How Brian Eno Created Ambient 1: Music for Airports (2019)
reverbmachine.com185 points by dijksterhuis 17 hours ago
185 points by dijksterhuis 17 hours ago
>To dig deeper into this style of tape loop ambient music, check out William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops. William Basinski used a similar concept to Brian Eno, only the tapes he used rapidly deteriorated upon playback, causing the musical material to degrade over the length of the recording.
I've never "bought" the story of Disintegration Loops that Basinski tells about its creation. The idea he composed it literally during the 9/11 attacks was just a silly attempt to add gravitas to abstract music. The more you think about it, the more off-putting it becomes. Reminds me of Stockhausen's stupendous remark about 9/11 being "the biggest work of art there has ever been".
In the same vein, tape doesn't normally just deteriorate before your eyes. The gradual change in sound of the loops is more likely due to the guitar pedal chain he was running his loops into (Basinski tends to omit this part of its creation).
I went to see William Basinski 'live' in Liverpool at Yoko Ono's Tung Auditorium. William stood in front of his MacBook, waving his arms like a conductor and drinking red wine.
Halfway through, he said he was tired with travelling and left the stage.
The audience continued to sit there for another hour, staring at the lid of the MacBook that was making the music. When it finished, we applauded the MacBook and left.
Quite surreal. Very enjoyable though.
Despite being categorically "non-narrative" music, the longevity of both records is almost entirely dependent on these narratives behind them. Ambient 2-4 are musically much more interesting, but the memetic quality of its origin story has given Ambient 1 (and the Basinski record) undue attention over time. Conceptually pure, yes! Sonically compelling, maybe. At least the Eno's approach was novel.
Also, Stockhausen was not entirely wrong. It was insensitive and poorly phrased, but 9/11 is undoubtedly the defining aesthetic image of our time.
One of my first ambient records I bought after I got into Music for Airports by Eno. Still one of my favorites. After those two I got into Stars for the Lid.
That isn't true. The "loop tape" was already like 20 years old IIRC, it was already disintegrated by 9/11
Also a huge Eno fan here. Put together, I probably have listened to Music for Airports, Another Green World, Taking Tiger Mountain and Discreet Music more than any other artist. Maybe Philip Glass comes in at a close second.
Anyways, in 2016, Tero Parviainen (@teropa) shared this really cool long-form exploration called "JavaScript Systems Music – Learning Web Audio by Recreating The Works of Steve Reich and Brian Eno" that I enjoyed tremendously (and I don't even like Javascript!)
Check it out at: https://teropa.info/blog/2016/07/28/javascript-systems-music...
Thanks for sharing. I've been on a path of algo music with JavaScript (I also do not enjoy JavaScript) and have mostly just guess-and-checked my way through it. I'm going to work through this as my advent of code project.
Yesterday I put up a little dictionary of synth sounds that I'm building out to help me on my journey (https://synthrecipes.org). The goal to be able to export any particular sound in a format for different live coding environments. Sounds are defined in a JSON format like https://synthrecipes.org/recipes/acid-bass.json. I'll open source it today so other can submit sounds.
--
Edit: I've open sourced the repo so others can improve existing sounds and add new ones. https://github.com/bradly/synth-recipes/tree/main
That's really cool.
Music is funny. I played the closed hi-hat sound (https://synthrecipes.org/#closed-hi-hat) a couple of times and my brain instantly started playing AC/DC's, Back in Black. I probably haven't listened to that song in 15 years and now I'm shuffling AC/DC on Spotify.
Also, the "Sub bass" link might be broken:
Did you know https://play.generative.fm/browse
I did not! Very cool. Thanks for sharing. Is there a way to see the source for the sounds?
Check out his work with Jon Hassel and if you feel like it 'Pearl'.
Both are - in my opinion, of course - awesome. Though the Jon Hassel collaboration may take a while to grow on you.
I often use the general algorithm for 2/1 as my "hello world" when I'm building new generative music systems. You don't need too many ingredients to set it up, and it yields some surprisingly decent sounding results.
The most recent one[0] I made was done when I was playing around with Rust, WASM, and WebAudio. (You'll need to press somewhere to start the sound)
Great sound!
