Brian Eno’s Environment 1: Music for airports is a landmark album in ambient and electronic music. Although it was not the first ambient album, it was the first album explicitly labeled as ‘ambient music’.
music for airports Released in 1979, although some sources cite 1978 as its copyright date. It marked the continuation of Eno’s experimentation with the tape machine as a creative tool, a process he had begun four years earlier in the 1975 decade. Discreet Music,
music for airports Eno also saw further exploration of generative, system-produced music, whereby Eno would focus on creating a system that would generate ambient music, something he continues to explore with his iOS apps in the modern era.
In this article, I will discuss how music for airports Was built, and I will rebuild and rebuild the tracks 2/1 And 1/2Hopefully, the article will highlight some of Brian Eno’s techniques, and give you some ideas about adopting some of his ambient music techniques yourself,
Brian Eno and ambient music
Fripp’s guitar melodies were recorded and then bounced back and forth between two tape machines, creating long, fading delays that would create a dense sonic landscape. The length of the delay was controlled by the physical distance between the two machines.
Discreet Music Uses two separate loops, one of 63 seconds duration and the other of 68 seconds duration. Eno found that using two loops of different lengths created a stepping effect, where each repetition would produce different variations because the two loops were connected in different ways. I wrote a separate article discussing the recording in more depth Discreet MusicAvailable here.
recording music for airports
Music for airports, at least one piece, is structurally very, very simple. It has vocals sung by three women and me. One note is repeated every 23 1/2 seconds. It’s actually a long loop running around a series of tubular aluminum chairs in Conny Plank’s studio. The next lowest loop repeats every 25 7/8 seconds or so. Third every 29 15/16 seconds or something. What I mean to say is that they are all repeated in cycles that are said to be incompatible – they are unlikely to get back in sync again.
Eno recorded first before and after science And Cluster and Eno at Conny Plank’s studio, and would go on to record Devo. Q. Aren’t we men? Answer: We are Devo! There too.
compose music for music for airportsBrian Eno’s experiments focused on using short recordings of music – sustained notes or 3-4 note phrases – and looping them at different rates, determined by the length of tape on which they are recorded. The difference in tape length between the loops will cause them to intersect in interesting ways; At each iteration, new phrases and variations on existing themes will emerge. Eno himself says it best:
“The particular piece I’m referring to was done using a whole series of very long tape loops, fifty, sixty, seventy feet long. There were twenty-two loops. One loop had just one piano note. Another would have two piano notes. Another would have a group of girls singing one note, holding it for ten seconds. There are eight loops of girls’ voices and about fourteen loops of piano.
I just turned on all these loops and let them configure the way they wanted, and actually the result is very, very nice. Interestingly, it doesn’t seem at all as mechanical or mathematical as you imagine. It seems as if a man is sitting there playing the piano with great intensity. The distance and dynamics of “his” playing seem very well arranged. This was an example of no interference at all.,
graphic score
music for airports The liner notes contain a graphic score designed by Brian Eno himself. He was not a trained musician and was unable to read or write sheet music, instead he used graphic symbols to denote each musical phrase or loop. Look closely and you can see different symbols on each line, each placed at different distances, indicating the recording technique used to produce the album.
Brian Eno also designed the cover art for music for airportsAs well as the rest of the Ambient series: Environment 2: Mirror Plateau With Harold Budd, Environment 3: Day of Shine with Laraaji and Environment 4: On LandEach of which has map-like covers.
<a href