I've been a fan of Steve Roach from around the time his Dreamtime Return release came out in 1988. My friend Hans Stoeve played a lot of his music on The Quiet Space on 2SER radio in Sydney.
Steve Roach's music was often lumped in with 'New Age' but it was so much better than nearly all the music put into that category. The synth textures he uses are never cloying or syrupy, but have a drier and darker feel that evoke timeless moods of wide landscapes and the night sky.
He started out strongly influenced by the likes of Tangerine Dream but in 1988 he took an extended trip to outback Australia, meeting didgeridoo player David Hudson which resulted in the Dreamtime Return album.
According to Roach, his interest in Australian aboriginal culture was sparked by the Peter Weir film The Last Wave.
Through the early 90's his music became increasingly tribal sounding, inspired by the desert landscapes of his home in Arizona, and incorporating traditional instruments.
Significant collaborators during this period include Kevin Braheny, Robert Rich, Vidna Obmana and Jorge Reyes.
Although Roach was from a completely different and earlier scene to later electronic dance, he found a new audience on that fringe through being picked up by dark ambient / gothic label Projekt in the late 90's.
He has continued to release music on Projekt and on his own label to the present.
I made this playlist covering his best tracks from the start of his career until 2000. Tracks ordered chronologically:
cloud motion structures from silence the memory towards the dream the continent the other side magnificent gallery specter desert solitaire origin closer fearless the grotto of time lost la luna touch glimpse the face in the fire your own eyes begin where i end flow stone
I made a new music video for the Vangelis track, Rêve. This is sort of an homage to Frederic Rossif's wildlife films. Suggested reading: essay 'Why Look at Animals' by John Berger. Thanks to Gavin Gatenby of Werrong Lane films for the sooty oystercatcher footage.
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. I've also mixed them together on Soundcloud here.
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. It cover a lot of the best material he's created since the mid-90's, and some previously unreleased work. It is a treat for lovers of Eno's long-form ambient pieces. I have included the track I Dormienti on this mix.
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.
