215 Quotes by Brian Eno

Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences.

The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band

In the 19th century, a lot of people were against outlawing child labour, because to do so would be against the very foundations of a free market economy: 'These children want to work, these people want to employ them... what is your problem? It's not as if anyone has kidnapped them...'

My guitar only has five strings 'cause the top one broke and I decided not to put it back on: when I play chords I only play bar chords, and the top one always used to cut me there.

Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that's what the music is about.

Everything is an experiment until it has a deadline. That gives it a destination, context, and a reason. (Meaning)

Well, I am a dilettante. It's only in England that dilettantism is considered a bad thing. In other countries it's called interdisciplinary research.

Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.

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If something is good, you must torture it mercilessly until it is either dead or great.

Anything popular is populist, and populist is rarely a good adjective.

American television really is pathetic.

The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another.

If there is a new fascism, it won't come from skinheads and punks; it will come from people who eat granola and think they know how the world should be.

Set up a situation that presents you with something slightly beyond your reach.

Saying that cultural objects have value is like saying that telephones have conversations.

Avant-garde music is sort of research music. You're glad someone's done it but you don't necessarily want to listen to it.

My interest in making music has been to create something that does not exist that I would like to listen to. I wanted to hear music that had not yet happened, by putting together things that suggested a new thing which did not yet exist.

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I've had quite a lot of luck with dreams. I've often awoken in the night with a phrase or even a whole song in my head.

I often work by avoidance.

Whenever you listen to a piece of music, what you are actually doing is hearing the latest sentence in a very long story you’ve been listening to - all the pieces of music you’ve ever heard.

Lyrics are the only thing to do with music that haven't been made easier technically.

If you had a sign above every studio door saying ‘This Studio is a Musical Instrument’ it would make such a different approach to recording.

I think that sex, drugs, art and religion very much overlap with one another and sometimes one becomes another.

My kind of composing is more like the work of a gardener. The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow where and when - and he won't necessarily be able to reproduce it again afterwards either.

Every collaboration helps you grow.

I'd love it if American kids were listening to Muslim music.

The trouble with New Age music is that there's no evil in it.

What matters in modern music is not the part you can write down, the words and the tune, but the rest - the texture, the atmosphere, the references and associations.

The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.

In art, you CAN crash your plane and walk away from it

The basis of computer work is predicated on the idea that only the brain makes decisions and only the index finger does the work.

I love good, loud speakers.

If you grow up in a very strong religion like Catholicism you certainly cultivate in yourself a certain taste for the intensity of ideas.

The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one's furniture.

A part of me has become immortal, out of my control.

The computer brings out the worst in some people.

Everybody is entertained to death.

Don't be ashamed of your own ideas. Most musicians get applauded for sounding like someone else.

The philosophical idea that there are no more distances, that we are all just one world, that we are all brothers, is such a drag! I like differences.

When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone's talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false 'intelligence' and selected 'leaks'.

Art is not an object, but a trigger for experience.

For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.

I'm struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity.

If you're in a forest, the quality of the echo is very strange because echoes back off so many surfaces of all those trees that you get this strange, itchy ricochet effect.

You shoot your arrow and then you paint your bulls eye around it, and therefore you have hit the target dead centre.

People tend to play in their comfort zone, so the best things are achieved in a state of surprise, actually.

The point about working is not to produce great stuff all the time, but to remain ready for when you can.

Rationality is what we do to organize the world, to make it possible to predict. Art is the rehearsal for the inapplicability and failure of that process.

The dominant theory coming out of Hollywood is that peoples' attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and they need more stimulation.

I'd rather hold one note for an hour and modulate it so that it means something than play 3,000 notes in 15 seconds.

It's not the destination that matters. It's the change of scene.

Try to make things that can become better in other people’s minds than they were in yours.

Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing - 'Oh, let's put that sentence there, let's get rid of this' - have become commonplace in films and music too.

Human development thus far has been fueled and guided by the feeling that things could be, and are probably going to be, better.

