Electronic Music

"He runs his scissors at the seam in the wall He cannot break it down or else he would fall One thousand lonely stars hiding in the cold Take it, oh, I don't wanna sing anymore"

"There are so many things that I don't understand There's a world within me that I cannot explain Many rooms to explore, but the doors look the same I am lost, I can't even remember my name"

"Once you free your mind about a concept of harmony and of music being "correct," you can do whatever you want. So, nobody told me what to do, and there was no preconception of what to do."

"I wanted to do an album with the sounds of the '50s, the sounds of the '60s, of the '70s, and then have a sound of the future. And I said, "Wait a second. I know the synthesizer. Why don't I use the synthesizer which is the sound of the future?" And I didn't have any idea what to do but I knew I needed a click. So, we put a click on the 24-track which then was synced to the Moog modular. I knew that it could be a sound of the future but I didn't realize how much the impact would be. My name is Giovanni Giorgio, but everybody calls me Giorgio."

"Let the music in tonight Just turn on the music Let the music of your life Give life back to music"

"There is a game of love There is a game of love This is a game of love This is a game of love"

"Work it harder, make it better Do it faster, makes us stronger More than ever, hour after hour Work is never over"

"Sampling the traditional way gets frustrating fast: bad tuning, rigid tempos, weird textures that don’t bend. So we started recording our own source material — built for flexibility. It saves us 900 hours digging through crates. The downside? No more surprises. No more accidents. That spark of stumbling on a forgotten gem … gone. Daft Punk were the kings of that. They could turn half a second of groove into a global anthem."

"Nineteen years on, every single aspect of Discovery has been pilfered time and time again, from the glossy production style to the sound of the drums. Every vocal in pop has that electronic effect on it, which I now know is called Auto-Tune. Daft Punk were incredibly prescient: play Discovery today and it sounds utterly contemporary."

"It's not right, it's not true, it's not right It's not how we used to do"

"If you lose your way tonight That's how you know the magic's right"

"Familiar faces I've never seen Living the gold and the silver dream Making me feel like I'm seventeen And it's crystal clear that I don't ever want it to end"

"Remember, love's our only mission This is a journey of the soul"

"Like the legend of the phoenix All ends with beginnings What keeps the planet spinnin' The force from the beginnin' We've come too far To give up who we are So let's raise the bar And our cups to the stars She's up all night 'til the sun I'm up all night to get some She's up all night for good fun I'm up all night to get lucky"

"Home, hold on, if love is the answer, you're home."

"We didn't decide to become robots, There was an accident in our studio. We were working on our sampler, and at exactly 9:09 a.m. on September 9, 1999, it exploded. When we regained consciousness, we discovered that we had become robots."

"The idea was really having this desire for live drums, as well as questioning, really, why and what is the magic in samples? Why for the last 20 years have producers and musicians been extracting these little snippets of audio from vinyl records? What kind of magic did it contain?"

"As much as I love this character, the last thing I would want to be, in the world we live in, in 2023, is a robot."

"We tried to use these machines to express something extremely moving that a machine cannot feel, but a human can. We were always on the side of humanity and not on the side of technology."

"I almost consider the character of the robots like a Marina Abramović performance art installation that lasted for 20 years"

"People are often afraid of things that sound new. Like robots."

"Electronic music right now is in its comfort zone, and it’s not moving one inch, That’s not what artists are supposed to do."

"The idea of the perfect album is this amorphous thing that we're always aiming at. For us, it can mean something that's full of imperfection, because part of our aim has always been to destroy the sound in a beautiful way. It doesn't mean that we expect everyone would like it. I'm not sure that we will ever get there, to make the perfect record. But the whole point of making music is at least to aim at your own idea of perfection."

"We began writing and playing music in a more serious way at some point around 1987 [...] At first, we experimented without setting ourselves any questions, with whatever means were available to us; then we worked a lot with other musicians and with real instruments, which brought more complexity into our music. Five years ago (1993), we sounded a lot more gothic, much closer to experimental rock, with the occasional vocal, though it was heading for electronic music; already we were sampling our own instruments. Then we went back to something closer to our original spirit, simple and instinctive, the only difference being that from then on, we could use all the wonders of digital technology, and so it was a lot easier to experiment and to get what we wanted."

"Of course we are massive fans of My Bloody Valentine. Loveless is probably one of my top five favorite albums of all time. I think that, even if we don't sound like them, there's a connection in terms of the approach to the music."

"The Beatles really became enthralling to us through their psychedelism."

"We love artists like Joni Mitchell and The Incredible String Band. There's a sort of purity of sound that they have, and I guess we are striving for that ourselves. [...] In fact, [String Band] come from the same place where we live now. We see them from time to time. So I guess our rural sensibilities are similar. Personally, I think they are one of the most important and underrated bands in the past forty years of music. They influenced so many other artists yet they never get due credit."

