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Ambient 1: Music for Airports (Brian Eno, 1978)

 

AMBIENT. Brian Eno se explica en las notas interiores de este disco. Supongo que entendería necesaria una explicación para una música que, si no totalmente nueva, sí era rompedora en su matización e inmersión en algo ya existente. Comparar esto con el muzak puede resultar tentador, aunque bien mirado esto supera a esa insulsez en todos los aspectos. Eno consigue crear una música de ambiente que no solo acompaña susurrante al oyente mientras se realizan otras actividades, sino que lo envuelve y llama constantemente su atención. 

 

Escuchar el primero de los discos ambientales de Eno es caer rendido ante su fuerza gravitatoria, sumirse en un estado de catatonia festiva, mientras tu cerebro repasa alocado todas las cosas que te sugiere esta música. Desde paisajes torrenciales o vaporosos a nostalgia infantil, pasando por grupos y músicas que sin este disco no existirían o serían otra cosa. Porque inluyente lo es y mucho. No solo para esa electrónica paisajística y de carácter meditativo, sino para grupos que no esperaríamos a priori. Por decir solo uno, mencionaré a My Bloody Valentine, aunque por extensión esto implicaría a todo el shoegazing noventero.

No es "Ambient 1: Music for Airports" un disco fácil, aunque pueda ser de los que menos esfuerzo cuesta disfrutar. Desde la primera escucha podemos apreciar su fuerza. No se trata de pegada sónica, sino de un flujo gaseoso casi físico, un sonido que se hincha, respira y te anega por dentro. Como las olas del mar en su lento e inexorable vaivén o como una ballena flotando en el océano, hundiéndose para volver a emerger entre espuma. Rompiendo el silencio para volver a reconstruirlo al momento. Una danza interminable entre brumas y nubes blancas que apenas pueden tapar el sol.

 

★★★★☆

 

A1 1/1 16:30

A2 2/1 8:20

B1 1/2 11:30

B2 2/2 6:00

Total length: 42:20

 

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 idiosyncracies, 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 levelling 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 accomodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.

BRIAN ENO
September 1978 

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