I've got nothing against records - I've spent my life making them - but they are a kind of historical blip.

You either believe that people respond to authority, or that they respond to kindness and inclusion. I'm obviously in the latter camp. I think that people respond better to reward than punishment.

Cooking is a way of listening to the radio.

John Cage made you realise that there wasn't a thing called noise, it was just music you hadn't appreciated.

The reason conservatives cohere and radicals fight: everyone agrees about fears, no one about visions.

Law is always better than war.

When you build a building, you finish a building. You don't finish a garden; you start it, and then it carries on with its life. So my analogy was really to say that we composers or some of us should think of ourselves as people who start processes rather than finish them. And there might be surprises.

Admirers can be a tremendous force for conservatism.

Since I have always preferred making plans to executing them, I have gravitated towards situations and systems that, once set into operation, could create music with little or no intervention on my part. That is to say, I tend towards the roles of planner and programmer, and then become an audience to the results

Pop is totally results-oriented and there is a very strong feedback loop.

Being completely free to choose what to do is actually quite difficult

The whole history of pop music had rested on the first person singular, with occasional intrusions of the second person singular.

Of course, like anybody I repeat myself endlessly, but I don't know that I'm doing it, usually.

One often makes music to supplement one's world.

If you watch any good player, they're using different parts of their body and working with instruments that respond to those movements. They're moving in many dimensions at once.

Musicians are there in front of you, and the spectators sense their tension, which is not the case when you're listening to a record. Your attention is more relaxed. The emotional aspect is more important in live music.

People assume that the meaning of a song is vested in the lyrics. To me, that has never been the case. There are very few songs that I can think of where I remember the words.

People do dismiss ambient music, don't they? They call it 'easy listening,' as if to suggest that it should be hard to listen to.

I'm very good with technology, I always have been, and with machines in general. They seem not threatening like other people find them, but a source of fun and amusement.

One of the interesting things about having little musical knowledge is that you generate surprising results sometimes; you move to places you wouldn't if you knew better.

Everybody thinks that when new technologies come along that they're transparent and you can just do your job well on it. But technologies always import a whole new set of values with them.

Ambient music is intended to induce calm and a space to think.

The great benefit of computer sequencers is that they remove the issue of skill, and replace it with the issue of judgement

All music has political dimensions because it suggests a way of being.

Ideas reflect the moment, and so you have to use them. If you store ideas, they wither.

Honor thy error as a hidden intention.

One way of working is just bring a group of totally different musicians together and encourage them to stick to their guns, not to do the thing that normally happens in a working situation where everyone homogenizes and concedes certain points - so eventually they're all playing in roughly the same style. I wanted quite the opposite of that. I wanted them to accent their styles, so that they pulled away. So there would be a kind of space in the middle where I could operate, and attempt to make these things coalesce in some way. In fact quite a lot of my stuff has arisen from that.

I believe that singing is the key to long life, a good figure, a stable temperament, increased intelligence, new friends, super self-confidence , heightened sexual attractiveness, and a better sense of humor.

We're going through this super-uptight era, which I think comes entirely from literacy, actually. It's the result of machines that were designed as word processors being used for making music.

When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That's one of the great feelings - to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.

It's easy to forget that your best work is done when your attention is fully engaged.

Any constraint is part of the skeleton that you build the composition on - including your own incompetence.

Every increase in your knowledge is a simultaneous decrease. You learn and you unlearn at the same time. A new certainty is a new doubt as well.

The reason I don't tour is that I don't know how to front a band. What would I do? I can't really play anything well enough to deal with that situation.

When I went back to England after a year away, the country seemed stuck, dozing in a fairy tale, stifled by the weight of tradition.

I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant.

Emotion creates reality, reality demands action.

When you make something you are always offering some choices and denying others.

There are certain sounds that I've found work well in nearly any context. Their function is not so much musical as spatial: they define the edges of the territory of the music.

Feelings are more dangerous than ideas, because they aren't susceptible to rational evaluation. They grow quietly, spreading underground, and erupt suddenly, all over the place.

