Dilettante Music

Before there was a style of music called "ambient" -- with offshoots reaching into classical, world, and "new age" musics, as well as electronica and a variety of dance-based sub-genres -- the phrase "ambient music" was largely connected to Brian Eno. Eno, known in part for his work with groups like Roxy Music, Talking Heads, and U2, has also produced a significant catalog of his own music. Some of his albums are relatively conventional collections of songs, but others are more experimental in approach and sound, including several which might be termed "ambient."

Generically speaking, "ambient music" is music that evolves very slowly through subtle textural changes, and tends not to have a pronounced beat or prominent melodic content. As early as 1975 Eno theorized on the possibilities for such music: "we might simply use it to 'tint' the environment, we might use it 'diagrammatically,' we might use it to modify our moods in almost subliminal ways." That year he was forced to spend several months in bed after an automobile accident. At one point an album of harp music was playing, very quietly, in his room. Since he was unable to get out of bed to turn it up, the music mixed with the sounds of a rainstorm outside and simply became part of the room's environment. Expanding on this revelatory moment and taking further inspiration from Erik Satie's notion of "musique d'ameublement" or "furniture music" -- which exists in the environment like furniture but doesn't dominate one's attention -- Eno explored something like an ambient approach in albums like ^Discreet Music (1975), and embraced the idea entirely in Ambient 1: Music for Airports, recorded in 1978 and released the following year.

In an essay that accompanied the album, Eno talked about the more common form of background music, "familiar tunes arranged and orchestrated in a lightweight and derivative manner." He imagined a different sort of background music that would enhance an environment and "induce calm and a space to think," and that would maintain some musical interest but "be as ignorable as it is interesting." Although he went on to create many albums which might be generally described as ambient, the "Ambient" series proper featured only four recordings: Music for Airports; Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror by Harold Budd and Eno (1980); Ambient 3: Day of Radiance by Laraaji (1981); and Eno's own Ambient 4: On Land (1982).

Music for Airports is made up of four pieces. 1/1, co-written by Eno, Robert Wyatt and Rhett Davies, takes a gentle, Satie-like piano tune and repeats it many times, accompanied by Eno's characteristically murky, studio-generated textures. "1/2" overlaps long notes from electronically distorted female voices, and "2/1" combines voices with a spare piano line. The album's last piece, "2/2," is for synthesizers.

The music took on new life in 1998 when the New York-based new music group Bang on a Can created its own arrangements for live musicians and performed Music for Airports frequently in concert. ~ All Music Guide