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Computer music is universal and sounds almost exactly the same all over the world. With a few striking exceptions, I hear pieces and think, "Oh... I see... that's sort of quite interesting in theory" and never have the impulse to listen again. I ought to be more excited about it, since, after all, I probably played some part in preparing the ground for it, but it sounds to me increasingly like diligent and careful secretarial work which happens to have taken place in front of a music sequencing program rather than, say, a spreadsheet program. The sound of mice and typewriters.... I don't think that it's a lack of passion that disturbs me.... I never felt strongly pro-passion anyway. It's more the sense that the person making the music was not actually fully engaged - fully there - that big parts of their being were never invited to the party.
...I want to feel the music is too big to fit on a little old CD, that there is more to it than that, that it has a separate life from my hi-fi - a life I can imagine and add to my aural experience of the music. That's what I hear in some great gospel, jazz and R&B recordings...What I want to hear is music that exists for some other reason than that the artist wanted to make a bit more CD earfood. Even the suspicion that someone might have felt something at some point in the process would do.
...What you sense in these musics is a complete absence of people walking back into the control room and saying, "Can you stick a bit more reverb on the snare?", a complete absence of producers dicking around with the sound, of engineers getting people to hammer kick drums all morning, of blokes in faded black T-shirts sitting in front of computers and making loops.... what you hear, in fact, is the complete absence of the workaday process of 'making a record'. These people are not 'making a record', they are making music because it creates for them a world they want to inhabit, makes them feel alive, and that life floods out over the edges of the recording and into you, the listener.
-- Brian Eno
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For us, the technological aspect of our music goes as far as the studio recording techniques we use, but we don't let the technology dictate the purpose of our art to us. Too many electronic bands get carried away with the influences of computers and the internet and other technology, and they end up using that as their sole inspiration because at the end of the day that's all they do. So they let their song-titles and themes be direct references to current technological buzzwords or fashions, and to us that's a total lack of imagination. They're geeks obsessed with equipment and computers and ultimately it's become fucking predictable and boring. They should go out and live. Or travel around or something, get some real ideas, and real emotions.
-- Boards of Canada
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