What people call unemotional just doesnt have a single overriding emotion to it. The things that I like best are the ones that ambiguous on the emotional level.

I cant duplicate my own successes, because part of the creation of that effect is making something happen that you didn't expect

If you want to make someone feel emotion, you have to make them let go. Listening to something is an act of surrender.

With all fashion, what we do is play at being somebody else. We play at inhabiting another kind of world.

I still do mostly listen to CDs. I think that every format really is a different way of listening. If you take a different sort of psychological stance to it - like, I think the transition from vinyl to CD definitely marked a difference in the way people treated music. The vinyl commands a certain kind of reverence because it's a big object and quite fragile so you handle it rather carefully, and it's expensive so you pay attention to how it's looked after.

As soon as I hear a sound, it always suggests a mood to me.

Aggressive music can only shock you once. Afterwards its impact declines. It's inevitable.

Listening to something is an act of surrender.

Most big concerts sound disgusting and awful and insultingly bad. It's like going to the cinema and been shown a scratchy film which is upsidedown and the bulb had gone on the projector. The quality of large-scale live music is so shocking.

If I had a stock of fabulous sounds I would just always use them. I wouldn't bother to find new ones.

Complexity and intelligence grow from simplicity, not from greater complexity.

Most of those melodies are me trying to find out what notes fit, and then hitting ones that don't fit in a very interesting way.

Every band I’ve worked with also wants to be countercultural in the sense that they want to feel that they’ve gone somewhere that nobody else has been.

For me it's always contingent on getting a sound-the sound always suggests what kind of melody it should be. So it's always sound first and then the line afterwards.

Given the chance, i'll die like a baby, on some faraway beach, when the season's over.

There's a kind of edge to what you're doing, the kind of leading edge of what you're doing. Inside that edge [are elements you] are familiar with, and are probably becoming slightly bored with, as well, over a period of time. "I've pulled that one out before. Oh, no, I can't I'm just fed up with that. Let's do something else."And you always think "Oh my God I've never done anything at all like that before." But, of course, in retrospect, and to an outsider, they'll say, "Oh, yeah that's typical Eno.

I think that there's something that I still like about the fact of a package, like the latest report from somebody. "Okay, this is what they're up to now; this is what they're doing; who's working with them?

Sometimes you recognize that there is a category of human experience that has not been identified but everyone knows about it. That is when I find a term to describe it.

I'm very opinionated.

I always use the same guitar; I got this guitar years and years ago for nine pounds. It's still got the same strings on it.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.

Every collaboration helps you grow. With Bowie, it's different every time. I know how to create settings, unusual aural environments. That inspires him. He's very quick.

Robert Fripp and I will be recording another LP very soon. It should be even more monotonous than the first one!

I see TV as a picture medium rather than a narrative medium.

Everything good proceeds from enthusiasm.

Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences... That solves a lot of problems ... Art is something that happens, a process, not a quality, and all sorts of things can make it happen ... [W]hat makes a work of art 'good' for you is not something that is already 'inside' it, but something that happens inside you.

The difficulty of always feeling that you ought to be doing something is that you tend to undervalue the times when you’re apparently doing nothing, and those are very important times.

It's amazing how quickly people get used to bad quality.

Attention is what creates value. Artworks are made as well by how people interact with them - and therefore by what quality of interaction they can inspire.

Instead of shooting arrows at someone elses target, which Ive never been very good at, I make my own target around wherever my arrow happens to have landed. You shoot your arrow and then you paint your bulls eye around it, and therefore you have hit the target dead centre.

Composition is a way of living out your philosophy and calling it art.

The problem with computers is that there is not enough Africa in them.

The most important thing in a piece of music is to seduce people to the point where they start searching.

"People in the arts often want to aim for the biggest, most obvious target, and hit it smack in the bull’s eye.

Of course with everybody else aiming there as well that makes it very hard and expensive to hit. I prefer to shoot the arrow, then paint the target around it. You make the niches in which you finally reside."

Not many people bought Velvet Underground LPs, but those who did, started a band.