This Sonic Pi example really blew my mind when I first heard it. Such a rich sound out of three notes.
use_synth :hollow
with_fx :reverb, mix: 0.7 do
live_loop :note1 do
play choose([:D4,:E4]), attack: 6, release: 6
sleep 8
end
live_loop :note2 do
play choose([:Fs4,:G4]), attack: 4, release: 5
sleep 10
end
live_loop :note3 do
play choose([:A4, :Cs5]), attack: 5, release: 5
sleep 11
end
endNice one! Really like the visualization, as a note starts expanding I try to predict what it will sound like.
I trained myself to take a power nap to track “2/2” on that record. After a really hard workout, getting cleaned up, having a bite to eat and drifting off for 30 minutes so many times it has a warm spot in my heart. I like that music can serve as “functional”. I also recommend Mindspring Memories if you have nostalgia of the personal computing boom for a unique ambient. To me it evokes what trying out a Phillips CD-i at my local department store felt like in 1991. YMMV
Reading this article makes me want to point out the difference between commercial music software and open source software.
What stands out here was that Eno used very simple sounds and looped them. This was not a complicated rube-goldberg machine he built to finally get to these masterpieces. It was simple recordings of voices, looped.
Reggie Watts makes incredible, and non-traditional, electronic house music, basically just his voice and looping machine (granted he does have a 4 octave range, but...). So organic and human.
Same for Matthew Herbert, see his manifesto: https://prruk.org/personal-contract-for-the-composition-of-m.... It is all organic.
This is what makes me a little sad when I play with all the amazing open source tools on Linux. Ardour is great. Hydrogen is great. Sonic-PI is incredible.
But, the UI's are not the best. Getting started requires a ton of reading and researching. It is a long way to just "play" (I mean playing like a child, not playing piano).
For example, I wish Sonic-PI had a better way of writing music than JUST writing out ruby. I like ruby as a language, and I'm surprised there is not a way to easily extend the Sonic-PI tool so I can plugin my Novation drum pad and easily trigger samples and notes. I can absolutely watch for MIDI notes from Novation, and take actions in ruby code, but it kills my creativity to do it that way. I wish I could build a tiny set of buttons that shows me that which is not a stream of logs. I never feel like Sonic-PI puts me into a creative mode. It feels like trying to jam the beauty of a harp into emacs. And, I love emacs.
Open source music software could have bespoke custom UIs for any user. I'm a command line guy so I'm part of the problem. But, these tools should be customizable to make our own bespoke UIs which match the beginner level, or the advance level, or anything in between.
> But, the UI's are not the best.
Try jumping into any DAW without "a ton of reading and researching".
Granted, there are hardware drum machines and sequencers that you can "play" with as a completely fresh user, but these tend to be the exception rather than the rule. The newer generation of hardware sequencers (say the Elektron series) are quite impenetrable without spending a significant amount of time learning about what they can do and how to do it.
> Open source music software could have bespoke custom UIs for any user.
from the voice of experience, I'll tell you that this makes user support almost impossible, or at least, extremely difficult and frustrating.
I 100% agree with everything you said.
But, when I use open source, I assume user support == "me supporting it". That often means reading the docs, reviewing source code, (and lately, asking claude...)
I'm just saying I want to be permitted to build my own UI, easily. I think that should be front and center in the design decisions. I sheepishly think of Sonic-PI, and how incredibly hard Aaron has been working for years and know he was rightly focused on the backend pieces, which are incredibly complex. I don't think he should do the "UI-only-for-me-and-not-for-thee" work, but maybe as a community we can start doing better about making bespoke UI possible.
You think open source has a UX problem? Try learning to play a guitar. It’s so bad it makes some people’s fingers bleed. People spend years learning how to play and they still say they have a long way to go!
You should check out Andrew and Ben's work, Extempore.
There is definitely a learning curve, but after reading the basics and poking through the examples, you realize you can do anything.
Lots of C libraries have wrappers already written and you can also write your own. I wrote a curl wrapper and pulled live data from sources such as weather APIs, assigned different facets of the data to different instruments and dynamics. You can write GL shaders and generally create your own interfaces.
It's also fully networked with sample-accurate synchronization, so that it's very easy to construct distributed computation and physical interaction. This is where the cyberphysical programming aspect comes into play.
Extempore has support for MIDI devices, and I've really pushed my gear to the limit with it. It is also very low level; you even write your own DSP. But you create libraries over time so that spontaneous jams don't require twenty minutes of fiddling first.
