Ambient 1: Music for Airports
| Ambient 1: Music for Airports | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Studio album by Brian Eno | ||||
| Released | 1978 | |||
| Recorded | 1978 in London, England and Cologne, Germany | |||
| Genre | Ambient, minimalism | |||
| Length | 48:32 | |||
| Label | ||||
| Producer | Brian Eno | |||
| Brian Eno chronology | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |  |
| The Austin Chronicle |  |
| Encyclopedia of Popular Music |  |
| Mojo | |
| Pitchfork | 9.2/10 |
| Rolling Stone | |
| The Rolling Stone Album Guide | |
| Slant Magazine | |
| Spin Alternative Record Guide | 4/10 |
| Sputnikmusic | 5/5 |
| The Village Voice | B+ |
Ambient 1: Music for Airports is the sixth studio album by Brian Eno, released by Polydor Records in 1978. The album consists of four compositions created by layering tape loops of differing lengths, and was designed to be continuously looped as a sound installation, with the intent of defusing the tense, anxious atmosphere of an airport terminal.
Music for Airports was the first of four albums released in Eno's "Ambient" series, a term which he coined to describe music "as ignorable as it is interesting" in distinction to "the products of various purveyors of canned music." Though it is not the earliest entry in the genre, it was the first album ever to be explicitly created under the label "ambient music."
Eno conceived of the idea for Ambient 1 while spending several hours waiting at Cologne Bonn Airport in Germany in the mid-1970s and being annoyed by the uninspired sound atmosphere. The music was designed to be continuously looped as a sound installation, with the intent of defusing the tense, anxious atmosphere of an airport terminal by avoiding the derivative and familiar elements of typical "canned music". To achieve this, Eno sought to create music that would "accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting." Rather than brightening and regularizing the atmosphere of an environment as typical background music does, Music for Airports is "intended to induce calm and a space to think."
The album marked the beginning of Eno's "Ambient" series of albums, conceived with the intent 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." Eno had previously created similarly quiet, unobtrusive music on albums such as Evening Star, Discreet Music, and Harold Budd's The Pavilion of Dreams (which he produced), but this was the first album to give it precedence as a cohesive concept.
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