Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno

and legend, Brian Eno. We spoke in 2025 about his book "What Art Does" and "What Art and Creativity

Mean" in the age of AI. The conversation remains a breath of fresh air, so I hope you at this particular moment. Enjoy it.

“I've got an email from a lot of you lately saying, "Can we do a show just off the news?”

Can one show not be in the grim march of events?" So here it is. How do you intro, Brian Eno? Eno is a claim as much as anyone does to have invented the genre of ambient music. So there's no narrative quality to the music. It just sort of starts, stays pretty much in one place and then ends. He's certainly coined the term, built out the philosophy, sort of his eating a lot of the music we now listen to. But also he's just done so many other things. He's produced

Seminole Albums by YouTube. David Bowie, "I'm so glad we were strangers when you meet." The talk in heads, Laurie Anderson, "In our sleep, as we speak, listen to the drums, in our sleep, cold place." But that was when Eno composed the sound that plays when you boot up Windows 95.

“Do you remember that one? A lot of sound we just take for granted.”

A lot of the way sound is now made. Eno helping that into existence. A lot of his work on creating generative systems that make music can be seen as a forerunner to much of today's AI systems. Eno is more than just a sonic technician or tinker. He's this wonderful thinker and philosopher of art and just being a human being. And he's got this really delightful new book out. What art does an unfinished theory? As well as a new album with Beaty Wolf called Limitil.

I wanted to talk to him about all of it, or at least as much of it as I could. As always,

my email as recline show at nvitimes.com. Brian Eno, welcome to the show. Hello, is there? Nice to meet you. So your new book is called What Art does? And I guess tell me, what is art do? Well, perhaps I should tell you first why I thought that question needed answering because in education in England and in fact, I think probably in most parts of the world,

the budgets that always get cut are the arts budgets because they're apparently more important

things that we should be teaching people. Science, engineering, financial technology, that kind of thing.

“Yeah, you should be making short trades. Exactly. Exactly. Are you really alive if you can't”

short a start? So I've always thought that art is actually one of the most important things that humans do with their time. In my book, there's a long list of things that I consider could come under the headline of art. And it includes, of course, obvious things like symphonies and photographs and paintings, but it includes cardigans and jewelry and makeup and tattoos and all the things that humans do that they don't have to do. None of those things have survival

benefits in the obvious sense. There are things we do to do something in our mind to change our mind in some way. So what does art do? Why do we like it? I have this phrase in the book that

When we look at children and we watch them playing, we don't think, oh, they're just wasting their time. They should do something more serious. We realize that when children play, they're learning. They're understanding about materials, about social relationships, about their own bodies, their own minds, about where they live, all of those things that are very important to understand.

“And they do that infallibly and with a huge appetite. That's what children like doing. And we”

understand all of us understand that that's the way they learn things. Art is grown up play. It's a way of imagining things and imagining what they would feel like and imagining how they connect to other things that we know about. And then feeding that knowledge back into our lives and into our relationships. I want to zoom in on a word used there, which is feel. One of the central arguments of the book is that art is a way we explore or attune to our feelings. And I guess that

raises another question. You say, and I agree with this, that feelings have a bad reputation. So, to you, what do feelings you do and why do they matter? Yes. So, they have a bad reputation because they're very hard to quantify and measure. And of course, science wants things that are easily comparable and easily describable in some kind of language of quantity and measure.

Feelings because they're subjective are very difficult to do that with. However, the first

response we have to most things is a feeling response, particularly if they're unfamiliar things. What's the first thing that happens when you meet somebody? You kind of form an impression of them quite quickly. You think he looks like a decent person. He looks quite friendly. He doesn't look

“hostile. I think I could get on with him. Well, she looks pretty interesting and I think I'm in love”

with her. Feelings form very quickly, actually. And they form without really much relation on our part. And they are, in fact, our first antennae, our first judgment of a situation,

our first sense of whether it's dangerous or friendly or useful or useless is made on the basis of

feelings. And then after that, we backfill with other information we find. And we sometimes find that our feelings, the quick response, were incorrect. But surprisingly often, we find that they were actually exactly on the money. I knew that as soon as I saw her. One thing that I was thinking about while you were talking is a way I think to say what our modern relationship is here is that we think feelings line. We think facts don't. Yes. And I've come to believe that's a very

simplistic way to think about both feelings and facts. Yes. But what I am doing to make form into content here, while you talk, I have this whole list of questions. And in a rational coherent factual way, I know what the next question should be. But I'm actually doing is watching a feeling that is moving around in my chest while you speak. And there's a moment when I know that you said

“something that's at the next place we should go and it's not the thing on my sheet of paper. Right?”

It's this whole thing I'm doing right now in a way. And maybe it's wrong. Yes. But no great interviews are logical. Like they're just aren't. Like we're working in a medium that does not work that way. Conversation does not work logically. And I do think we've degraded our relationship our toolmen to what we feel. Yes. And that's actually a mistake. So I understood one argument you're making about art, which which feels true to me is that it's a way of practicing our

toolmen to our feelings. I think that opens something interesting here. You one thing in the book that connected for me was you quote a musician friend of yours John Hassel, who you says asks the

question, what is it that I really like and says being able to answer that is the most important

question. Why? So we're being told probably about 10 or 12,000 times a day what we ought to like, what other people like, what some people would prefer that we liked. We're told that in the form of advertising and the form of political messages in the form of all of the things that try to persuade us to think or believe one thing rather than another. It's the biggest industry in the western world actually persuasion and it's very easy in that flood actually of that tsunami of

there he's suggesting that the deepest feelings we have are actually the most reliable things that we

know about. One of the things that happens when you're looking at art or listening to art, something connects to you and you think that's what I really like, that's what really moves me.

“And I think when that happens you should pay attention to that. You should think, why do I really”

like that? What does that mean that I like that thing? What does that connect me to that's so important to me? And we frequently don't do that because the distraction rate is so high. There are so many things to think about all the time. I think this question of what is it that I really like

and trying to pay attention to your response to different pieces of art is interesting because it

gets it a mystery to me about being human which is why things that are legendarily beautiful works leave me completely cold even as they have inspired thousands of books and and komeums from others and then I'll hear something or I'll see something and my soul will leap into my throat. I've been obsessed this year with an album by an art-a-same drum and the album is called under-entangled silence and this one-song wax cap I just keep listening to and listening to.

When I give my headphones to somebody else they quite rarely have the experience I am having with that song. Right. In a way that makes me feel lonely or but also a little bit more unique. So you're an artist but you're also an artist who both yourself creates and helps others create things for mass consumption. And so how do you think about that difference of a tuneman in different people how some people can hear something and it is their favorite thing ever.