It took a lot of time to feel comfortable in the environment when I first got into it years ago, but with modern agentic IDRs such as Cursor, you should have a much, much easier time. It's great for writing algorithmic music and really great for freeform jam sessions. Lots of built in goodies that will really inspire you.
Also it's LISP.
I love this album. I often listen to it when programming, Ambient (or more generally: calm, instrumental music) helps me focus.
> I love this album. I often listen to it when programming
Me too. Its been a coding zone favourite of mine for many years.
The classical/instrumental version by Bang on a Can [1] is good too.
[1] https://www.discogs.com/release/1140705-Bang-On-A-Can-Brian-...
This album helps me wake up, helps me go to sleep, helps me focus, and keeps me centered. Eno's works are so versatile.
Another favorite is Eno's Discreet Music. Gives me chills every time. One of my favorite records to fly to.
Do you have any recommendations?
Sleep by Max Richter is great (and very long)
Sunset Mission by Bohren & Der Club of Gore is very very sleepy Jazz (they have released more albums, but this one is my favorite by a wide margin)
Long Ambients 1 & 2 by Moby - he was kind enough to make them available for download free of charge, too
Under Wires and Search Lights by Marconi Union
In A Silent Way by Miles Davis
Pretty much anything by Sigur Rós. It's not strictly speaking instrumental, but the lyrics are Icelandic, which I don't speak, so it's close enough
Cocteau Twins recorded many very ambient-ish albums. Not instrumental, but the "lyrics" are mostly glossolalia, so not distracting (at least for me).
No particular order:
Max Richter, John Cage, Tangerine Dreams, Klaus Schulze, Gavin Bryars, Richard Chartier, Asmus Tietchens, Tomaga, Boards of Canada, Stars of the Lid, William Basiniki, Joanna Brouk, Pauline Oliveros ...
I do way too much coding...
> Pauline Oliveros
Yes yes yes! Finally someone who won't make fun of me for listening to Horse Singd from a Cloud.
You should add Laurie Spiegel to your list, something tells me you'd enjoy.
"Deep Listening" by Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster and Panaiotis is also excellent:
> Laurie Spiegel
Just listening to "Appalachian Grove I" - Nice, thanks for the tip :thumbsup:
Excellent recs.
If anyone reading this like Bohren & Der Club of Gore, also check out Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble.
And if you vibe with Sigurd Ros, check out Godspeed You! Black Emperor too.
Here that is on spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3d3e49rSmge86cU4D4u8mn
Drone Zone on SomaFM (free internet radio) was how I discovered a lot of that stuff. Although they don't play the old classics as much these days, it's still good and they have a few similar stations there https://somafm.com/player24/station/dronezone
I generally find Deep Space One more appropriate for most of my coding, though I used Drone Zone a lot many years ago.
I've been supporting SomaFM for more than 20 years now, and am so grateful for it. Not just the ambient stuff, but Secret Agent and several others too.
I'll second Max Richter's Sleep. Timeline by Edith Progue might interest you too. The later is my favorite xcalm down" CD even before Max Richter's, when I'm too restless to sleep.
And maybe Glitch (music) might be of interest as a starting point, especially the "Clicks & Cuts Series" which gave me a lot of pointers to interesting niche artists.
Loscil - First Narrows album is great and was used in the game Osmos.
Ulrich Schnauss - Far Away Trains Passing by Album, particularly the songs "passing by" and "knuddelmous"
Kromattic "song "porcelain"
Peardiver - song "hangout"
lechiffrebeats - song Moonlight Garden
Lori Travel - song "apple lamp"
King of Woolworths - Song "Theydon"
Aisake - song "autumn Leaves"
Christopher Willits - song "wide"
Northscape - song "approaching the trig point"
Kiasmos - song "blurred"
Celer - song "Diphenhydramine"
Tony Anderson - song "Ariana"
East Forest - Album "Music for Mushrooms: A soundtrack for the Psychedelic Practitioner"
If you're on Apple Music, look for the shared playlist Lo-Fi Chill: https://music.apple.com/ca/playlist/lo-fi-chill/pl.1d5ead185...
For me - Aes Dana (Season 5 is still my favorite) and Carbon Based Lifeforms (Hydroponic Garden, World of Sleepers, Interloper).
Actually, check out the whole Ultimae catalogue: https://bandcamp.com/ultimae
Carbon Based Lifeforms are amazing.
Sadly they peaked pre 2010 and then slowly became average.. Was huge fan on the days and saw them live once and DJ set another time..
