Brian Eno
Ambient 1: Music For Airports
"The concept of music designed specifically as a background feature in the environment was pioneered by Muzak Inc. in the fifties, and has since come to be known generically by the term Muzak. The connotations that this term carries are those particularly associated with the kind of material that Muzak Inc. produces - familiar tunes arranged and orchestrated in a lightweight and derivative manner. Understandably, this has led most discerning listeners (and most composers) to dismiss entirely the concept of environmental music as an idea worthy of attention.
Over the past three years, I have become interested in the use of music as ambience, and have come to believe that it is possible to produce material that can be used thus without being in any way compromised. To create a distinction between my own experiments in this area and the products of the various purveyors of canned music, I have begun using the term Ambient Music.
An ambience is defined as an atmosphere, or a surrounding influence: a tint. My intention is to produce original pieces ostensibly (but not exclusively) for particular times and situations with a view to building up a small but versatile catalogue of environmental music suited to a wide variety of moods and atmospheres.
Whereas the extant canned music companies proceed from the basis of regularizing environments by blanketing their acoustic and atmospheric idiosyncrasies, Ambient Music is intended to enhance these. Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities. And whereas their intention is to 'brighten' the environment by adding stimulus to it (thus supposedly alleviating the tedium of routine tasks and levelling out the natural ups and downs of the body rhythms) Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and a space to think.
Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting."
-Brian Eno's original liner notes to the 1978 release of Music For Airports
The temptation to respond to Music For Airports with a curt "cannot be described, you should just listen to it" is one that many a music critic, reviewer, blogger & ignorant turd have embraced. All writing about music has to determine its audience eventually--is it for the minority of listeners consumed by technical descriptions? The voracious fan who seeks out any and all words touching upon the albums and artists they love? The curious consumer who wants to expand their collection? The musicians themselves, a group tangled up somewhere in the middle between the technical notation and the vomit of poetic license? With Music For Airports, as well as any of Brian Eno's Ambient series, the decision is even starker. It takes almost nothing to describe the technical aspects of the album--four tracks, intermittent length, Robert Wyatt's piano, tape loops, the tones of a synthesizer, tones, vocal fragments--you're done. The supposed story of the album's initial idea takes only a bit longer--Eno was unable to turn up an album of harp music playing in his hospital room and was stuck trying to pay attention to music that was occasionally drowned out by the sound of rain hitting his window--done, once again. After that, you're left with either poetic masturbation, an examination of the album's impact and still-constant position of reverence, or, as any trip on google can show you, the populist "Just give it a listen. You'll understand."
Some of the best reviews I've read about Airports are, and I'll be the first to admit having no problem with this, long-winded navel-gazing nonsense. Some of the worst are the ones that attempt to explain the album in terms going beyond Eno's own frank description. Let me be brutally honest: Generally speaking, Music For Airports will bring you the worst writing of a great music critic while showcasing the brilliance of the troglodyte. It's an album that's so open to personal interpretation because there's so little to say about it that could be considered wrong, unless you started calling it a reggae influenced album that consists of Jeff Buckley freestyling about his favorite sexual positions. So much of what Eno did with Airports was create a movable texture of sound for listeners to play out their own emotions, to test their own willingness to pay attention, to question what, exactly, they went to music for in the first place. Sometimes the responses are a bewildered "There's nothing to this!", other times the music brings about such transcendent emotional responses that listeners describe weeping; no matter what they end up saying, as long as it's honest? Fascinating stuff. In the shared workspace I spend the majority of my day in, it's the only album I've ever seen spawn group emails that said "Whatever this is, please put it on repeat", only to be followed by a frantic plea of "Please ignore that last email. I can't take this." There's absolutely no hook to hang a hat on, there's no sense that the album has an official start or finish, opening or conclusion--it begins when you want it to, sure, you do control the horizontal, the vertical...but after that, the initial charge is extinguished. As asinine as all of this sounds, here we go: Music For Airports just IS, and how long it lasts is up to you. No experience with it is ever the same, because you aren't, and it's too ephemeral to hold a memory.
Anyway. There's that.
Eno went on to record and release more chapters in his Ambient series, song suites of tape loops would become the bread and glorious butter of sound artists like William Basinski, Aphex Twin would release a multi-volume set with a similar sounding name and a bit of similar acclaim. It would be the height of bullshit to make the claim that, after Airports, Nothing Would Be The Same Again. Not because it wasn't true--it is true, but that fact never has anything to do with music. It would be the height of bullshit because that wasn't what Brian Eno meant in the first place. What he meant?
Well shit, man. Just listen.
You'll understand.
-Tucker Stone, 2009
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