By January 1975, Brian Eno worked like an electron. He bounded among projects and people, flitting into sessions only long enough to add what Peter Gabriel insisted upon calling “Enossification” to Genesis’ 1974 opus, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. A self-proclaimed non-musician, Eno would appear with his early EMS synthesizer in a briefcase, then wind others’ instruments through it or a panoply of tape recorders, augmenting their sounds with the excitement of the ineffable.
Then a free agent just shy of 27, Eno had already become a rock star with Roxy Music. He was the alien razzle-dazzle beauty, sashaying among his electronics and upstaging singer Bryan Ferry until the resulting tension prompted Eno’s exit. Other opportunities abounded, anyway: As he labored over his first two solo albums—obtuse hybrids of high-art idealism and glam-rock strut—he daydreamed about outré ensembles he might start but never did. Luala and the Lizard Girls, for instance, was his plan to pair his catholic sexual enthusiasms with his artistic transgressions. Like many other Eno hypotheticals, it never happened.
Though he couldn’t much play the clarinet, he lent his lack of skills (and budding imprimatur) to the Portsmouth Sinfonia, the amateur orchestra of composer Gavin Bryars that mutated the classical repertoire with uncanny allure. He even helped them secure an unlikely record deal. There were his foundational tape-and-guitar improvisations with Robert Fripp, sporadic dalliances with boyhood heroes Nico and John Cale, and his collaborative loyalty to the remaining members of Roxy Music not named Ferry.
Around the middle of January 1975, Eno was leaving a session with Roxy guitarist Phil Manzanera, daydreaming about what he’d just played and the sudden uncertainty of his career when he slipped on a drizzly London street. He fell into the path of a speeding black cab. Eno bled from the head and was badly bruised, but he soon returned home from the hospital to convalesce, an electron momentarily at rest.
What followed is now, nearly a half-century later, essentially the origin story of ambient music, as riddled with factual uncertainty as all good fables. On her way to visit Eno, Judy Nylon, his former roommate and confidant, bought a cheap album of antique harp tunes near the train station. As Eno lay in his living room, with the rain tinkling against the windows, Nylon put on the record and adjusted the sound to fit the ailing mood. Eno heard his new direction: He wanted to make music like this, sound that could enliven or enhance a space without overpowering it, like a faint stick of incense in the corner or a dim sconce glowing in the distance. Eno now wanted to render the antithesis of the preening rock’n’roll that had made him famous—no glory, only grace.
But first, he again worked like an electron. He would soon finish Another Green World, another ostensible rock album punctuated by opalescent instrumentals, and establish Obscure Records, a short-lived but crucial fountainhead for contemporary classical music. One of its first four records was his own, Discreet Music, an entrancing but halting attempt to re-create that living room calm with a 30-minute keyboard hypnosis and warped fragments of Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major. Eno assembled a potpourri of brief pieces for movies and commercials, then expanded it. He courted Talking Heads and Devo as their potential (and eventual) producer. And he repeatedly jetted to Berlin to join David Bowie on what would become the Berlin Trilogy and to Cologne to commune with Motorik idealists Cluster on a series of less commercial but eerie and luminescent works.
That’s when it happened: Sitting among the gleaming steel fixtures and softly glowing concrete lines of the modernist Cologne Bonn Airport on a sunny Sunday morning in late 1977, en route to his homebase, the perennially nervous flier recoiled once again at the canned pop pleasantries mindlessly piped into such an inspired space. The music was not only an afterthought but also insulting to the idea that you would soon climb into a sleek metal tube and be propelled by engines through the sky at 40,000 feet. “I started thinking, ‘What should we be hearing here?’ I thought most of all you wanted music that didn’t try to pretend you weren’t going to die on the plane, ” Eno, laughing but serious, told Stephen Colbert 34 years later, much as he’d said to Lester Bangs in 1979 and repeated in his own published diary in 1996. “Let’s face facts.”
Within a matter of months, Music for Airports was finished. Eno had struggled for years with the sessions that would become his de facto rock farewell, 1977’s Before and After Science, as he wrangled more than a dozen collaborators in two countries. But rock’s valence electron had finally found his perfect fit, coming to rest in the sound he’d been circling for years. This one—an act of near-complete self-reliance, informed by a decade of attentive listening, thought, and arguable artistic theft—arrived in a flash.