Yes and others will put that same thing on. Yes and here nothing but noise.

“I think the answer to that is that of course when we look at any piece of art we're not looking”

just at that piece of art we're looking at this piece of art in terms of our own personal history. So it's like you're hearing the latest sentence in a conversation you've been having for your whole life. I wrote this little story once about somebody finding in some post-apocalyptic time finding an art museum and the whole place is wrecked but there's lots of pictures still around and they find one picture that obviously hasn't been finished which is just a white canvas which of course

in fact is melee of it is white on white. So it has no meaning to that person who doesn't share its history. Part of the value of any piece of work and the power of it is how it sits in the cultural conversation in general and in your cultural conversation in particular. So a little difference that is very significant to you may be meaningless to somebody else. For instance I've

always had a rather blind spot for Shakespeare. No English person is ever supposed to admit that but

Shakespeare's never thrilled me. I find it hard to read and quite unrewarding. So when a critic a writer picks out a Shakespeare sentence and talks about its significance they do that because they know the rest of the Shakespeare canon and they know where it sits in there and what value it therefore has. It doesn't mean anything to me because I don't know any of those things and I don't care about them in that case either. Well let me offer a cliched concern which is that this is a way

“that art fails. I think when people think of art now they don't first think of music or food on a”

plate or the way of building looks. I think of something you see in the museum and I go to a fair number of shows or try to. And I'm often left cold in part because it feels like there is so much cultural conversation going on. And I'll read the little placard on the wall next to a piece by an artist working at the peak of their powers who is being venerated as one of the great artists of our age and this little placard is telling me what a meditation this is on identity and borders

and looking at like is it though? And one of the ways art, it feels locks people out is by demanding so much literacy and a cultural conversation and it's one reason music is so interesting. Well one of the problems that find art faces is the problem of its own irrelevance to most people's

they buy it because there's a good chance they'll be able to sell it again at a profit or it secures them as sort of social status that is not easily obtainable otherwise. So you have to

“make it seem very important. You have to pretend that it isn't just an object of commerce.”

It's an attempt to build something up by repackaging it in this kind of crust of usually incomprehensible language. I think some of the worst writing in the world is writing about art, about fine art and it ought to be much simpler. One of the reasons you like it is because it doesn't translate into words. It doesn't turn into sentences. It hits you in some other place, some other part of your mind. You did an album in last couple of years with Fred again who

I think is you've been a mentor too and there's another artist who I really love and there's a

song on that album that became big and I remember the first time I heard it the song is called

"Come On" and I've probably listened to it. It was one of my top listen songs at whole year. I want to play a little piece of it. I want to ask you about it. So we've been talking about feelings and the thing that happened to me I listened out song in every single time I listen to it since including in that moment is something about the way you've distorted that sample is incredibly physical for me. I don't really know why that

“works but I think it's something to do with the sense of a of near-encohirrence of the voice.”

It's like somebody trying to say something and it doesn't come out clearly and straightforwardly. So there's a sort of either a reticence or a feeling of the machine doesn't work any longer. The machine that is me speaking isn't quite working. It's defective in some way. But the way you describe it there is almost frightening where to me it's extraordinarily

comforting. It's a feeling I almost never have. I mean it's there's very little I can put

on. It gives me the exact feeling of that song and nor would I be able to describe the feeling. Yes, but it's not jarring for me. It's like a caress. If you had to name the emotion that that song has, what would you call it? I mean for me it's there's something melancholy and like a nostalgia for a different future or something and nostalgia for a future that didn't happen. Which isn't sad but it's it's a to me.

It's a very moving song actually. I love hearing you say that because I such a different experience I find it enormously comforting. That's not. That's lovely and that there's something yeah very physical. It's like having a blanket pulled over you and I even find this interaction so interesting. I had Jeff Tweety on this show years ago from Wilcoe and we're talking about the song he is impossible germany and I was asking about the lyrics of it because I've

always found it to be such a beautiful song about the dislocations of travel.

And that is not what he was doing that song at all. It was like a misremembered line from a murder novel as I remember his description and just the idea that you can create something that it's not just that it's evoking such feelings in me or others but that the feeling is so different than even the ones that gives you. Yes, when you're making something it starts to come alive when you start to have feelings that you didn't expect from it. You think well I'm going to

make this. And as it starts to form it starts to change. It starts to become something that you hadn't imagined and you can either say okay I don't want that which is what a lot of people do. They shut that down and try to get back to what they're supposed to be doing but I don't do that

“and I think a lot of artists don't do that. We say oh I wonder where it's going. I wonder where it's”

taking me and you just carry on then and think there's a certain point you reach either where you can't make it any better. You notice that what you're adding is starting to subtract rather than

deadline and I couldn't spend any longer fucking them up. I think this gets another interesting

“distinction. So I think we've been talking about the exposure to pieces of art here. If I'm”

going to try to define it more tightly and the way that they create a space should be attentive to feelings arising in you that you might not have expected. Then once you have discovered that it gives you that feeling it can become a tool to reavoke it. I put on that song come on to feel a certain way. I put on your series of ambient albums because I actually know how they will make me feel and I'm trying to shift my emotional landscape in that direction at a certain

moment. I always think this is really interesting. This difference between art is something you pay

attention to or music is maybe something you pay attention to and then music is something you use to change the way you pay attention to everything else. That's a very nice distinction. I wish I'd sort of that myself. Well it's very built on things you've written so but I'd be curious to hear

“how you think about that. I think when you're working as an artist you're always”

world-building. You're creating a world. It might be a huge world like you know George Orwell's 1984. That's a whole world completely thought out and when you read that book you decide to live in that world for a time and you decide to experience the feelings of living in a world like that because the wonderful thing about art is that it isn't dangerous. You can live in that terrible totalitarian world and then you can shut the book and don't put on a fret again song.

What to do? I'm always sort of trying to find something that suddenly makes me think, oh,

there's a different kind of world. I've never been in a world like that before. If we go back to

“the idea of adults playing, I think that's what we're doing. Pretending imagining situations and then”

sort of figuring out the mechanics of them by imagining them is the clue to everything that makes humans such a powerful and probably dangerous species. So even if you thought out was not valuable for anything else at all, you'd have to say that this process of giving our minds away of imagining futures and virtually living in them actually, living in them in our imagination, must be a very important thing for human beings. I hear this so often from artists and in books I've read about art.

