Brian Eno — Ambient 1: Music for Airports and the Oblique Strategies

1978

Artists: Brian Eno, Peter Schmidt (Oblique Strategies co-author) · Year: 1978 · Medium: Generative ambient music — tape loops of different lengths producing non-repeating combinations · Substrate: Multiple tape loops of varied duration; their phase relationships produce continuous non-repeating output; initial installation at LaGuardia Marine Terminal · Place: London, UK · Institution: Independent; EG Records / Polydor Brian Eno released Ambient 1: Music for Airports in September 1978 on his own Ambient label, manufactured by E.G. Records. The album's liner note, written in small type on the back cover, defined ambient music: "must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting." It was a manifesto of roughly fifty words, printed on the sleeve of a commercial pop record by a man who had been, four years earlier, the synthesizer player in Roxy Music. The operational method was specific. Eno had built, in his home studio, a system of tape loops of different lengths — a loop of a few seconds, a loop of a few minutes, a loop of a few minutes plus a few seconds — playing simultaneously. The loops contained sung pitches (one track was a choir of three women, recorded separately and looped), piano figures, and sustained electronic tones. Because the loop lengths were incommensurate, the relationships between the sounds would not repeat for hours. The record was a recording of the loops running for a few minutes. The system could run forever; the record was a cross-section of it. This is the algorithmic gesture stated in music: a set of rules, running, from which the artist draws a finite presentation. It is also, in its specific form — multiple layered loops of incommensurate length — a direct descendant of Reich's 1965 phasing discovery. Eno had been reading Reich; Music for Airports is, technically, Reich's phasing logic applied to slow, consonant, ambient material rather than to short rhythmic samples. What makes the record matter in this archive is its argument that programmatic generation could be commercial — that a process running could be pressed onto vinyl and sold to people who would play it as a piece of furniture music. Eno made this argument twenty years before streaming services would make it the default listening mode of the twenty-first century. Every generative-music system that followed — Eno's own Generative Music 1 on Koan (1996), Scape (2012), the endless catalog of algorithmic ambient released since the advent of cheap software synthesis — is an extension of the 1978 premise. Lore Eno wrote the liner note while recovering in a hospital bed after being struck by a taxi in London in 1976. Lying still and unable to reach the record player that a visitor had left playing quietly, he realized that the music at low volume was merging with the sound of the rain outside his window, and that he could not tell, and did not care, which was which. He decided, upon recovering, to make records designed to do that intentionally. Music for Airports was rejected by several major airports when Eno tried to install it in departure lounges; eventually a few terminals — Pittsburgh, LaGuardia's Marine Air Terminal — ran his tapes briefly. The record sold poorly on release and became, slowly through the 1980s, one of the single most influential records in electronic music. Eno is still alive and still making generative work. Sources • Tamm, Eric — Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound (Faber, 1989). • Eno, Brian — A Year With Swollen Appendices (Faber, 1996). • Pitchfork — "Sunday Review: Ambient 1" (2019, retrospective).