In the latest episode of Pearl Acoustics’ Great Recordings series, host Harley Lovegrove takes a look at Brian Eno‘s seminal ambient album, Ambient 1: Music For Airports.
Lovegrove is the Founding Director of Pearl Acoustics, and his videos are one of those rare examples of a company creating a video series that strives to do more than promote their products. Each of his Great Recordings videos focuses on an iconic album, ranging from vintage classics like Take Five to Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter.
Eno’s Ambient 1-4 are seminal albums that defined the concept of Ambient Music. Eno didn’t ‘invent’ ambient music – Mark Prendergast’s book The Ambient Century traces the precursors to Eno’s work back over 100 years. But Ambient 1-4 both defined the genre, and demonstrated the range of possibilities within the genre.
Lovegrove’s video provides an introduction to Eno and his work, and then digs deeper into Ambient 1 and the album’s individual tracks.
“It’s very calming,” he notes, “just like sitting…..at the beach with the sound of the waves rolling in. You can sit there for hours, without speaking a word, alone or with a group of people.”
Video Summary:
“When the composer and music producer Brian Eno had to suffer intolerable ‘muzak’ in an airport departure lounge, while waiting for his flight home back in the 1970’s, he concluded that there must be something better to fill the void. The result was the creation of a totally new genre of music which he called ‘Ambient’.
Designed to be played in any circumstance and not requiring the intellectual participation of the listener, unless desired, this album ‘Ambient 1 – Music for Airports, was the first LP in the new genre and set a ball rolling that is very much alive, 47 years later.”
Topics Covered:
00:00 – Title sequence
00:26 – Introduction to the topic & context
03:27 – Brian Eno, a brief synopsis
06:58 – Ambient 1 – Music for Airports
13:58 – Track 1 (1/1)
18:03 – Track 2 (2/1
21:19 – Track 3 (1/2)
24:41 – Track 4 (2/2)
All art strives for the condition of Muzak. –Michael Moorcock
Eno shared his thoughts on the differences between Muzak and ambient music in the ’70s:
“The concept of music designed specifically as a background feature in the environment was pioneered by Muzak Inc. in the fifties, and has since come to be known generically by the term Muzak. The connotations that this term carries are those particularly associated with the kind of material that Muzak Inc. produces – familiar tunes arranged and orchestrated in a lightweight and derivative manner. Understandably, this has led most discerning listeners (and most composers) to dismiss entirely the concept of environmental music as an idea worthy of attention.
Over the past three years, I have become interested in the use of music as ambience, and have come to believe that it is possible to produce material that can be used thus without being in any way compromised. To create a distinction between my own experiments in this area and the products of the various purveyors of canned music, I have begun using the term Ambient Music.
An ambience is defined as an atmosphere, or a surrounding influence: a tint. My intention is to produce original pieces ostensibly (but not exclusively) for particular times and situations with a view to building up a small but versatile catalogue of environmental music suited to a wide variety of moods and atmospheres.
Whereas the extant canned music companies proceed from the basis of regularizing environments by blanketing their acoustic and atmospheric idiosyncrasies, Ambient Music is intended to enhance these. Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities. And whereas their intention is to `brighten’ the environment by adding stimulus to it (thus supposedly alleviating the tedium of routine tasks and leveling out the natural ups and downs of the body rhythms) Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and a space to think.
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.”
I heard a song on YT called “demonwave” and it was like a picture of skeletons or something, and I felt it sounded like a new genre, but I have searched for other songs like it and have not found any yet.
Oh, in addition to skeletons on the background, it had Mark Zuckerberg.
It did not sound like other tracks on YouTube labeled “demonwave” and I believe it was uploaded long before all of them as well.