This cultivation of humanity, this cultivation of different futures. I know you're doing a lot of work on Gaza and I've been doing a podcast on this topic and as part of that work I was reading a book by Philippe Sands who will by the time this comes out of bin on the show and this book

about the Holocaust and the development of the idea of genocide and one of the essential characters

this book tracks is a man named Hans Frank who is under Hitler, the governor of Poland, the worst things in history happen under Hans Frank and a point Sands makes about him that is very, very, very present in his biography is how culture the man he was. Yes, a beautiful classical pianist, somebody who much more so than most people does really did care about art, about literature, about music, about paintings that he got it and at the same time was so much

more capable of inhumanity and calisness and so some part of me rebells on this. I often hear novelists and others as if it is an equation with a single output if you expose yourself to more of these worlds more Beethoven more Bach you will become a more civilized person. Yes, and yet so much of the most uncivilized civilizations or parts of our civilizations have been driven by people who are enormously cultured in fact that was part of what they believed made them so superior to everybody else.

Yes, you're absolutely right and in saying that it helps us use our minds in that way I'm not saying necessarily for good things it just makes our minds better imagining but they can just as easily be imagining terrible things you know one of the great art collectors of 20th century was some hymler had a huge collection which he'd stolen mostly from Dutch and low countries Jews,

something to make a mind work better isn't the same as the ability of something to make a mind work

“to good ends. That's a different problem that's a that's a problem of morality, spirituality,”

something like that. I'm not going to stay on this topic for very long so there's to be a somewhat later conversation than this but after reading a Sanskrit I started reading a biography of Martin Boomer the great Jewish theologian and one of the great humanists of the 20th century and it was against a strange Hans Frank loved Bach and Boomer loved Bach and it says that much of who he is as an adult is formed in sitting in concerts listening to the contradictions inside

Bach's music and the two people who souls can I mean far from our like is is command melancholic or comforting that these works of art can take people in such different directions I'm not blaming Bach for anything the Hans Frank did but it just speaks to something very very complex and like the feeling faculties and what we bring to them that's a very good way of putting I think we've been told

“somehow that art is this very important thing that is good for you and I think it is but I don't think”

it's good for you in that way I don't think it necessarily improves you in any moral dimension whatsoever I think it's quite possible that as some people now insist Picasso was a bit of a shit he was more than a bit of a shit I mean a Markiplard I'm going lighter complicated person to say at least yeah but it's funny that we expected it would be otherwise it's because we've sort of imputed a moral dimension to and all I'm saying is that no I think it's much more

biologically functional than we think it is I don't think it's such a spiritual moral business being an artist hey y'all it's Kyra Blackwell from Wirecutter the product recommendation service from the New York Times and I test mattresses today I am testing seven mattresses all brand concealed it just feels like such a daunting endeavor to pick the right mattress this mattress is very

supportive it's just a very easy to shift positions we've considered nearly four dozen foam inner spraying and hybrid mattresses we're looking at for edge support motion isolation and firmness levels we are cross referencing our data between testers which includes people of all different shape sizes and sleep preferences when it came right out the box it smelled like lavender I'm not sure how long it'll last I finished compiling all of my testers surveys one tester

noted the mattress had some gift and underlying firmness and support at Wirecutter we do the work so you don't have to for independent product reviews and recommendations for the real world come visit us at ny times.com/ Wirecutter feels very squishy but in a good way

I've always found this very interesting you're here with the Roberto Blano book the

Savage Detectives no it's a beautiful fiction book and one of these I love it is it's because it's about a personality that I've always been fascinated by and do not myself have which is the personality that would give everything anything to create art this case young poets there are people I mean you you know them I've known some of them who for them art is everything they put their whole souls or whole lives into projects it most people would walk by if they were hung on a wall

or playing a store and not give a second thought to and then I know other people who see no role or understand no role for art in their life what do you differentiate those people the people for

whom art becomes everything the most important thing even society cannot give a damn about what

they are creating and the people feel no resonance to it. Have you ever heard of place in Switzerland

“Losa and called the Muse de de la Brute it's the I think the greatest museum of outside are out”

in the world so these are people who none of whom were called artists in their lifetime a lot of them were in mental institutions and they had nothing much else to do and they painted for their whole

working as artists for their whole life and my kind of feeling about that is that if you if you can

invent a world that you prefer to live in which is sort of what those artists were doing then why not stay in it you know if the rest of the world is awkward and you don't fit into it it's got lots of sharp corners and you can make this world where suddenly you're sort of in control of it you've

“decided the terms of that world and I think a lot of what's happening when artists are working”

is that they're trying to make the world they would prefer to be in now that sometimes gets dismissed as escapism but I don't think it isn't anyway I don't think there's anything wrong with escapism it's sometimes a really good idea to escape and to get out of things and think about them from a distance rather than from being in the centre of them but this is another of the misconceptions about art that it ought to be difficult to do and I think there are many people who I would call artists who

never experience any difficulty with what they're doing it's just what they do people who make

beautiful cakes for example one of my daughters loves doing um mousy pan decorations on cakes and they're beautiful the things she makes but I'm sure she wouldn't call that being an artist but I can't see what the difference is you know why why is that not being an artist so that's one of the other art world things that in order to make it valuable to justify the high prices we've got to think of some way of kind of making it seem abnormal making it seem like something that only abnormal

“humans can do what are you doing with art when I think of your library it's not all creating a”

world that you would like to live in what is it you've sort of given all these legible motivations

for other people as your motivation is legible to yourself at best what I'm doing is thinking I often start something by thinking I wish there was a piece of music like this whatever this means in my mind the for instance one of my best known records is music for airports and that came from a very direct experience like that of sitting in a newly built airport in Germany Nikolone and everything about the airports dazzlingly beautiful lovely structure and they had

terrible German disco music playing really loud through the whole PA system in the airport and I just thought nobody's thought about this issue of what kind of music would belong in this place you know we use music in public all the time but does anybody actually sit down and think seriously what would be the best kind of music to have in this important place where people are arriving leaving going on to important new phases in their lives or going back to loved ones or

whatever it would to be something a bit more I started thinking what should it be more often so I started thinking and trying to make a kind of music that I thought would make the airport experience feel important and special and they're with quite a lot of technical considerations like obviously it mustn't interfere with communication it mustn't keep stopping and starting it must not matter if it gets interrupted

so on and so on so that was that was a very conscious act of making a making a work of art but most of what I do isn't really motivated by such high-sounding ideas most of the time I'm fiddling around and something starts to happen something intrigues me or some feeling starts to happen

