Brian Eno | Ambient #1: Music For Airports

Brian Eno

Ambient #1: Music For Airports

London, UK: E.G. Records, 1979

12” vinyl LP, 42:20 

Edition size unknown

Today Pitchfork’s Sunday Review featured Brian Eno’s 1979 landmark LP Music For Airports.

It was awarded ten stars, which is not exactly going out on a limb, given that the site in 2016 called it the greatest ambient recording of all time (and the genre’s namesake). I’d argue that Discreet Music is better (and earlier) but it’s difficult to dispute the importance and ongoing significance of the record. 

"That’s when it happened: Sitting among the gleaming steel fixtures and softly glowing concrete lines of the modernist Cologne Bonn Airport on a sunny Sunday morning in late 1977, en route to his homebase, the perennially nervous flier recoiled once again at the canned pop pleasantries mindlessly piped into such an inspired space. The music was not only an afterthought but also insulting to the idea that you would soon climb into a sleek metal tube and be propelled by engines through the sky at 40,000 feet. “I started thinking, ‘What should we be hearing here?’ I thought most of all you wanted music that didn’t try to pretend you weren’t going to die on the plane, ” Eno, laughing but serious, told Stephen Colbert 34 years later, much as he’d said to Lester Bangs in 1979 and repeated in his own published diary in 1996. “Let’s face facts.”

[...]

Just a few weeks ago, I visited a favorite aunt whose husband had recently died. He had left behind decades of accumulated records in a basement crowded by a lifetime of hobbies and collections. She needed to know what to do with those thousand or so LPs, each cover inked with his name in blue ballpoint pen.

As I sat on the floor scanning the spines, she flitted about the room, trying not to cry as she busied herself with arcane errands but failing. It was the first time I’d been in that room in 20 years, and it was a fraught scene, weighted by thoughts of a kind man of a million passions who died too young. Wedged between a few Magazine records and a Nick Cave single, I spotted the familiar blocky black capital letters: “AMBIENT #1 MUSIC FOR AIRPORTS.” I pulled it from its place and asked my aunt if she knew it. She’d never heard of Eno, let alone the record.

Minutes later, Robert Wyatt’s lullaby-like piano chimed from speakers wedged among busy rows of books. And then it repeated, of course, seeming to tug itself and the entire room skyward even the second time around. My aunt stopped her busywork, looked up, and finally let the tears flow. We stood there in silence for a while, like electrons coming to rest, held aloft by this music. In those quiet moments, we did exactly what Eno had hoped Music for Airports would allow people to do, in or out of an airport—to not pretend we too weren’t going to die, and to go on ahead, anyway.”

- Grayson Haver Currin, Pitchfork.com