On a different note, here's a part of an interview the magazine Music Technology conducted with Brian Eno for the February 1988 issue:
“The problem with synthesisers has always been that the sound that you hear is a direct result of the movement of a very small number of electrons”, he explains, therefore the regularity and evenness of the sound are awe-inspiringly boring. The sound of a grand piano is the result of the interaction of so many factors - environmental, climatic and physical factors – in fact, a piano never sounds the same twice.”
Eno’s whole approach to synthesis is texural. In fact, that's his sole aim in the studio, using everything from tape manipulation to signal processing he seeks to create a particular presence of sound. But, although he uses a Yamaha DX7 extensively, he still won’t use samplers even though they reproduce acoustic sounds.
“I’m not very interested in samplers”, confesses Eno, “conceptually, synthesisers interest me much more. A sampler is a tape recorder as far as I’m concerned, and it isn’t conceptually very much more interesting than a tape recorder. Synthesisers, however, interest me for two reasons. One is because they do introduce new sounds into the world, and the other is because in working with them, I learn a lot about how sounds are made up. The DX7 has been very useful for that. I use it almost as much as a research tool for seeing how a sound is made. What happens when this hits this? Why does this sound like that? You find that a very specific relationship between two operators produces something that sounds like a grand piano. And you think ‘I wonder what it is in the physical make-up of a grand piano that demands precisely this relationship or its imitation’. I’m not interested in imitating grand pianos per se, but I am interested in finding how sounds work.
“My solution has been to make the equipment unreliable in various ways. I used to like the old synthesizers because they were like that. My first synthesisers - the EMS, the AKS and the early Minimoog - were all fairly unstable and they had a certain character. Character has really to do with deviations, nor with regularity, they were very Latin in that sense. And then, of course, I used to feed them through all sorts of devices that also had a lot of character: that were themselves in various ways unpredictable. The interaction of a lot of these things started to create sounds that had an organic, uneven sound to me.”
Although it’s not easy in computerised, digital synthesisers like the DX7, Eno has found a way to introduce character into modem synthesisers as well.
“I’ve found ways to de-stabilise the DX7 a little bit to create interactions between it and other instruments that are more interesting”, he says with a gleam in his eye. “I don’t have very good voltage supply, for instance. Within the patches, I build in certain elements that don’t repeat. For instance, there’s something wrong with the programming of envelope generator four on the original DX7 and you can use that to create non-repeating patches. If you have that set to a value under 50, you’ll find that the synthesiser behaves unpredictably. Unfortunately, they sorted this out on the second generation of DX7s, so I still use the first one, and that’s an important element or quite a few of my patches.”