“I think I like that feeling how can I bring that forward how can I make more of it and I often”

don't know why I'm doing that or how it will end up I have an archive of about eleven thousand unfinished pieces of music and what I do occasionally is pull one of those out and suddenly I haven't seen it for 15 years maybe eleven thousand unfinished pieces of music that's some of the very short but let me hold you on music for efforts for a minute one of my favorite albums

vocatively named given how a vocative they are is a very important piece of music to me so I want

to play a couple seconds of it when you were saying that you wanted music that matched what you felt that experience should be

“it should be more something two one on there what is it more up to you I think it's more contemplative”

I think it makes you relax into the situation that you're in whatever that happens to be presumably in an airport in this case rather than tries to pretend that you're not in that place so made nightmarish form of music is getting on an airplane and hearing a piece of music coming they lose because they haven't got the machine to work properly and you have two thoughts then you have a thought they're playing music because they want to stop us thinking about the

possibility we might crash and secondly they can't even get the bloody player to work properly so we're going to crash you know you can use music as a mask which is what is normally done

“in public situations as a way of covering up the noise or you can use music that invites the”

noise to sound like it's part of it so with all of that kind of music what I call ambient music I don't want there to be an edge to the music I want it so that you don't know whether some of the things you're hearing are in the world around you or are part of the music so I want it not to have a sharp boundary I want to sort of fade out into the rest of the world's noises around you

I always think about that as being on an album called Music For Airports

because at both is very discordant and then as I thought about it more exactly correct that is to me one of the holiest pieces of music I have ever heard that piece of music just feels holy and in a way it gets to something true about airports which is that this is a place where human beings go to fly or they're forced into I mean I feel is when I go on planes a confrontation with their own mortality yep there's never a time when a plane when I'm in a plane that is having

turbulence during takeoff or I don't think to myself in a way I usually do not think in my day I could die yes there are all these people they're going to places that are many cases

“incredibly important to them and the airport is like extraordinary combination of a place that is so”

banal lines and you're taking off your shoes and you know you're waiting in line for food that is mediocre at best and you know you're late and your plane is late and you're annoyed and then also the absolute most remarkable place that a human being can possibly find themselves something that for most of human history was completely unimaginable yes and to one to me on an album called Music For Airports is such a perfect song because it's more true about the

airport than my experience of the airport is so I wanted to make flying feel like a more spiritual experience is what if I had to put it into a sentence with a controversial word in it and by that I mean I you used to be very frightened of flying and of course I had to do it at that time in my career and I thought well what about if you could make a kind of music that made you less worried about the idea of dying what about if you could make a piece of music that made your life

seem less the center of your attention if you could see yourself as just being one atom in a universe of complicated molecules um would that make things feel better so so in a way it was a it was intended to take the stress of yourself not by pretending you weren't flying so let's make it just sound like a disco or a nightclub or something like that which is what most of the music tries to let's not do that let's say we're having an unusual experience and let's experience it as a beautiful experience

one of the things in that album music opera is your line-in or it's a very famous

and I know you've been asked about a million times so I don't want to stay here too long

but you do talk about wanting that music to cultivate different modes of attention

attention not all of them an attention that is spent on the music yes I guess in the years since then the decades since then how do you think the relationship between music and attention is changed do you see it as a success of what you're trying to do do you see it as a nightmarish world that you accidentally summoned it to exist is what is your what is your relationship to it

“well I think what's happened is that it's changed in both directions so I think people are ready to”

accord music a level of attention that they never have done in the past for instance when you

go to these extremely long concerts sometimes 10 hours long where you were basically listening to three sign tones for a very long time that's a level of attention that really people never thought of giving until at least the middle of the 20th century and later so there's that and then on the other hand you have TikTok or very short pieces of music like that which of course right at the other end of the scale but I think in culture this is a general rule that every single

standard every single metric has increased in both directions we now have extremely long pieces

of music and extremely short ones we have extremely loud bands and very very very quiet ones

it's as if we've taken every dimension in which music can exist and tried to expand it and say what would happen at the edges now let's make a new edge but I also was thinking about that in terms of the movement towards music that what it is doing is saying we're going to cultivate this form of attention or feeling for you so the rise of the Spotify but they're on every streaming network now the playlists that are well here's your happy beats playlist here's your beast mode

at the gym playlist for when you really need to be pumped up but here's your melancholy rainy day playlist here's studying at a coffee shop which is different of course in studying at the library playlist here's your ambient playlist or ambient essentials but here's your and and now we're seeing this move into these plus being somebody's generated right I don't know how much of it is happening now but clearly removing towards AI generating a bunch of these songs that function

you know cost mass produced mood altering music music is an ex music is at or all music as music is mood alteration yeah and done not as a relationship between the artist and the listener but like you hire the music to perform a service and to do so quite unobtrusively some of the music is good some of this bad obviously but how do you feel about that well you're right in your previous question you asked did I feel any responsibility for that and I do actually I mean I was very

“excited about the idea of generative music I invented the phrase I believe and I was very excited”

by the idea of making a music like a seed you know a seed is something that has a genetic message in it and every manifestation of it will be a little bit different depending on where you plant it and what time of year it grew and so on and so on so I thought wouldn't it be nice if you had music like that so I mean there's a very simple example of that windchimes a windchime is a simpler enough machine let's say you've got five times each one is a particular pitch it's not

going to change it's only that pitch but how and when they strike depends on the wind so it's sort of semi random so you can't really say that you composed that particular performance though you can say that I built the system from which that performance emanated you know a windchime

is basically a simple piece of generative music and so it shifts and I know you've talked a bit

about almost wishing you could sell people not the album but the system behind it it shifts the artistic act into the creation of the conditions yes it will create the artistic product yes that's

“right so so two things becoming important what what is the structure of rules if you like”

what are the possibilities that the system has what are the limitations that it has and what are the materials you put into it so if you make a windchime out of glass for instance or out of bamboo rods or out of metal they're all going to be slightly different results but each one is a kind of package of possibilities you're not specifically saying which possibilities

that was a sort of a nice area for music to be in because if you think about it up until the

“turn off the 20th century you could never have the same musical experience twice there was”

no way that you could precisely repeat a musical experience as soon as records came along you could do that you could hear exactly the same performance of exactly the same song over and over and over and over and over and that became how most of us listened to music unless we happened to be born into a musical family or a church group or something like that most of the music we heard was repetition so what I thought was I wonder if you could use the technology of repetition to make

music that constantly changes and my first clue to that was when I first got hold of a tape recorder

