Pierre Henry Quotes

Well, the things that one says at the age of 20 are, of course, not the same as those one would say at the age of 60 ... I believe that every day one destroys their past. My earlier works are not literally destroyed of course, but when I listen to one after the other they are non-existent now. I don't regard myself as more or less revolutionary now than in the beginning, but now I compose works that are less spontaneous, and more reflective on the things that I see around me, comprising issues of philosophy and metaphysics, radiating a certain serenity which is, I think, a natural thing for an artist. After years of hard work one arrives at a sort of peace and one tries to restrain one's language.
Pierre Henry 

I try to work without any specific machinery and when I find a machine ... I find a machine interesting when I have twisted it without knowing. That's same thing like in painting. I love it when the objects have been led away from their function. When working with a filter, and this filter turns a sound into something entirely new and unexpected, that interests me more because I am less connected to the style of the machine and its function than to the source of the sound. The source of a sound interests me because that's the adventure of mind's world. There are particular sounds that interest me because they have been cut in certain fashion, because they have a certain roughness, because perhaps there are these stories that have not been entirely excised. An analogy: Raymond Roussel wrote his books with mirrored images with coded words and I use coded sounds and shallow sounds and sounds that tell a story. And these latter sounds to me are The Sound.
Pierre Henry