The whole point of art, as far as I’m concerned, is that art doesn’t make any difference. And that’s why it’s important. Take film: you can have quite extreme emotional experiences watching a movie, but they stop as soon as you walk out of the cinema. You can see people being hurt, but even though you feel those things strongly, you know they’re not real.

As soon as you externalize an idea you see facets of it that weren't clear when it was just floating around in your head.

I've always thought that art is a lie, an interesting lie. And I'll sort of listen to the "lie" and try to imagine the world which makes that lie true...what that world must be like, and what would have to happen for us to get from this world to that one.

Think inside the work - outside the work

You know that in order to copyright material somebody has to write it down for you. Any piece of recorded material has to be scored in order for it to be copyrighted. I've seen the scores of my things and they don't resemble the music in any way. If you give them to somebody who has never heard the music and say, "What does this sound like to you?" they'll play you something that has no relationship with the music it derives from. Notation simply isn't adequate.

Whenever there's a new music, there's a new way of listening. And whenever there's a new way of listening, there are new musics that follow from that. And people start listening differently - that can either mean in different places or at different volumes or in different social groups or through different technologies.

Often, I think you find that you're enjoying certain things, you've got this new way of listening, and you find that you really enjoy the way that sounds on it and the way this other thing sounds on it and the way that other thing sounds on it. So, you're finding a new pleasure that you didn't know about before.

My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.

Some people say Bowie is all surface style and second-hand ideas, but that sounds like a definition of pop to me.

Basically, you're still sitting there using just the muscles of your hand, really. Of one hand, actually. It's another example of the transfer of literacy to making music because the assumption is that everything important is happening in your head; the muscles are there simply to serve the head. But that isn't how traditional players work at all; musicians know that their muscles have a lot of stuff going on as well. They're using their whole body to make music, in fact.

I love San Francisco and Brighton has something of San Francisco about it. It's by the sea, there's a big gay community, a feeling of people being there because they enjoy their life there.

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature... The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.

I'm actually an evangelical atheist, but there is something I recognise about religion: that it gives people a chance to surrender.

The tools are evolving, and people's interests are evolving as well. So, suddenly people like to hear bands, people like Devendra Banhart or the xx, bands that make a kind of virtue of sloppiness. That isn't what they would describe what they're doing, but the fact is they make a virtue of the sort of hand-made nature of what they're doing.

Culture is everything you don't have to do.

Be the first to not do what nobody has ever thought of not doing before.

W]hat makes a work of art ‘good’ for you is not something that is already ‘inside’ it, but something that happens inside you.

Put out as much as you can. It doesn't do anything sitting on a shelf.

People who are very confident in themselves aren't hurt by criticism. They make use of it.

I can see the use and value of religion, just as I can see the use of mud wrestling, yoga, astronomy and sadomasochism. but I reject the idea that you can't be a deep human being without it or any of them.

What happens with notation is that it reduces things to a language which isn't necessarily appropriate to them. In the same way that words do, you get a much cruder version of what was actually intended.

One of the great breakthroughs of evolution theory is that you start with simple things and they will grow into complexity.

It's actually very easy for democracy to disappear.

When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. Not, he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought I should know how it's done so I would recognise when I was being lied to.

Cultural objects have no notable identity outside of that which we confer upon them. Their value is entirely a product of the interaction that we have with them.

Repetition doesn't really exist

I had an interesting day. I was in the studio with a group of musicians, who shall remain nameless, and I said to them "Our exercise today is not to use 'undo' at all. So, there's no second takes. Or, if you do a second take, you have to do the whole take. There's no sort of drop in, change that little bit". The session broke down in, I'd say, 40 minutes. It was impossible for people to work in that restriction any longer.

I got interested in the idea of music that could make itself, in a sense, in the mid 1960s really, when I first heard composers like Terry Riley, and when I first started playing with tape recorders.