I'd want a tape recorder my whole childhood I just thought the idea of being able to catch a piece of sound and make it physical was most magical thing I could think of actually and I had this obsession with you could play it backwards and I just wanted to hear a lot of things would be like if they were played backwards discovering that first of all you can catch a sound and make it physical that was something new for the 20th century but then I thought if you can make it physical can't you also

make it mutate in certain ways can't you make it so the physical medium for instance is not reliable

it will play slightly differently each time and so my first experiments in that direction were

I had a collection of broken tape recorders which I just got from junk shops you know or thrift stores as you might see and I would try to break them a little bit more but so that they would still play things so a tape playing through it would change into something else you know would have a lot of distortion or it would run unevenly like this you know I discovered that if I connected two tape recorders together put one tape through one and coming out through

the other so that the playback head is separated by several feet from the record head you get a very late echo and then you can build up those you can work on top of those I mean I discovered

“this in the 60s so did Terry Riley and a few other people I think it just happened I had two”

tape recorders for a while so I could try this out and then I could build up these huge sort of orchestras of music live on my own so I think that became an obsession to try to make a recorded music that somehow changed every time I finally achieved it in the 1990s and I'm still doing it now you draw this distinction when working with generative systems we say you don't want to be an architect you want to be a gardener what's the difference so the conception of an architect

is somebody who thinks about an end result in great detail you know the archetype is Frank Lloyd Wright who designed everything down to the teaspoons in his houses and so the whole thing kind of pre-existing the architects mind and then is bought into being by a builders what a gardener does is put some seeds in the soil and then watch us how they develop oh these ones over here are doing better than those ones over there so next year I'll plant them differently but you know that if you're

making a garden you're only starting something so one of Stuart Brands books it's called how

buildings learn it's a great book and in that he says you never finish a building you only start it

“and I think that's what I kind of mean by generative music you start the piece but it finishes”

itself it carries on finishing itself for the rest of time but so you you upgrade this idea of generative music and now we have launched into this world of generative AI the way you were using the term generative and the way what it is describing when we're saying now generative AI which are things like Chatchee PT and and all these large language models is it the same word for you right or the two generatives equal I think they mean the same thing now of course as a set of techniques mine is

being used in LLMs and of course the other big difference is that mine are not owned by

“mad billionaires and I think that's an important difference in fact with all the discussion about AI”

to me the single most important question is who should be in control of it and we've seen in

this century what happens when billionaires control new technologies social media I'm talking about and we've seen that they you get completely unpredicted and quite disastrous results sometimes you know the the collapse of democracy and most of our countries I think is very traceable to social media and to the kind of misunderstanding that under wrote it that let's make this amazing new media where everyone can communicate with each other oh but we've got to make a lot of money from

doing it you know in a way the big mistake was when the the algorithm became maximizing engagement which means maximise profits of course if maximising engagement is what you're going for or they knew end up with what we have now an internet that flourishes on anger and nastiness in some ways I'm not saying of course everything like that is like that on the internet but what seems to have happened in the race for profits we've managed to sidestep the friction

“that normally comes with things being born into the world friction is very important”

friction gives you a little time to see what's happening it makes something easy into your life

more slowly so you can start to correct it as it's easing in I always say it's like we've

invented an amazing new type of car that can travel at 750 miles an hour but we haven't put any breaks in it you know because breaks slow down the profits basically so there's this question of who controls it and then also as you get out there this question of who profits from it one of the things I find very morally complicated to think about with generative AI is that it is generative and the seed of it and more than the seed of it the substance of it

is the sum total of knowledge that human beings have made in a way that is legible to the crawling software developed by the AI companies and you can see that it's really about that because in fact these companies are mostly neck and neck with each other for how good their systems are it's not like one of them came up with an algorithm that no other human being could come up with there there should have gone back and forth because they have the same training

data which is us and so on one level that's like everything else is scientists are coming up with new scientific discoveries built on every scientific discovery before them you have a lovely bit in your book about all the human genius over how many years it goes into getting you to work in the morning there's nothing new about creations just being a marginal step forward built on the

shoulders of us all and yet I can never escape this feeling of the AI systems there is something

about the scale of the use here that should change who profits from it and how the fact that they have absorbed everything I have ever written for the internet and vetted into the machine I kind of think somebody should send me a royalty check you know it's not okay doesn't have to be a big one and it maybe shouldn't go to me it should go to society yes yes but something about it feels I don't want to call theft it isn't theft but nor is it just like a standing on the they there's something

here that feels like it needs new ways of thinking about it because you know just for a couple of these companies to profit off of the transformation of everything we've all ever done this is the question I'm asking myself should it be that we automatically have a system that says this is a social good all this knowledge it's a socially produced good and therefore it's usage should

“reward society that's quite hard to meter of course hard to put a meter on it I think it has to”

be written into the whole machinery itself so that nobody has to make a decision for example it wouldn't be a bad idea if everything that was generated in that way 50% of all the profits from it immediately go back to society in some way it would be saying we're not claiming to be the geniuses here we're claiming to be the people who know how to corral it all how to put it together

and everybody else and with your permission we'll redistribute this society it's so obvious to me

that that should be the way but of course that that is not the American way at all that sounds like socialism of some kind early taxation that seems true to me too I mean at the moment these companies are not making such big profits that even doing something that would be that meaningful to the treasury they're sucking in much more venture capital than they are producing revenue in general but in the future if it is what they think it will be you know if it is what they are

promising their venture capitalists it will be I mean I guess you just saw that the tax system but it seems like you need a way of thinking about it that's a little bit clearer than the ways we have and it's funny if you go into the writings of a lot of them Sam Altman and and and others from a couple of years ago they're talking about this like this is a thing they imagine I mean smallman has these ideas for what's functionally like a universal basic wealth grant coming

“out of taxing the AI companies but I'm sort of with you on this I think it deserves a different”

conceptual category that is not merely the category of taxation that is more something of sharing right it is not confiscatory taxation it is a reflection of the nature of these systems yeah and so to my view of them is they actually should be able to crawl the sum total of human knowledge that is you know at least the people willing to make accessible to them yes but that part of that is that there's a contract between those companies and the rest of us

that we both know what we're doing here and we're in this together yes especially if you're trying to inspire confidence in them you you you want people to willingly participate in them rather than having it forced upon them do you know this word that I came up with years ago which is seniors yes okay so that that was an attempt to try to understand there I had been studying the early 20th

century painting in Russia there was a 20 year period when there were amazing amount of innovation

going on you know suprematism, constructivism, rayonism all these differentisms appearing and I discovered that the scene was very complex it wasn't just that there were a few brilliant artists like Candid Ski and Rochenko and Tatlin and so on it turned out that some of the very

