or Germany or Italy or Japan, and you didn't sing in English, you really were limited: You could be successful in the country where people understood your language. The world of electronic music is completely international. You have DJs from Finland making huge records for people in New Zealand, DJs in South Korea making huge records for people in France. By the fact that it doesn't cost anything to make, and that it transcends language, nation it accidentally accomplishes a lot of really remarkable things.

The 80s were deranged. People had all these liberties all of a sudden and all the freedom in the world, the Less Than Zero sort of themes that came from that period, I think electronic music works very well for that whole idiom.