I guess I agree (used to be a massive 90's EBM collector together with my ex, though I kind of got out of the loop of EBM end of 00's / start of 10's). Seeing a Woob album from 1994 recommended a few comments below <3 for CBL, I do like the track ~42 degrees.
How we used to find music: go to the record store every week to listen to whatever you couldn't afford, look at P2P networks at people who like similar music as you, and browse their collections. Eventually, use Discogs to search. Or simply talk with other people (at parties, on the internet) who also like the same music.
How we can find music nowadays: Spotify (and such). I mean, seriously. Their suggestions can open you up to a plethora of new artists. If you then look at the top 10, chances are you'll like some of their work. I found a lot of music this way, for all kind of genres. As Valve's Gabe used to say: piracy is a service problem. Though I am not sure Spotify is so good for the artists, given they earn pennies via that.
..and it is still nowhere to getting and downloading and listening 24/7 to every new release (or, well... trying to), using SMB to the NAS (which automatically gets the releases from a scene FTP) and Winamp locally to add some .m3u files.
music for programming podcast: https://musicforprogramming.net/latest/
some of the artists below are not strictly speaking ambient as in brian eno kind of ambient
jogging house, r beny, biosphere, anthony childs (surgeon doing ambient), abul mogard, alessandro cortini, alva noto (glitchy ambient), benoit piouliard, bing & ruth, bvdub, mu tate, jake muir, ulla, log et3rnal, space afrika, heurco s, donato dozzy - plays bee mask, imaginary softwoods, jo johnson, koen holtkamp, mountains, kyle bobby dunn, oneohtrix point never, neel, pendant, romeo poirier, domenique dumont, …
Not OP but I also often to listen to ambient while programming. A couple recommendations would be "Music for Nine Post Cards" and other works by Hiroshi Yoshimura, and "Music for 18 musicians" and others by Steve Reich.
In fact, the use of loops described in this article reminded me of what Reich called "phases", basically the same concept of emerging/shifting melodic patterns between different samples.
I recommend Stair (2:22:22) by datassette for focus and ambient background. The artist recorded the sound of downtown Chicago overnight from his hotel and then processed and mixed this together with processed sounds from MS-DOS strategy game soundtracks from the 80s. Brilliant.
Biosphere - Shenzhou and Cirque, Stars of the Lid - The Tired Sounds of The Stars of the Lid are favorites of mine. I would also include everything by Microstoria which is not ambient but it works to the same end.
I have an 'Ambient Radio' channel on https://ambiph.one, my soundscape generator: https://ambiph.one/?m=1-Ambient+Radio-bf100
There are some great less-well-known artists on there - if you tap the album art it'll link you to their Bandcamp if they have one
Absolutely! For instrumental focus music, check out Nils Frahm or Max Richter. Do you prefer more electronic or acoustic sounds?
Woob 1194 by Woob. Immersive, maybe darker than most would like, but deep and very graphical sound.
A good place for experimental music is ubu web, in fact Brian Eno is also over there[1].
Edit:
Also if you're a programmer and what to learn a new programming language, then check out SuperCollider[2]. You can use that to create your own ambient sounds. SC has a great library for creating user interfaces along with creating sound.
There's also Strudel as a programmatic music composing app: https://strudel.cc/
My personal favourite for online is noisecraft, for example: https://noisecraft.app/1961
now that is fun to watch :)
A lot of great recs in this thread, but I'll a couple others I didn't see listed yet:
Mort Garson: Mother Earth's Plantasia
Hiroshi Yoshimura: Surround
Satoshi Ashikawa: Still Way (Wave Notation 2)
Shameless plug... Search BirdyMusic.com in Spotify/Apple Music/YouTube Music to hear some ambient music algo generated based on realtime Birdnet detections and weather in my backyard.
For a good intro the Sleepbot Environmental Broadcast radio is well worth listening to. Also their write up on how and why they produce the broadcast is really interesting.
Here's a playlist list of long-form ambient drone stuff I've been curating for a couple years now:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGMYnukvmgiXXFxuTKDvZfw-e...
I listen to it while I work.
i have a 5hr playlist on spotify called lost in the sea of ambien which happens to have many of the artist recos here. title is a reference to haruomi hosono who said he got lost in the sea of ambient in the 80s after leaving ymo.