“important people were the collectors who would specifically target certain artists and say I want”

to keep this person alive I'm going to support this person or they would go to Paris and by pictures that they brought back to some Petersburg and Moscow to show to painters there and say look this is what's going on in Paris now and then there were the people who ran the salons who would invite artists to meet up with each other and talk to and so on and so on the cafe owner the cafe that everybody used to hang out in who was quite conscious that they had a part to play in the scene and they

would let people not pay for their meals and so on and put it on the tab and so I thought there was a whole scene here that was fertile that was operational there was a whole support system and so

I had got sick anyway of hearing this word genius being used all the time because it never seemed

to me like it was just one person who was doing everything so I came up with this word senior which is seen with an IUS on the end and that seemed to me to much better understand the

“ecology of systems like that and I think that's what it is it's an ecosystem and we'd still don't”

understand ecosystems it's still not intuitive to most of us to understand how a thing like an ecosystem works how there are lots and lots of nodes and they're collected in very complicated ways and if you move one of the nodes to a different place everything else in the system has to shift anyone who's become interested in the environment has started to become aware of how complex natural systems are but human society is a natural system as well and the society of knowledge that we

all share is a natural system. This is a way in which and I'm not an anti-AI person I use CHPT a lot I'm fascinated I feel a sense of both I've do feel some fear but I feel a tremendous amount of wonder around these technologies I find watching it formulate a response that in some ways reads more human and the response is most humans give me the most things it it does it it generates a form of awe in me one thing that frightens me as somebody who came up on the internet and understands

fundamental social contract of the internet which is even take something like Google the value of

“Google is that there is so much that other people have created that is valuable and Google connects you”

to it but it does connect you to it yes and now CHPT or anthropic or whomever and hails the internet

and it's all right there and I never go to the underlying sites and the creation of all this

data which was incentivized by ways people were able to monetize and not just monetize but have their work discovered that was for many of us on the internet when I started a blog with no ever intent of a job or a profit from it I was a college student just yet dear that anybody would ever find their way to me and read something I did and care about it was such a tremendous incentive to create but there is something very problematic about this a huge amount of the internet and the

intellectual comments we are now built on is traffic moving around the internet people moving around the internet and then the advertising that comes from that the whatever that comes from that keeping that whole ecosystem healthy and these these AI systems by nature you go to the system and then for most people stops there even Google searches trying to become more like that yeah the whole thing they're built on they're going to destroy yeah or at least substantially to grade yes that's right

when I was a kid and I I liked watercolor painting a lot and I used to notice that after a day of painting the water that I was dipping my brush into which was of course a mixture of all

the colors I touched that day was always the same color actually I called it "Munch"

"Munch" is sort of perply browny horrible color basically and whenever I've tried creating things on chat GPT I haven't done that much of it actually but I work very hard to get my prompts right and to filter what I'm saying to trying to edge it into something interesting but the color of "Munch" covers all of it it's it's so over-digested and of course it's quoting things it's using things on the basis of how frequently they have appeared I don't know

whether you've ever tried making anything let's say artistic using chat GPT or any of the other programs it has a very interesting progression when you're doing it the first thing you make you think bloody hell that's pretty amazing and then after half an hour or so you think I'm so bored and I

“remember that thing that Samuel Johnson said about something I can't remember what it was about”

now but he said it's a little bit like watching an animal walk on a dog walk on its hind legs you're not interested in how it walks but just that it can you know you're sort of impressed by the fact that it can do something that is really quite like a human being but then you find out that it's like a quite dull human being and it kind of doesn't get more exciting unless you can trick it into some sort of aberration which is what I've been trying to do. I've been amazed

on the one hand at how good it is but then I also have the exact experience I love your description of it is munch and I think it goes back to something we were talking about the beginning of this conversation which is the information and possibility that is encoded in factual knowledge and then the more amorphous forms of intelligence and intuition that are encoded in feelings so I have experiment a lot with using different forms of AI as help in this show and they are

helpful for things that are very specific but they are never helpful for the actual work of

“creating the conversation and and what's absent in the output is I think what we're talking about”

I could not give you a description of how this conversation is structured it is just structured by me having intuitive reactions to what is happening with it and then moving with those reactions and chatchipity is structured as a probabilistic output of what the entire internet would have done yes and so it it's not even that it always locks surprise but it always has a very visible internal logic and then over time that internal logic becomes over poweringly annoying some people work

on this company said oh I keep my diary in it and that's very interesting you should try that

I was amazed at how psychologically insightful they were how supportive they were I mean it is

better than what human beings in my life gave me and then on response 9 10 11 12 15 20 it was the same fucking feelings it was the same glazing and sick of fancy and the same kinds of

“insights and I think it's one of these things it you couldn't look at the”

responsive there's anything wrong with it but there is something human beings are tuned to in the way we do not travel a perfectly logical or well structured path we're not supposed to it's not how intelligence works and it is funny it you do begin to feel the divergence there yeah it's not even what we like actually you know as as humans we we like a certain amount of predictability but only a certain amount we don't want exactly the same each time so you know we rely

on our interest being taken by a deviation we didn't expect the sick of fancy is the thing that really tries me mad when it says good question Brian that's a really good question that's not just an insight that's a revelation yeah so that's not an ex it's a why formulation yeah so you first

“or if you're going to do work with AI tool you have to as my friend Danny Hillis says you have to”

start off by saying please don't flatter me I'm Anna Martin the host of the modern love podcast in every episode we peek into an intimate corner of someone's life and learn about what love

means to them 35 years with another person I've never spent that much time with anyone else

so we both kind of said I love you pretty fast as long as they keep the dance up I'll keep the dance up and she felt the same way an instant connection it's a window into how real people navigate all kinds of love I mean romantic family friendship dog based there are stories of life-changing moments small joys big revelations my advice is that it's okay if it's hard a lot of the way that you manifest your love for your children is through cooking and I remember just looking at them in

or almost like wow you know so much that I couldn't even dream of knowing about my brother you can listen to modern love wherever you get your podcasts you've done so much of your work in collaboration but also in collaboration with machines I mean it is something you are known for yes so do you what makes you good at creating healthy collaborations between humans and technologies and and what for you typifies a healthy collaboration as opposed to an outsourcing

a an unhealthy form of the diminishment of the human beings behind us yes so I have a few mental tricks that I use which I think are just naturally part of me one of them when I'm faced with a piece of technology which can do something I immediately don't want to know about what it can do I want to know what it can do that the makers didn't imagine it would ever be used to do and with the type of technology that I work with musical technology that's a very

rich open territory and it's rich and open because not that many people explore it you know they have something that says this will make your mixes sound louder and they use it to make mixes sound

