How Brian Eno Created Ambient 1: Music for Airports (2019) (reverbmachine.com)

I love this album. I often listen to it when programming, Ambient (or more generally: calm, instrumental music) helps me focus.

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.

"Ambient 4: On Land" is for me one of the most beautiful and mystical Albums of all time

I did not realize Eno could not read sheet music. I always thought he used graphical expressions in his presentations as an artistic choice.

Wow. I turned on the randomized tracks under the "Deconstructing 1/2" and it's beautiful.

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...

Previously:

How Brian Eno Created Ambient 1: Music for Airports (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33172448 - Oct 2022 (127 comments)

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)

0: https://pbat.ch/isorhythms/

    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
    end

This is an insanely cool blog

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.

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…

>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).

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.

I always assumed he spoke to the airport about what sorts of music it enjoys, this method seems needlessly hostile to user research.

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravedeath,_1972

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!

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.

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

This was wonderful. So inspiring.