With devices my technique is always to hide the handbook in the drawer until I've played with it for a while. The handbook always tells you what it does, and you can be quite sure that if it's a complex device it can do at least fifteen other things that weren't predicted in the handbook, or that they didn't consider desirable. It's normally those other things that interest me.

We have two different ways of working. One is completely unstructured where somebody just starts playing and somebody joins in and then the other person joins in, and something starts to happen. That's occasionally what happens. What more often happens is that we settle on some sort of - a few sort of structural ideas, like, "Okay, when I put my finger up, we're all going to move to the extremes of our instruments. So, that means you can only play either very high or very low or both. And we're going to stay there until I take my finger down.

As struggles go, being an artist isn't that much of one.

The Marshall guitar amplifier doesn't just get louder when you turn it up. It distorts the sound to produce a whole range of new harmonics, effectively turning a plucked string instrument into a bowed one. A responsible designer might try to overcome this limitation - probably the engineers at Marshall tried, too. But that sound became the sound of, among others, Jimi Hendrix. That sound is called electric guitar.

Possessions are a way of turning money into problems.

I want to make things that put me in the position of innocence, that recreate the feeling of innocence in you.

A culture is the sum of all the things about which humanity can choose to differ.

You can't really imagine music without technology.

In the wake of the events of 11 September 2001, it now seems clear that the shock of the attacks was exploited in America.

The trouble begins with a design philosophy that equates 'more options' with 'greater freedom.'

I know that if I had a television in my flat I would convince myself that everything on it was really interesting. I would say, 'I'm a Celebrity - Get Me Out of Here!' is so sociologically fascinating that I think I'd better watch.

I prefer to shoot the arrow, then paint the target around it. You make the niches in which you finally reside.

One night, I pissed into an empty wine bottle so I could continue watching Monty Python, and suddenly thought 'I've never tasted my own piss,' so I drank a little. It looked just like Orvieto Classico and tasted of nearly nothing

You don't have to act as if you know what you're doing

Once you've grown to accept something and it becomes part of the system you've inherited, you don't even notice it any longer.

The only value of ideology is to stop things becoming showbiz.

You can't do anything interesting with cutting-edge technology except not make it cutting-edge.

A studio is an absolute labyrinth of possibilities - this is why records take so long to make because there are millions of permutations of things you can do. The most useful thing you can do is to get rid of some of those options before you start

At the party, Rob Partridge said to me, "You gave hope to other balding men." My new epitaph: "Co-wrote a couple of decent songs and went bald shamelessly."

I'm fascinated by musicians who don't completely understand their territory; that's when you do your best work.

When people censor themselves they're just as likely to get rid of the good bits as the bad bits.

I occasionally meet people and they say, 'Oh, I was born to Discreet Music'... They always have very weird eyes, those people.

You just make different music on a computer. And you can make wonderful music on a computer, but don't pretend that the machinery is transparent. It makes as much difference to what you're doing as it does if you play an acoustic guitar as opposed to a kettledrum. You're not going to make the same music.

You feel as if you're not living a full life. Which, of course, is why - it's my theory about why so many people who are heavily into computers are also into extreme sports and S&M. It's because their bodies are crying out for some kind of action.

If you think of the way a composer or say a pop arranger works - he has an idea and he writes it down, so there's one transmission loss. Then he gives the score to a group of musicians who interpret that, so there's another transmission loss. So he's involved with three information losses. Whereas what I nearly always do is work directly to the sound if it doesn't sound right. So there's a continuous loop going on.

What I would really like to do, if I could have a sort of kingship for a short time and organize the group of my dreams - I would make one group which would be a combination of, say, Parliament and Kraftwerk - put those two together and say, "Make a record." Something that would be an extraordinary combination: the weird physical feeling of Parliament with this strange, rigid stuff over the top of it.

I wish there was a serious investigation into flying saucers that wasn't conducted by crackpots. Unfortunately nearly all of the people who are interested in them kind of manufacture the evidence to fit the theories rather than the other way around. So it's very hard to find any dispassionate treatment of them. Maybe there isn't any scientific basis in which case that's why you never see any scientific evidence.