“louder you know to blame them that's what it says on the box but but you will also find out that”

that can do something else that nobody had ever thought of doing with music before so that was an example of using something that was meant to do a particular job record something and play it back later on so build something new in real time so I think that's to do a technology to do with people

so the first thing I think about when I look at a band I think okay there so there let's say five

people in that band how many possible duets is that how many possible trios how many possible cortex how many solos five obviously and how many everybody one now it very often happens that

three of us play in this and then another slightly different configuration of three play so it's a very simple thing but it suddenly unlocks a set of possibilities that probably hadn't been explored before you know what happens if we only have vocalist drums and bass none of the other instruments that usually fill in the harmonic information in between there are lots of tricks like that but there's sort of ways of looking at the system as it stands and thinking what hasn't been done yet

with the system what might excite people you see I think that music grows out of excitement and if you aren't feeling excitement then you try to create it in some way if the situation isn't turning you on then you try to change it until it does turn you on because when you're excited you are at your most alert I think and when you're at your most alert you're most likely to spot the little thing that is going to turn into the big thing one thing that makes me think about

“the feels relevant in both directions is I think it's often a very important question”

where the agency resides in something so I think we always say we use social media

but no social media uses us yeah and over time if you watch anybody on for long enough you you watch them become the social media that's using them right they begin to bow to its incentives to its habits to its form what you were to sing about that was so interesting about the the set of possibilities in a band initially it's a bunch of musicians playing in a band eventually the band through its habits through what's expected of it is playing musicians yes and

I think this is very true of technologies you know when you talk about you discovering or terribly discovering what you can do is to taper quarters you are playing the taper quarters

“and I think this is probably not always true but when you think about a lot of the digital”

possibilities people have had you know in the last couple of decades like Ableton and other things it's still people playing the synthesizer playing the music library I think the fear that a lot of us have about generative AI is it we're not going to be playing it it's going to be playing us often because we prefer it to play us right when a kid you know you can use AI to help you right a better essay but a lot people just want the AI to write the essay right hold it say the whole

essay yeah and I think that that space between are you playing the technology or is the technology playing you is a very tricky one and I think that's one of my more dystopic versions of our AI future my kids future in AI is a world in which they've given up a lot of their own agency because it seems

a little bit ridiculous to take it yes and that could always have been true I mean there's a

million technologies that I like I'm happy I have Google Maps I'm have a bad sense of direction and I'm not trying to make it better but there is some line where you are acting upon the

“world versus world is just acting through you that I think is going to be very hard to please”

yes I think what bothers me which is exactly part of what you're saying is the possibility of not making a mistake at all of making things that always come with this sort of professional finished glass of what a real pop song looks like or what a real picture looks like and I think that's lethal I have a friend at architect friend called Rem Coolhouse he's a Dutch architect and he uses this phrase the premature sheen so when in his architectural practice

when they first got computers and computers were first good enough to do proper renderings of things

he said everything looked amazing at first you know you could construct a building in half an hour

in the computer and you'd have this amazing looking thing and he said but it didn't help us make good buildings it helped us make things that looked like they might be good buildings but he said in the end we went back and I went to visit him one day when they were working on a big new complex for some place in Texas and what they were using were matchboxes and pens and packets of tissues it was completely analog and there was no sense at all that this had any relationship to what the final

product would be in terms of how it looked so it meant that what you were thinking about was how does it work what do we want it to be like to be in that place you started asking the important questions again not what kind of facing should we have on the building or what kind of color should the stone be and when I see people fiddling around with synthesizers this has always been

don't want to learn how to program them which it turns out is most people I remember talking to

Yamaha ones who produced the most successful synthesizer all time which was the DX7 and I said you

“know you should really make these a little bit easier to program and they said well we don't bother”

because nobody tries to change them anyway we often get them back for repair and we can tell if somebody's tried to change the programming and nobody's ever done it they've just used the presets and that seems to me a kind of mental laziness that I really don't think fits well with making new things I think that's strange a little bit inspiring as a principle you've worked corresponded known as somebody just fascinating people people admire that I want to see if you

be up for me just reading a few names not a lightning round you can answer it whatever length you would like but you just tell me you know something inspiration and insight something that that you talk from that person if you'd be up for it sure yes but let me start just the composer John Cage

“I think the thing that really impressed me about Cage was not his music which I didn't particularly”

care for after the 1940s but his idea that being a composer was a kind of a practice in the sense of a religious or spiritual or a philosophical practice and I thought that's the kind of artist I want to be I want to have a practice I want there to be resonances into other parts of my thinking I don't want it to just be something that I do on the weekends and then forget about so Cage with his book Silence was very important for me that came along just the right time for me David Bowie

one of the most committed artists I've ever worked with in the sense that he he really thought about what he was doing just to tell you a short story I remember being in the studio with him doing he was doing a vocal on one of the songs I can't remember the song but so he does the vocal he comes back into the control room listening back to he says it's a bit lumberjack isn't it

“and I knew exactly what he meant and he said I think the guy should sound a little bit more nervous”

like he's working in an office and he hasn't been there very long doesn't quite know how you're supposed to behave in the office then he goes back out and does this other vocal and suddenly you hear the transition from this confident strong hairy matcho guy to somebody who's a little bit timid and has doesn't quite know whether he should be saying the things he's saying and seeing him fine tune that was very impressive Steve Reich well Steve Reich was a very important

part of my listening because he made a piece called it's gonna rain that opened a door for me and the door it opened was not just to do with the way in which he made it which was itself very impressive using an absolute minimum of material point eight seconds of material I think it was that piece works by making your brain behave in a certain way you are not an inactive listener in that all of his work I think depends on making your brain perform and watch

itself performing in a certain way so I suddenly thought then oh the composer isn't just Steve

