The 12th in a series of posts from Carl Lee.
The musical landscapes of Brian Eno’s cover art
Music for Airports (1979), The Plateaux of Mirror (with Harold Budd 1980), Day of Radiance (with Laraaji 1980), and On Land (1982) all share a cover art theme of partial map representations with a topographically knowing nod to pop art.
Hung in sequence on a wall the album covers were as striking and as artistic as the music they represent.
It is probably not possible for a single recording to be acknowledged as the starting point for a whole musical genre but ‘Ambient 1 Music For Airports’ comes some way to achieving that feat. Although it certainly was not the first ‘ambient music’, it was the first record to specifically adopt the label ‘ambient music’.
Brian Eno had started exploring abstract electronica in his 1975 album ‘Discreet Music’ before moving onto work with Talking Heads and producing their ground breaking albums ‘More Songs about Buildings and Food (1978), ‘Fear of Music (1979) and ‘Remain in Light’ (1980)’’, a trilogy that sound-tracked my late teenage years.
It is probably not possible for a single recording to be acknowledged as the starting point for a whole musical genre but ‘Ambient 1 Music For Airports’ comes some way to achieving that feat. Although it certainly was not the first ‘ambient music’, it was the first record to specifically adopt the label ‘ambient music’.
Brian Eno had started exploring abstract electronica in his 1975 album ‘Discreet Music’ before moving onto work with Talking Heads and producing their ground breaking albums ‘More Songs about Buildings and Food (1978), ‘Fear of Music (1979) and ‘Remain in Light’ (1980)’’, a trilogy that sound-tracked my late teenage years.
As a teenager, ambient music was as unfathomable as penguins trying to grasp jazz, it simply was not on my radar until I got an ‘in’ with the Brian Eno/David Byrne genre busting, or is that genre defining, I’m not quite sure which even now, ‘My Life in The Bush of Ghosts’ (1981).
Here's the track 'Regiment':
Producer, Associated Performer, Composer: Brian Eno
Producer, Associated Performer, Composer: David Byrne
Drums, Associated Performer: Chris Frantz
Bass Guitar, Associated Performer: Busta Cherry Jones
Associated Performer, Drums: David van Tieghem
Associated Performer, Voice: Dunya Yusin
What ‘Music for Airports’ does not do is demand active attention and in that it has a lineage back to ‘Musique d’ameublement’ (Furniture Music), the phrase given by French composer and pianist Erik Satie (1866-1925) to his sparse piano motif led minimalist compositions.
Which brings us back to the cover-art of Eno’s quartet of ambient albums.
This was an album that employed samples of radio shows, sermons, an exorcism, chanting of the Qu’ran, cawing rooks and the voice of Lebanese singer Samira Tewfik. Few albums have had to fend off so many lawsuits, offending as it did both some Christians and some Muslims. Its initial critical reception was mixed but not from me - now I had to explore everything that Eno had made, and that included his ambient work.
It was whilst in Berlin producing David Bowie’s Low album in 1977 that Eno started work on ‘Music for Airports’ and he added parts that were looped from Robert Wyatt on piano and the avant-garde jazz guitarist Fred Frith, who I once saw in the 1980s in an upstairs room of a pub in Sheffield with three men and a dog.
It was whilst in Berlin producing David Bowie’s Low album in 1977 that Eno started work on ‘Music for Airports’ and he added parts that were looped from Robert Wyatt on piano and the avant-garde jazz guitarist Fred Frith, who I once saw in the 1980s in an upstairs room of a pub in Sheffield with three men and a dog.
Wyatt and Frith were both involved with Mike Oldfield early in his career too... more on Oldfield throughout the blog.
Although musicians contributed, Eno stated that machines predominantly made the album. In this it was a precursor for a whole direction for the creation of music to go in and this found further expression in the manic chop and paste rhythmic assemblage that ‘My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts’ became.
Music for Airports is a wandering, rather aimless piece of music whose tone is set by piano motifs that are arrhythmic and with melody barely hinted at.
Music for Airports is a wandering, rather aimless piece of music whose tone is set by piano motifs that are arrhythmic and with melody barely hinted at.
Eno describes his ambient music as something that “is intended to induce calm and a space to think”, he has also referred to it as “music to resign you to the possibility of death” which doesn’t appear to be the ideal music to listen to in an airport waiting room.
What ‘Music for Airports’ does not do is demand active attention and in that it has a lineage back to ‘Musique d’ameublement’ (Furniture Music), the phrase given by French composer and pianist Erik Satie (1866-1925) to his sparse piano motif led minimalist compositions.
Satie’s work, instantly recognizable, a century after his death, were an influence on the young Brian Eno and that is both acknowledged by Eno himself and is straight-forward to recognize when listened to side by side. Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1 is perhaps the most widely known of his short works.
Which brings us back to the cover-art of Eno’s quartet of ambient albums.
A representation of the abstract landscapes that the music inside conjures with.
A melancholic air of beauty is all round, a grey day of scudding clouds and intermittent drizzle is evoked, a beauty that is sometimes so under-stated that it is hard to see, something that the cartographic suggestions give possibility to.
Or maybe that’s just the geographer in me.
And quite striking on a living room wall.
Carl Lee is retired but was a lecturer at The University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University, taught A level Geography for 20 years at Sheffield College, is the author of five books about geography and has a PhD in economic geography. He has been nuts about music since buying his first single in 1973: 10cc’s 'Rubber Bullets' if you were wondering.
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