Another way of working is setting deliberate constraints that aren't musical ones - like saying, "Well, this piece is going to be three minutes and nineteen seconds long and it's going to have changes here, here and here, and there's going to be a convolution of events here, and there's going to be a very fast rhythm here with a very slow moving part over the top of it." Those are the sort of visual ideas that I can draw out on graph paper. I've done a lot of film music this way.

Things that are very popular are not taken seriously, because the snobbish side of one says, "Well, if everyone likes it it can't be that good." Whereas if only I and a couple of other people like it, then it must be really something special.

When I work there are two distinct phases: the phase of pushing the work along, getting something to happen, where all the input comes from me, and phase two, where things start to combine in a way that wasn't expected or predicted by what I supplied. Once phase two begins everything is okay, because then the work starts to dictate its own terms. It starts to get an identity which demands certain future moves. But during the first phase you often find that you come to a full stop.

In fact, quite a lot of what I do has to do with sound texture, and, you can't notate that. You can't notate the sound of "St. Elmo's Fire." There's no way of writing that down. That's because musical notation arose at a time when sound textures were limited. If you said violins and woodwind that defined the sound texture; if I say synthesizer and guitar it means nothing - you're talking about 28,000 variables.

The problem with improvisation is, of course, that everyone just slips into their comfort zone and does sort of the easy thing to do, the most obvious thing to do with your instrument.

Sometimes something intrigues me about particular sounds, how they work together, and I think "Okay, I've found something here; I'm going to take it somewhere." And sometimes just to find a name for that sound, whatever it is, ends up becoming a title of the piece or becoming part of the title.

I got an amazing 10-CD set, it's the music that Alan Lomax recorded in Haiti in 1936. And what's incredible is how fantastic the drummers are and how off-the-grid they are. The liveliness is astonishing; they're just totally alive, these recordings. It's very interesting, to me, to be reminded of that, that there was a time when things were not that tight.

I remember when in the early days of rock'n'roll, when everything sounded totally different, all amazing and blah blah blah blah blah. Now you can play me one second of any record from that time, and I'll say "1959" or "1961." I can hear precisely. It's like it has a huge date stamp on it.

Songs that don't depend on composition depend instead on performance - so the fire has to be there in the playing.

I never wanted to write the sort of song that said, 'Look at how abnormal and crazy and out there I am, man!'

I suppose I am reluctant about being any sort of 'star' and I didn't particularly want to be portrayed as one.

The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten.

Genius is individual, scenius is communal.

I wanted to use the studio like a microscope for sound, which is what good engineers do.

It's nice, I think, when people use your music for things you didn't think of.

I think most artists would be happy to have bigger audiences rather than smaller ones. It doesn't mean that they are going to change their work in order necessarily to get it, but they're happy if they do get it.

Something I’ve realized lately, to my shock, is that I am an optimist, in that I think humans are almost infinitely capable of self-change and self-modification, and that we really can build the future that we want if we’re smart about it.

For instance, I'm always fascinated to see whether, given the kind of fairly known and established form called popular music, whether there is some magic combination that nobody has hit upon before.

Well, there are some things that I just can't get out of my head, and they start to annoy me after a while. Sometimes they're of my own creation, as well - and they're just as annoying. It's not only other people's ear worms that bug me, it's my own, as well.

The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don't set out to say anything very important.

I do sometimes look back at things I've written in the past, and think, 'I just don't remember being the person who wrote that.'

Most game music is based on loops effectively.

My shows are not narratives.

Painting, I think it's like jazz.

Perhaps when music has been shouting for so long, a quieter voice seems attractive.

I want to rethink surrender as an active verb.

The artists of the past who impressed me were the ones who really focused their work.

If you are part of a religion that very strongly insists that you believe then to decide not to do that is quite a big hurdle to jump over. You never forget the thought process you went through. It becomes part of your whole intellectual picture.

If you've spent a long time developing a skill and techniques, and now some 14 year-old upstart can get exactly the same result, you might feel a bit miffed I suppose, but that has happened forever.