Charlemagne Palestine Quotes

"around 1977 I became very ... negative, I began to do things unconsciously that I didn't understand, and they were very sabotagistic and I didn't know what I was doing. I was pissing everybody off, I was breaking my bridges. I was hostile to people, I was doing performances and insulting people there - I was doing whatever I could to destroy whatever world I had created ten years before, without knowing, really, why"
Charlemagne Palestine

"Perhaps at the time we were a bit anti-establishment, as far as the music scene was concerned, and British avant-garde music was still very much tied to 'legitimate music'."
Charlemagne Palestine

My piano music came about when I was a ringer in a Bell Tower in New York (2a,b). Also, I was using synthesizers around that time, with the oscillators making pure tones (3, 4, 5) and I had decided that the piano was finished for me. I enjoyed Debussy and jazz but as an instrument it was no longer interesting for me until I started to use a Bosendorfer Imperial piano (6a, b, c, d) that I had the possibility to play in 1969 and I could hear a fantastic instrument full of overtones, resonances.
Charlemagne Palestine

With the organ… I also started that a very long time ago. I love the instrument, it's big, it's monstrous and it's (used and heard) in fantastic spaces like churches. That's also if you see the churches not only as religious places and if you don't see the churches as places only to make sounds. These instruments with enormous pipes - sometimes with thousands of pipes- interests me so much: having the thousands of pipes as oscillators. You have thousands of sounds at the same time! In an organ, you can play many tones at one time without a problem. So this was an instrument that was interesting to me and I made many pieces with sustaining tones.
Charlemagne Palestine