Ambient 1: Music for Airports

Eno, Brian

album cover

The Way Station as a Place Itself

Inside the vast enveloping tones and isolated melodic events that make up Brian Eno's Music for Airports is a serenity distinctly missing from the experience of air travel. There's none of the frantic scramble for the gate or the jostle of queuing humans. There isn't even much discernible pace, or rhythm. Instead, these airy audio "environments" are designed to counter the constant motion of transit with a monastic stillness. Calm radiates from the deep background. Vast enveloping textures, as still as desertscapes, are the primary lure. Contemplatively plinked piano notes pop out from the drones, each one representing a fragment of melody that rarely coalesces into what could be considered a "theme."

Eno developed Music for Airports, the first in a series of ambient projects, in the late '70s while working as a producer on the Talking Heads' decidedly un-ambient More Songs About Buildings and Food. Eno wasn't the first to explore the concept of music as palliative or "background," but he was ahead of his time recognizing the psycho-acoustic properties of sound, and the ways various tones could help shape the experience of being in a particular space or situation. As he wrote in the liner notes: "Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing any one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting."

By that measure, Airports, which has actually been used in the passenger waiting areas of some airports, is an unusual success. It's as ignorable as drapery, like much of the music classified as New Age that followed it. Yet if you bring full awareness to it, you may discover unexpected riches waiting inside. Both the piano-based sixteen-minute opening track "1/1," which was cocomposed by former Soft Machine drummer Robert Wyatt, and the more impressionistic drones of "2/2" cast a captivating spell. It's possible to be drawn deep into these "environments" without intellectually processing them at all.

Genre: Electronica
Released: 1978, EG/Astralwerks
Key Tracks: "1/1."
Catalog Choice: Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Music (with Jon Hassell); My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (with David Byrne)
Next Stop: Jean-Michel Jarre: Oxygene
After That: Mark Isham: Tibet
Book Pages: 259–260