Moore's Eno interview
An interview of Brian Eno by Alan Moore for BBC Radio 4 is available here until next Thursday.
Also, last week's interview of Alan Moore by comedian Stewart Lee is now available as a transcript here (link via David Simpson).
Eno: [...] this is a big interest for me, lyric generators. That’s something I’m working on at the moment.
Moore: Really?
Eno: Yeah, I think that’s... Lyrics are really the last very hard problem in music. Software -and hardware- have changed the rest of music dramatically in the last thirty, forty years. It’s very very easy to make pretty good music. I could take anyone in this room and within two hours we could make a pretty good piece of music. I mean, pretty good isn’t very interesting, but pretty good is possible.
But writing songs is just about in the same place it was in the days of Chaucer. Apart from hip hop: hip hop is the only sort of breakthrough in a way -rap. Because it breaks away from the strict adherence to melody and beat structure and so on. But the problem of how you write a song that is in any way original is a really interesting one, I think. [...]
Moore: I’m fascinated by this idea of a lyric generator, because it’ll probably just, like, make me completely redundant and ruin my plans for a contented retirement. How far are you along with it? [laughs]
(transcript by moi)
Also, last week's interview of Alan Moore by comedian Stewart Lee is now available as a transcript here (link via David Simpson).
Eno: [...] this is a big interest for me, lyric generators. That’s something I’m working on at the moment.
Moore: Really?
Eno: Yeah, I think that’s... Lyrics are really the last very hard problem in music. Software -and hardware- have changed the rest of music dramatically in the last thirty, forty years. It’s very very easy to make pretty good music. I could take anyone in this room and within two hours we could make a pretty good piece of music. I mean, pretty good isn’t very interesting, but pretty good is possible.
But writing songs is just about in the same place it was in the days of Chaucer. Apart from hip hop: hip hop is the only sort of breakthrough in a way -rap. Because it breaks away from the strict adherence to melody and beat structure and so on. But the problem of how you write a song that is in any way original is a really interesting one, I think. [...]
Moore: I’m fascinated by this idea of a lyric generator, because it’ll probably just, like, make me completely redundant and ruin my plans for a contented retirement. How far are you along with it? [laughs]
(transcript by moi)
posted by James Kozak at 10:40 AM
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