10. 1/1 – Brian Eno
Well, it’s hardly a missing or rare gem, but it occurred to me recently that you may not actually have it in your collection. I’ve included this classic Eno work for two main reasons:
1) I love it to bits;
2) I found a bunch of people who had never heard of it — and thought that ambient music was something to do with Enigma. That needed to be put right.
These were my students.
I teach a second-year undergraduate class in music programming (for radio – not to be confused with sequencer programming), and I was trying to get them to appreciate the concept of musical ‘meaning maps’. That is, the different ways that people consume and understand music.
To do that, I gave them some listening assignments across a range of genres, scenes and subcultures. I wanted them to get an experience of something outside of their usual comfortable tastes and interests.
So I had them compile a compilation disc — a mixtape — and reflect on what was going on in the music, and what meanings were associated with it. You know the sort of thing… I gave the hard rock guy Disco, the drum & bass enthusiast Swing, the reggae bloke Emo, the cheesy pop girl Fusion and the R&B and bhangra guy Ambient.
There were confused faces in the room. This was one they hadn’t struck before.
“Ambient?”
“Well, go research it and see what you come up with,” I suggested.
I should have given some direction.
If you ask the internet about Ambient music, it thinks you’re keen to read about populist downtempo music with ‘World’ flavours.
In fact, Ambient music is a thoroughly interesting and hugely influential movement that has parallels in the visual arts (think Rothko. Lovely, lovely Rothko).
It is an immersive, environmental music that can be listened to or ignored as the inhabitant of the space desires. It rewards attention, but does not demand it. As Eno put it in the liner notes to what is generally recognised as the first (and possibly best) of the genre:
‘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 have some other favourites of the genre — many of them also by Brian Eno (The Pearl, with Harold Budd, is particularly great).
It’s great music to relax to, but don’t go calling it Chill Out music. And nor is it soundtrack music, despite the fact that it keeps turning up in movies and all over home renovation programmes on the Beeb.
It’s more soundscape than soundtrack. More similar to kinetic sculpture than wallpaper.
And if you’d never heard of it, well — now you have.
