About

A TAV Essential Listening Album.

“With his 1978 album Ambient 1: Music for Airports, English musician/producer/conceptualist Brian Eno coined the terms “Discreet Music” and “Ambient” as “music designed to induce calm and space to think.” The album, comprised of four dissimilar yet completely cohesive movements, was created with simple keyboard melodies, serial tape loops and embedded voices. The effect is sheer weightlessness, the disc’s soft ebb and flow of synthesized patterns imbued with live brass and strings. More than just spatial white noise, Music for Airports is the sonic equivalent of visual art. Eno’s sculpture of sound has inspired numerous imitations, briefly fulfilling its postmodern destiny as an audio installation at NYC’s LaGuardia Airport.” – Slant Magazine

“Four subtle, slowly evolving pieces grace Eno's first conscious effort at creating ambient music. The composer was in part striving to create music that approximated the effect of visual art. Like a fine painting, these evolving soundscapes don't require constant involvement on the part of the listener. They can hang in the background and add to the atmosphere of the room, yet the music also rewards close attention with a sonic richness absent in standard types of background or easy listening music.” – All Music

Eno's first official statement of larger intent came three years later with Ambient 1: Music for Airports. The dispassionate title reflects the smooth, sterile, modernist surfaces that the music evokes. Eno picked a building similar to a hospital, the location of ambient music's conception. Both hospitals and airports are centered on mechanized rituals that are simultaneously in the service of, and often numb to, basic human needs. Eno thus aimed to make a music that would "get rid of people's nervousness." The music comes in four sparse sections-- some of them solo piano, some synthesized voices and other tones, all altered through subtle tape manipulation. In long, disintegrating notes that echo the work of Morton Feldman, Music for Airports gives the listener nothing to hold onto, remaining as transitory as its location. - Pitchfork

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