Saturday 31 March 2018

Ten Brian Eno ambient albums preferable to Ambient 1 Music for Airports

There's been a few articles around marking the 40th anniversary of Brian Eno's Ambient 1 Music for Airports, released in March 1978. Somehow though, I've never been a huge fan of this album. And whenever articles talk about ambient music it's kind of placed there like the first part of a science lesson that you have to understand in order to go on to the next bit. That's a pity because I worry that people might get turned off by it and not go much further. So here I'm going to set myself the challenge of listing ten Eno ambient albums that I prefer to Ambient 1.

These are listed in no particular order, include collaborations, and are broadly ambient albums. In each case I've listed a standout track. The Youtube playlist contains all the tracks.



Harold Budd / Brian Eno - Ambient 2 The Plateaux of Mirror

Budd played the piano while Eno provided the treatments. Budd's music was influenced by minimalism and John Cage but not afraid to sound 'pretty'. First Light is the standout - a gently evolving melody leading into Eno's synth waves. There's something eternally refreshing about it, I've been listening to it regularly for over 25 years. How would it sound to a first time listener? I think it would sound very lightweight, but let it sink in a few more times over a few days and you may be converted.

Laraaji - Ambient 3 Day of Radiance

Eno is not credited in the title but he does the producing. Laraaji on zither. Meditation #2 probably takes a few listens before you realise it's not a cheesy new age piece but just straight out serenity in soundwaves. In the mid-section it's all about the way the sound changes as it very slowly fades away to silence.

Harold Budd / Brian Eno - The Pearl

Deeply loved by many people, this album has quite a few tracks but is thematically consistent. It's hard to choose a favourite but try Against the Sky. Listen for the slow shimmering synths that come in towards the end.

Brian Eno - Thursday Afternoon

This hour-long track is not wildly different to 1-1 from Ambient 1. There's a continuous background synth shimmer like an Indian tampura and there's a fixed set of piano tones that play in some semi-random way. Should you be doing something more productive with an hour of your time, like trying to stop climate change? Probably. So do that from Friday to Wednesday and clear your mind with a listen on Thursday afternoon.

Brian Eno - Neroli

Also titled 'Thinking Music Park IV', this 1 hour piece connected with Eno's interest in perfumes. Very minimal bell-like sounds with long decays. Get in the zone and stay there.

[NB For brevity the Youtube playlist above contains the shortened versions of Thursday Afternoon and Neroli that appeared on the Brian Eno ‎– I: Instrumental box set. By all means delve into the full-length versions.]

Brian Eno - Shutov Assembly

This album has more of a digital feel to it. Ikebukuro has bell tones, a distant sound like a steam train, a sound like swooshing bird's wings, some other taps and tweets here and there. The sounds are only vaguely familiar and suggestive. If you knew what they were, it wouldn't be so interesting to listen to. This piece has variants used in a lot of Eno installation works.

Brian Eno - Another Green World

A fair bit of this album has vocals and is not quite ambient, but on balance the majority is. The tracks In Dark Trees and The Big Ship were used to great effect in the Adam Curtis documentary 'The Power of Nightmares'. A number of the track titles have watery titles suggesting a nautical theme. My favourite is Becalmed. It's a sad track where the synths provide the lead melody and the piano sounds are the background tint.

Jon Hassell - Power Spot

This only just qualifies as an Eno ambient album. Eno co-produced. In a way, the style could be called Fourth World, a genre with one practitioner: Jon Hassell. But let's call it a sub-genre of ambient just to make it fit. Hassell plays his unmistakeable and ethereal trumpet. The production is very crisp, what one might expect from the ECM label. Solaire has Eno on electric bass. Utterly unique music.

Brian Eno with Daniel Lanois and Roger Eno ‎- Apollo

Another very popular album in the Eno discography, featuring Canadian producer and frequent collaborator Daniel Lanois. This music was used as the soundtrack to the documentary For All Mankind. Eno wanted to make music to accompany the Apollo lunar mission footage that focussed not on the engineering achievement but, as he wrote, "[the moods and] feelings that quite possibly no human had ever experienced before, thus expanding the vocabulary of human feeling just as those missions expanded the boundaries of our universe." - quite different from the aims of Music for Airports, released 5 years earlier.

Deep Blue Day was used briefly in the Trainspotting soundtrack, with Lanois on spaced-out pedal steel guitar. Eno thought the country and western sound suggested a feeling of weightless space.

Brian Eno - Ambient 4

This album has a mysterious, foreboding sound that contrasts with the prettier sound of the Harold Budd collaborations. More favoured by professional critics as an early example of dark ambient, these pieces evoke real or even imagined landscapes. Treated field recordings of frogs, birds, insects and other non-musical sounds add to the atmosphere. Find a lonely windswept beach, and listen to 'Dunwich Beach, Autumn, 1960'. Or close your eyes and just imagine one, this music will take you there.

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Ok, so there I honestly managed to get to ten albums. I would probably put Ambient 1 Music for Airports next. The first track on side 1, titled 1-1, consists of tape loops of piano and other sounds of varying lengths that fall in and out of sync with each other.

From here, there are about another dozen Eno ambient albums that you could go on and listen to. There are plenty of wonderful tracks to discover. Some standout individual tracks include Prophecy Theme, from the Dune soundtrack, Ho Renomo, from Cluster & Eno, Spider And I, from Before And After Science, Always Returning II, from Music for Films Vol 2, which is a very slow version of Always Returning from Apollo, and finally Tension Block, co-written by Daniel Lanois, which can be found on Music for Films Vol 3.

As a side note, some of Eno's less widely released material produced for various exhibitions got a new release in May 2018 with the 6 CD Music For Installations box set. The list I have compiled above stops at the 1993 Neroli release but this box set covers a lot of the best material he's created since then, and some previously unreleased work. It is a treat for lovers of Eno's long-form ambient pieces.

Looking back, I think that by calling Ambient 1 'music for airports', Eno set up an unfortunate association for the fledgling genre. Eno was a previously famous musician for Roxy Music but wanting to move in a less commercial direction. Maybe the title was partly a provocation, partly an attempt to find a way to get paid. I don't know that Music for Airports was ever played in an airport, other than many years later in a commemorative performance by the Bang on a Can group. Some say that Neroli was played in maternity wards. I suggest that this is just an artistic statement similar to the opening title of the Cohen brothers film 'Fargo' where they claim that it is a true story. It's just part of the mythology of the music - imagine if it was played in an airport.

For this listener, ambient was not 'as ignorable as it is interesting' as was Eno's stated goal. It was a trojan horse for a new way of listening. From Ambient 2 onwards, Eno's music surrounded and profoundly moved a generation of listeners, spinning off new interpretations, particularly through electronic dance via The Orb, Aphex Twin, Detroit electro and beyond. There were many pale imitators too. In the way that David Attenborough and Carl Sagan made specialised knowledge in scientific fields comprehensible to a wide audience, Brian Eno took the ideas of 20th century avant-garde art music and did the same. The possibilities of what music could be and the 'vocabulary of human feeling' was surely expanded as a result.

Andrew Chuter


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