Brian Eno on Perfection (2013)

“I remember a musician once saying to me that he wanted to create the perfect sine wave. And the interesting thing is that the most boring sound in the universe is probably the perfect sine wave. It’s the sound of nothing happening. It’s the sound of perfection, and it is boring. As David Byrne said in his song, ‘Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.’ For me, perfection represents the absence of character. If I get anything even close to a perfect sine wave from my synthesizer, I send it to an amplifier so that it starts to get imperfect and becomes distorted. Distortion is character, basically. In fact, everything we call ‘character’ is the deviation from perfection. So perfection to me is characterlessness.”