Brian Eno

Music as furniture. Rooms as giant boxes to be filled with sound. The end of the traditional concept of "listening" and the birth of a new kind of soundtrack, designed to accompany spaces, not images. More than an album, "Ambient 1: Music For Airports" is a treatise on musicology, a definitive synthesis of that season of sonic research begun by Erik Satie in 1888 with the piece "Gymnopedies" and carried forward in the '60s and '70s by pioneers such as Terry Riley, Steve Reich and John Cage, as well as by Brian Eno himself (paired with Robert Fripp in 1973 on the single "Pussyfooting" and solo two years later with "Discreet Music"). All small steps in that direction. "Ambient 1: Music For Airports" (1978) is the crowning achievement of those projects: indeed, it's only with its release that the term "ambient music" is officially coined.

In his alchemy as a self-taught scientist, Eno actually proceeds by way of subtraction. Back in 1968 he had already theorized "Music for Non-Musicians", no longer the domain of composers and performers but of "brilliant incompetents", manipulators of tape, synths, equalizers and other electronic contraptions. Then, with his "oblique strategies", he decided to strip music itself of its pulp, reducing it to a hazy puzzle of sounds and tones, recycled in the studio through complex genetic-engineering-like operations. Stripped bare like this, robbed of its traditional harmonic structures, music becomes nothing more than part of an environment—be it a station waiting room or an airport terminal—absorbing its atmosphere and noises, turning into a backdrop that no longer requires attentive listening (there's that final "subtraction").

Those who rant about the hateful “muzak” tend to put two and two together, linking Eno's “ambient” sonorities to the old wired-radio background music, and describing the “non-musician” as the one who updated that kind of sound with an avant-garde, postmodern twist. Setting aside the navel-gazing of music critics, though, what matters most is remembering the historical significance of this undertaking, which would lay the groundwork for a great deal of future electronic music, from the most transcendent (new age) to the most hedonistic (chill-out). The only damage that, with hindsight, can be pinned on Eno is having indirectly encouraged a swarm of “non-musicians” (full stop) to make records, in the belief that standing behind a mixing desk is sufficient to produce something vaguely resembling music.

“Music For Airports” was recorded at the peak of an exhilarating period for the English artist, busy with collaborations alongside David Bowie (“Low”, “Heroes”), Talking Heads (“More Songs About Buildings and Food”) and Cluster (“After The Heat”). The record is part of a “music for environments” project devised together with Harold Budd and Jon Hassell, aimed at creating background sonorities for airport terminals, but also for waiting rooms, exhibition halls and art galleries. This is music that often stays under a hundred beats per minute, and at times is completely devoid of rhythmic parts — music that finds its main reason for being in a symbiotic relationship with space.

The chosen setting is therefore the airport: an international crossroads, a point of arrival and departure, a place of encounters and separations, of waiting and tension. Eno's aim is to instill in its occupants a sense of calm and hope, gradually easing their stress. The experiment was actually carried out for a while at New York's LaGuardia Airport terminal, just a few months after the record's release (and Eno still dreams to this day of getting permission from the authorities at London's Heathrow to create a room for travelers where one could listen to “current music for a modern airport”…).

A sort of “meta-classical” symphony split into four movements, minimalist even in its (almost non-existent) track titles, “Music For Airports” revolutionizes the very concept of musical creation, as well as that of its listening experience. The relationship between space and acoustics resolves into an alternation of silences, piano and synth phrases, choral parts and female voices, all duly broken down and reassembled at the mixing desk. The sound unfurls slowly; it's abstract, painterly, cerebral. And yet it doesn't merely serve as “wallpaper” for the space — it helps define how that space is perceived, to the point of almost merging with it. Everything is hazy, incorporeal, rarefied. Turning the usual sleeve-note instruction to listeners on its head, one might say: “To be played at minimum volume”.

In the overture, a wonderful sixteen-minute slow-motion adagio, it's Robert Wyatt who conjures an atmosphere of electronic ecstasy, endlessly repeating ethereal piano phrases, counterpointed by the other instruments running free and reworked through masterful mixing-desk direction. The second track is built on echoes and overlapping layers of an a cappella female choir that instills a sense of emptiness and vertigo. The third is a pastoral piece combining the choir with a piano, acting almost as a synthesis of the two preceding movements. The fourth, a synth solo in darker tones, seems almost designed to leave a sense of intriguing incompleteness. “Music For Airports”, in fact, could go on forever, and would always keep some imperceptible surprise in store. Behind its slow undulations, its obsessive calm, its hypnotic patterns, lurks a malevolent suspense, the anticipation of a twist that never seems to arrive, yet might come with every new listen. But perhaps that is precisely its twist.

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29/10/2006