Eno, Brian: Ambient 1 - Music For Airports (CD)

Brian Eno's dalliance with minimal musical soundscapes can be traced back to the sound-on-sound tape loops he created in collaboration with Robert Fripp on 1973’s (No Pussyfooting). Yet, while that album and subsequent titles such as Discreet Music and the second half of Before And After Science leaned heavily towards the pastoral, Eno would only explicitly label the music he was creating “ambient” when he released his sixth album, Music For Airports in September 1978.

Though it only saw the light of day in the fall of 1978, much of Music For Airports’ content dated back to 1976, while Eno was working on David Bowie’s widely-acclaimed Low. He was initially inspired by the negative feelings aroused in him while he waited for a flight at a German airport – and he struck on the idea of recording some pleasantly neutral music designed to soothe the soul of an individual stuck in the limbo of an airport lounge.

While Brian Eno firmly believed that passages from Music For Airports were “beautiful,” the critics of the day were less inclined to buy into the record’s super-minimal approach. Rolling Stone felt it was “self-indulgent and lacking focus” and while The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau suggested its “four swatches of modestly ‘ambient’ minimalism” had “real charms as general-purpose calmatives,” he also dubbed the record “a bore.” Lester Bangs was a little more upbeat in Musician magazine, declaring Music For Airports had “a crystalline, sun-light-through-windowpane quality that makes it somewhat mesmerizing, even as you half-listen to it.”

Yet, as with any such innovative artistic statement, Music For Airports’ reputation has grown substantially with the passing of time. Indeed, in more recent years, Eno’s quiet masterpiece has been recognized as the ground-breaking and influential release it surely is, with Pitchfork naming it the ‘Best Ambient Album of All Time’ in 2016 and a reappraisal in The Washington Post proclaiming that it “taught an entire generation of musicians to consider music as a texture.” For a record compiled with little thought given to its commercial yield, Music For Airports also had the last laugh, as it’s moved an estimated 200,000 copies, making it one of Brian Eno’s best-selling solo titles.

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