If drone with later neoclassical touch then Marsen Jules has delivered very stable and top tier. Brilliant guy.
The best is the instrumentals on David Bowie's Low IMO.
I know people love Music for Airports but I think it is incredibly boring compared to what Eno did with Bowie.
Beyond that the first few albums by The Orb are top notch.
Balam Acab - See Birds and Wander/Wonder are incredible.
Aphex Twin's "Digeridoo" is incredible. It's a 4-song EP so it repeats often, but that's a feature for me.
I've not seen Global Communication mentioned, 76:14 really is masterpiece. (Gamers will recognize a tune featured on GTA IV)
Yeah, everything's interconnected as Tangerine Dream got to work on GTA V soundtrack. There is this note about that track on Wikipedia:
The track "5:23" is included in the 2008 video game Grand Theft Auto IV and appears on the soundtrack album The Music of Grand Theft Auto IV. In the digital release it is listed as "Maiden Voyage". This track is very similar to, but does not credit, the song "Love on a Real Train" by Tangerine Dream from the Risky Business soundtrack. They had remixed the song for a then upcoming Tangerine Dream remix album but had their effort rejected so released it as 5'23 instead.
I have so many suggestions.
But if I had to pick one: Stars of the Lid - The Tired Sounds of Start of the Lid
All of his and his brother, Roger's albums are great for this reason. I would recommend Svaneborg Kardyb as well, who are a great instrumental band.
Eno has been an inspiration for my entire music listening life. U2's Achtung Baby and Zooropa - both of which Eno was a partner in making - came out in my preteens. It's tough for a kid in the rural midwest to find Brian Eno, but as soon as I got to a place with cultural access I was all over his work. And once Pandora and internet radio came out I was able to go deeper and in to contemporary composition and other related genres.
But even with almost 30 years of listening to this stuff, sometimes a really obvious one slips through the cracks.
I hadn't heard of or listened to Tim Hecker until just this year. And oh man, I haven't felt this way about finding a "new" artist in a long time. If you want a good entry point start with his mid-career Ravedeath, 1972 [0] and its companion Dropped Pianos (both of which feature the MIT Piano Drop on the cover) and work forward and backward from there.
Weird - I also listened to ambient music for almost a decade before hearing about Tim Hecker. I have to second the recommendation, although I started in a different place - when I first heard Harmony in Ultraviolet, it was like something clicked into place. Ambient music had been missing something and I hadn't even known it.
I had a similar experience with Abul Mogard. Whoever they really are is a genius of immense soundscapes.
Brian Eno has this great line from the liner notes for this album:
"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."
I've always found ambient to be perfect for listening while working. Now I understand why!
Thanks for the quote. It shows why Eno was so successful - I find all my favorites work either as entirely background sound or as a total listening experience on their own.
I did not realize Eno could not read sheet music. I always thought he used graphical expressions in his presentations as an artistic choice.
I always assumed he spoke to the airport about what sorts of music it enjoys, this method seems needlessly hostile to user research.
I imagined it was what he - as an airport user - thought airports should play.
Previously:
How Brian Eno Created Ambient 1: Music for Airports (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33172448 - Oct 2022 (127 comments)
Related: “A 6-Hour Time-Stretched Version of Brian Eno's Music for Airports” – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43520122
"Ambient 4: On Land" is for me one of the most beautiful and mystical Albums of all time
I was often confused by Brian Eno and Brian Green, who made one of my favorite albums Music for Home. The later has been a musician and producer for Rufus Wainwright, Michael Bublé, John Legend and others.
Conny Plank was a catalyst or genius (or both). He keeps showing up when I look into some of my favorite produced music. Besides Kraftwerk, I think the Ultravox! album, "Systems of a Romance", was the next time I saw his name. And then, more and more…
Wow. I turned on the randomized tracks under the "Deconstructing 1/2" and it's beautiful.
I like this type of music when working and other things, that does not get many mentions. And they play a decent amount of Brian Eno's stuff.
http://www.echoesofbluemars.org/
I think their bluemars stream is great.
Wow! I had no idea blue Mars was still around. I've been looking for an alternative to soma fm
This is an insanely cool blog
I am always vastly impressed by the beauty of instrumental albums, and just how memorable and easy listening they are. Eno is of course so high up the list, but as I have got older I have explored instrumental music, from classical to jazz far more and there is true beauty and artistry in conveying your message and making people feel with just instruments and no words.