Brian Eno on mental laziness

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 professional finished gloss of what a real pop song looks like or what a real picture looks like. And I think that’s lethal.

I have an architect friend called Rem Koolhaas. He’s a Dutch architect, and he uses this phrase, “the premature sheen.” 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 could construct a building in half an hour on the computer, and you’d have this amazing-looking thing, but, he said, “It didn’t help us make good buildings. It helped us make things that looked like they might be good buildings.”

I went to visit him one day when they were working on a big new complex for some place in Texas, and they were using 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.

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 color should the stone be?

When I see people fiddling around with synthesizers — this has always been a problem with synthesizers — they always come with a bank of sounds ready-made for people who don’t want to learn how to program them, which, it turns out, is most people.

I remember talking to Yamaha once, which had just produced the most successful synthesizer of all time, which was the DX7. And I said, “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 has tried to change the programming, and nobody’s ever done it. They’ve just used the presets.”

That seems, to me, a kind of mental laziness that I really don’t think fits well with making new things.