The second half of TechTV’s video interview with Brian Eno is now up on its website (story with video here). Here’s an excerpt: “I have not in my life owned very many synthesizers. … I just like to have one instrument and really get to know it a bit. So, I am trying to recreate some of the rapport that I see between guitarists and their guitars, rather just constantly getting bigger and bigger menus.”
The interviewer then asks, “Is it possible to have … a kind of a cultural history of a synthesizer, as a violin or a guitar does?”
Eno responds, in part: “Well, it’s starting to happen now. You might have noticed that a lot of records now deliberately incorporate early, unreliable synthesizer sounds. … Something that has happened recently in synthesizers is that they’ve deliberately started producing lower quality sounds to mimic the sounds of early synthesizers. And I think that’s very interesting. … It starts to show the thing has its own history and life, and early versions of it have different resonances and connotations. … So, I think there is a real vocabulary now building up.”