"A lot of the synthetic-sounding things you hear are actually recordings of us playing other instruments – pianos, flutes or twanging guitar strings – or field sounds we get from walking around with portable tape recorders, like electronic beeps in shops, or vehicles; then they are mangled beyond recognition. We have an arsenal of old hi-fi tricks up our sleeves and we basically destroy the sounds until they're really lovely and fucked up. So we're using sounds that are totally our own thing."

"It's important to leave a certain space there for the listener's imagination."

"The voices [in the music] are sometimes from old TV shows or tapes we've made. We have a lot of stuff we've collected, going back to the early '80s. But half of the time, it's things we've had friends record specially for us. We create tapes all the time. Practically everyone we know has been roped into recording something for us at some point. [...] We often get friends to sing things for us with the intention of building a melody around it."

"Every time we make a record we see it as an individual project, separate from what went before and what will happen afterwards."

"I've always been fascinated by the connection between music and numbers. Psychedelic experiences lead in this direction; they help us to see things in terms of numbers and their forms, of structures, as if the music was made out of crystals."

"We've touched upon the theme of lost childhood a few times because it's something personal to me that gives me real inspiration through its sadness. I think sometimes the best way to get inspiration is to face up to the things that make you very sad in your life, and use them."

"[On the 2005 album, The Campfire Headphase] We usually imagine our music to have a visual element while we're writing it, so we were picturing this character losing his mind at the campfire and compressing weeks of events into a few hours, in that time-stretching way that acid fucks with your perception."

"We're not Satanists, or Christians, or Pagans. We're not religious at all. We just put symbols into our music sometimes, depending on what we're interested in at the time. We do care about people and the state of the world, and if we're spiritual at all it's purely in the sense of caring about art and inspiring people with ideas."

"I do actually believe that there are powers in music that are almost supernatural. I think you actually manipulate people with music, and that is definitely what we are trying to do. People go on about hypnotizing people with music, or subliminal messages, and we have dabbled in that intentionally. Sometimes that's just a bit of a private joke, just to see what we can sneak into the tracks."

""Everyday. That's a joke. Sometimes I must lie because I don't want to disappoint people." Yulia Volkova, when asked when was the last time t.A.T.u last told a lie, October 2005"

"Gays are still thankful to us"

"Sometimes we have been asked to do things that have been uncomfortable," Lena recounts, "but for us, ultimately, t.A.T.u. is our project. I think that we have to do it in a way that is conducive to us, that we are comfortable with. If we're going to do things just because other people are telling us to, then we're just going to get lost. We have an instinct about what to do, and how to sing, and I think that usually when people are told what to do, it doesn't happen necessarily in a good way."

"As Yulia said in an interview with the Russian Bravo Magazine when explaining who the Люди-Инвалиды were, "...we are not talking about a physical disability, but only about the moral disabilities - they all have crippled souls.""

""It's about us growing up, the new challenges we face. It's a more serious album, darker and depressive because we met so many fake people in music." Lena Katina in an Interview with Planet Sound"

""Люди Инвалиды (Lyudi Invalidy) is about our lives and other peoples... Our thoughts our worries" t.A.T.u. in an interview with CD UK."

""People are focused on themselves, they become selfish, self-centered and they don't share anything! It goes beyond sexuality. The lyrics are more profound, serious and sincere than ever before. It's psychology!" Lena Katina in an interview with Tribu Move on the song "Loves Me Not." (Translation www.tatysite.net)"

""It's fucking great!" Lena Katina on the Frank Skinner show about their new album, Dangerous and Moving."

""They are so sexy, when boy kiss eachother, and girl." Yulia Volkova on Frank Skinner."

""We just stay together, it's normal. It's more comfortable, because she's carying shampoo.. and I'm carrying balm" Lena Katina on the Frank Skinner show talking about the benefits of sharing a hotel room with Yulia."

""We are happy that the whole world now is talking about Russia and our music, and we see a lot of people starting to learn Russian now. We want to support our country, and do what we like!" Lena Katina"

""Ivan is a genius, He is our friend and he has helped us on our journey through life. He cares about us and we care about him." Lena Katina"

""Maybe they are boys who are angry with us because we say we can love a girl. They are not our friends and if they were, they are not our friends any more. They want to say, 'Oh, Lena was a virgin and we had sex', 'Julia goes with all the boys'. Why would they want to tell stories like that? Why do people care? We don't care! It does not make us feel bad because we know the truth." Lena Katina"

""Moscow is the best place on earth, It is so warm, so friendly, the people are so nice. Everybody knows everybody. In America, they don't even know their neighbour. If you want some salt or sugar, you go to the store. In Moscow, we go next door." Lena Katina"