When Brian Eno lectured at RBMA in New York a couple of months back, he described [James] Blake as an artist who “works mostly by subtraction, he takes lots of stuff out and ends up with very skeletal pieces.”
Blake watched the Eno lecture yesterday, and he nods avidly when I repeat this analysis of his working process back to him. “One part [of a song] that doesn’t mean anything really pisses me off. Genuinely, it irritates me if there’s something that doesn’t need to be there. The thing is, it happens in other music as well; I’m not too fascist about it when it comes to other people’s music, but when it comes to mine I really try to do a spring clean on the track, to make sure that everything that needs to be there is there, and nothing extraneous is left just buzzing in the background, clattering and distracting me from the main idea."
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