Discography: Brian Eno: Ambient 1: Music for Airports

Ambient 1: Music for Airports is more of a starting gun than an album in-and-of-itself, a klaxon and clarion call for a whole new way of thinking and a soundtrack for an expanded psychology and social awareness. Although Discreet Music was Eno’s first exploration into crafting music meant to interact with the environment, Music for Airports is the first album branded as “Ambient Music.” It’s the record that launched a thousand genres, 10,000 lo-fi study playlists and a million albums, ranging from inspired to middling to the Muzak that partially inspired its inception.

In the liner notes to Music for Airports, Eno writes “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.”

The idea for Music for Airport‘s inception is reputed to have stemmed from an unpleasant sonic encounter at the Flughafen Köln/Bonn¨ (the Cologne/Bonn Airport) on a bright sunny afternoon in 1977. In an interview with Martin Large at the Opening Holland Festival in 1999, he recalled “The light was beautiful; everything was beautiful, except they were playing awful music. And I thought, there’s something completely wrong that people don’t think about the music that goes into situations like this. You know, they spend hundreds of millions of pounds on the architecture, on everything, except the music. The music comes down to someone bringing in a tape of their favourite songs this week, and sticking them in, and the whole airport is filled with this sound. So, I thought, it would be interesting to start writing music for public spaces like that.”

For the next few months, Eno experimented with crafting the four compositions that make up Music for Airports. Built around tape loops for piano, synthesizer and voice. All in all, he ended up with 22 very long tape loops ‒ sometimes as long as 60 to 70 feet ‒ sometimes consisting of little more than a single sustained note. These shifting patterns were then left to play, with very little interference, becoming the four tranquil, serene sound poems of “1/1,” “2/1,” “1/2” and “2/2.”

Music for Airports has been called “devoid of melody and harmony,” which couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, “1/1” is built around a simple, sweet seven note piano sequence in the key of D major which occasionally resolves into a thick, rich G add ninth chord. It may have sounded strange in 1978, with its timeless drift, but it’s deeply musical for those attuned to ambient listening to the point of being an earworm. Likewise, “1/1” has far more in common with the dreamy pastoralism of Johann Strauss than the noisy sonic malevolence of later ambient artists like Aube or Deathprod. Meanwhile, “2/1” sounds like choral music, devoid of language yet full of yearning, as heavenly sopranos and altos weave in and around one another like an ethereal Möbius strip. It’s almost hard to believe that chance is responsible for “1/2,” with its heartbreakingly tender piano melody recalling Bill Evans at his most nostalgic and introspective. Eno turns his back on the past on the album’s conclusion, however, and “2/2” feels fully futuristic, with its synthetic brass and otherworldly oscillators conjuring images of two suns setting over an interplanetary city, silent and contemplative beneath a protective dome.

Music for Airports has been a divisive album since its release and remains so to this day. At first it was received as some sort of artsy or pretentious joke by the critics of its day, who interpreted it as such. Rolling Stone called it “aesthetic white noise” and “unfocused.” Lydia Lunch panned the record with a characteristically savage takedown “it is just something that flows and weaves, flows and weaves . . . it’s kind of nauseating. It’s like drinking a glass of water. It means nothing, but it’s very smooth going down.” Posterity has been kinder, though. Ivan Hewett, the classical music critic for The Telegraph, called it a “seismic moment in musical history.” It’s been labeled the greatest album in ambient music history by both FACT Magazine and Pitchfork.

Listening to Music for Airports nearly 50 years after its release, it’s hard not to have mixed feelings about its vaguely utopian idealism. Although Eno positioned the album in opposition to the schmaltzy canned music of Muzak, it functions nearly identically, especially in its recorded state. His intentions may have been “to induce calm and a space to think” yet you can’t help but think of the authoritarian auditory control of centralized sound. It conjures images of ranked masses, falling into lockstep behind standard bearers, all eager to give their labor and their bodies for the greater good of the all-powerful state. For a more modern metaphor, it brings to mind the hyper-granular behavior modification of the contemporary data-driven marketplace, beneath the unblinking, never-sleeping gaze of machines of loving grace.

There’s simply no denying the loveliness of Music for Airports, though. It may sound inhuman, but it’s never sterile or anonymous. It seems custom-built for marble atriums with flying vaulted ceilings, hushed voices murmuring in the marbled halls as travelers enact tearful reunions and heartbreaking departures in sharp-slanted sunlight. While there are certainly critiques to be made against the sonic mind control of Muzak and centralized auditory control, its complete abandonment under late-stage capitalism is even more bleak. The Powers That Be don’t even make a pretense at better living, at this point. We no longer get the grand utopian arches of Penn Station. Instead, we get the rambling, crumbling junkspace of Newark forever and ever, amen.