Reich it's Steve Reich and my brain that's making this composition what it is and that thought never

left me that you are actually engaging the the technology of the listener's brain to complete the piece they're not passive listening to these music completely changed my relationship with music I think it it's like power washing your own mind it could really sit through it it it's a psychedelic as any as I think any drug out that really does it it's it's so rhythmic and it forces your brain to adjust to it in a way that feels like when you come out the other end of it

yes some sort of reprogramming has happened yes yes certainly that definitely happened with me I can definitely say from the moment I heard it's gonna rain music was a different thing Laurie Anderson oh such a sweet friend probably the hardest working artist I know

she absolutely never stops and she is always working on half a dozen projects in 10 different

not sleep come straight into a meeting and be absolutely there she's remarkably low maintenance

person she's always there and always sharp and Stuart brand well these these are all these

people you're naming are people who had a huge impact on me Stuart was in the army during I guess it was the time of career or just afterwards yes just after career I guess he was in the army

“and I I don't think he was ever ashamed of being in the army he I think he enjoyed it and he left”

the army and became a hippie became one of the sort of foundational hippies around Timothy Leary and Ken Keesian that group of people and he's always been a very big thinker and a very long term thinker and one of his early thoughts was if people on earth could see a picture of the earth from the moon it would change our consciousness of the earth I thought he had sitting on a roof while I'm asked it if I remember the story exactly that's absolutely true yes acid does produce

good results in some people not in me unfortunately so Stuart sort of gave birth to this idea I think that if we could show the world from the outside if we realized what this tiny what an amazing extraordinary unique gift that was this tiny little planet teaming with life swimming around in a dead universe as far as we know we still don't know that there's any other life in the universe which is phenomenally if you think about it we still don't know we might be the only life

“in the universe I think about that nearly every day I think it's the most sobering thought”

I think that should be shouted from the rooftops every day that's my version of seeing the whole earth from spaces getting people to understand that we might be the only life it might all be on this one place and bloody hell shouldn't we look after it a bit better then those things make me constantly think and constantly be sort of grateful for the fact that I'm alive I remember reading this comment from a New York taxi driver who's driving the taxi and he says he turns

to the customer he says oh life I'm so glad I got in I just love that the idea that it's like a an amazing show at a theater and you managed to get a ticket to see it I appreciate that kind of

gratitude that is lovely and then always a fun question what are three books you'd recommend to the

audience okay so this was a very hard question it's three is not very many books and I thought quite hard about them so one of the books it's called printing and the mind of man it was the catalogue really of an exhibition that was at the British Museum in 1963 and it was about the history of printing but actually the book is about the most important books in the western canon and the impact that they had when they were released starts with the Gutenberg Bible but it's such a fascinating

book because you really start to understand where the big fundamental ideas that made western culture it doesn't have any Arabic books or any Indian books or any Chinese books so it's really about the last 500 years in western culture and it's probably the most fascinating book about intellectual history that I've ever read and it's a very beautiful book because it was put together by a great

“printer who used lots of beautiful types and so it's a wonderful book so the second book I think I'm going”

to suggest is a book by the architect Christopher Alexander called a pattern language and it's really a book about habitat about what makes spaces welcoming and fruitful or hostile and barren and it's the most beautiful book so it talks about things that the biggest scale possible you know countrywide nationwide scale down to the scale of the molding of a banister or something like that and tries to understand why some of those things work and why they don't and it's such a lovely book to read

over the course of my life I've bought I would say 60 copies of that book now because I always give

great read and you would love it my third one is Naples 44 by Norman Lewis Norman Lewis was a

British intelligence officer who was sent to Naples when the Germans had been beaten out of there and he was sent there to find out whether there were nascent fascist groups still working in Naples and he kept a diary and this is the most fabulous diary you'll ever read it's just both hilariously funny deeply moving and totally confusing and that you realize that Naples was like another planet it's like reading sci-fi some of it the strangeness of that little world of

Naples with its intertwining of deep religiosity deep criminality deep love of the sensors

incredible attention to food weird decaying aristocracies all woven in with crux and priests and

so on so there's three books and I just want to suggest one other thing which is a subscription to

“the London review of books probably the best intellectual reading in the English language I think”

it's amazing comes out every two weeks and it's if you're interested in books the London review of books for me beats the New York review of books or the Times Literary Supplement or any of those things well let me let me try to do this piece I've loved these recommendations so much and I didn't offer this to you before so maybe it's too hard given all the little flood into mind but how about three albums three albums that have influenced you that they sort of form part of your

base layers okay I can respond to that one that really made a huge impression on me was a folkways record called the rural folk blues and they were sort of semi-field recording some of them were actually records been made but they all dated from the 20s, 30s and 40s and they were black American music now I'd been listening to a lot of black American music because of where I grew up in suffoc which had a lot of American air bases but it was pop music do up and stuff like that

I loved it when I heard those recordings I thought okay this is the soil that that stuff grew

“out of and I loved it it was such such rich soil I think the second one that I have to name because”

it still remains as one of the most moving records to me is the Velvet Underground's third album

which had the song pale blue eyes beautiful beautiful record beautifully controversial in many ways because in fact I think it was probably without that record I wouldn't have been a pop musician I don't know what I would have done I've probably been an art teacher or something but that record made me think this is something I could do and I think it made a lot of other people think that I know so many musicians who say

that was the record that really made things happen for me now I've got to do number three that means I only got one choice left this is very difficult see so much of the music that has really affected me as religious music which is funny because I'm sort of an atheist but the thing about

“religious music I think that is so special is that it's made by people and it's made by people for”

other reasons then I want to pull a chick I want to make a lot of money or I want to dance now all of those things are fine I have no problem with them but the majority of popular music comes out of those kinds of feelings I think I am very moved by the old conception of beauty that when we recognize beauty it is recognizing in your anus to God yep well I take that yeah even an atheist like me would say it depends how big the word God is for you and if it's bigger

now if I can accommodate ideas like that so I'm going to choose a gospel record and it's a strange one it's the Consolers the Consolers were a couple Sullivan and I owe a Pew Pew GH you know

outside Iraq I thought what's outside a music I wondered and then I thought well actually the whole

of pop music is really outside a music in that it didn't come out of academies or institutions

“of it's just people doing stuff together and I think as outside our artists the Consolers”

Sullivan and I owe a stand absolutely unmatched

Brian you know truly what a pleasure thank you thank you so much lovely to talk to you Ezra

“this episode of this one just produced by any galvan factri game i Michel Harris our senior”

audio engineers Jeff Gald with additional mixing by almond sauta our executive producer is Claire Gordon

the show's production team also includes Roland who Marie Cassione Jack McCordic Marina King

“Kristen Lynn and young cobal original music by almond sauta Isaac Jones and Pat McCusker”

audience strategy by Cristini Simulusky and Shannon Busta the director of New York times pinning audio is any roadstrasher