Alternately panned as a soporific joke or praised as a cathedral of escape, Music for Airports soon became Eno’s bestseller. And in the last half-century, of course, it has become so much more. Pragmatically and presciently co-titled Ambient 1, few albums have ever been more synonymous with the genre that followed, with the field of play they named. It is an ur-statement of scope and intent. “The listener, I felt, became the population of a sonic landscape,” he later wrote in the foreword to Mark Prendergast’s The Ambient Century, “and was free to wander round it.”
Systems had forever fascinated Eno. As an adolescent in a rural town near the Suffolk Coast, Eno was drawn to his grandfather’s player piano, which required no skill to activate and which he was soon modifying to render his own new melodies. As a budding teenage artist in Ipswich, he turned painting into performance art by trying to recreate someone else’s work by studying the pigmented drips they’d left on the floor. He loved Steve Reich’s early tape pieces, studied the groundbreaking ideas of David Tudor and John Cage, performed a La Monte Young composition that instructed him to repeat a sound as many times as he found necessary (three hours and counting!), and repeatedly installed a George Brecht piece in which water dripped from one container into another.
Synthesizers, tape recorders, and electronic circuitry at large allowed him to bring those propensities and experiences to bear on the rock music he also loved. He had magpied 30 secondhand tape machines by age 20, and, at 24, became the first person believed to be credited for “tapes” on a rock album, with Roxy Music’s debut. By the mid-’70s, writes David Sheppard in his authoritative biography, On Some Faraway Beach, Eno counted himself an apostle of Lee “Scratch” Perry and dub, particularly smitten by Perry’s 1974 rendezvous with King Tubby. The record’s back cover pictured their mixing consoles in striking chiaroscuro portraits, a secret handshake to anyone who believed in the endless possibilities of the studio.
Eno also found several kindred spirits among the German explorers that shaped the krautrock frontier. Chief among them may have been Conny Plank, a slightly older but no less adventurous engineer who had worked with Karlheinz Stockhausen and then converted a farmhouse outside Cologne into a cozy country studio. By the time he and Eno met there in 1977 for the first of two sessions with the duo Cluster, Plank had helped nurture that atmospheric vanguard through classics with Neu!, Kraftwerk, and Harmonia. He celebrated the value of craziness, especially in the studio. “Conny always seemed to enjoy the idea that something we didn’t yet recognize would appear,” Eno later remembered of Plank, who died a decade after their first sessions at the age of 47. “[He] wanted to be surprised, to hear something new.”
And then, thanks to Plank, it was Eno who heard something new. During a return trip to Cologne in early 1978, months after he’d had his airport epiphany, Eno saw the reels of tape that Plank and former Can bassist Holger Czukay had meticulously spliced together from samples of shortwave radio transmissions, disco drums, highlife guitars, and Arabic singing. Eno had been struggling to make yet another rock record as a lead singer, and these patchwork spools presented a way out: Someone else could sing, and the system could do the job for him.
Plank’s partner, the actress Christa Fast, typically fed the musicians, often baking sumptuous cakes. Now, though, Eno gathered her and two studio assistants, Inge Zeininger and Christine Gomez, to sing simple “aahs” alongside him, a little plainsong choir. He and Plank cut bits of tape from the results, spooling loops of slightly different lengths around the legs of the studio’s metal chairs, mixing the voices in real time. They thought it was beautiful, celestial—like flying, maybe? This was the start of the music for airports he’d imagined.
Eno had also been interested in another very different system, even before Roxy Music began at the decade’s dawn. Inspired in part by the casual classics of Bryars’ Portsmouth Sinfonia, he liked to assemble ad hoc ensembles, offer vague instructions (including his famous Oblique Strategies), and listen for resulting bits of intrigue. It was an extrapolation of John Cage’s indeterminacy, applied to rock settings. As Robert Fripp once put it, “He’s my favorite synthesizer player, because instead of using his fingers he uses his ears.”
Back in England, he asked old chum Robert Wyatt to hop on the piano, with audio engineer Rhett Davies on Fender Rhodes and the maverick Fred Frith on guitar. No one could hear anyone else, but, listening back, Eno spotted a synchronous moment when a six-note Wyatt phrase not unlike the French nursery rhyme “Frère Jacques” intersected with Davies’ electric piano just so. He cut the tape, built a loop, excised the guitar, slowed it all to a narcotized pace, and played along, augmenting the phrases where he saw fit. Music for Airports, for all intents and purposes, was finished.
Though it was the last piece to materialize, Eno smartly made that augmented 17-minute loop from the studio jam Music for Airport’s opening gambit, calling it “1/1,” or Track 1 on Side 1. On an album where the pieces are so amorphous they suggest Young’s ideas of music that would go on forever, it is the most recognizably shaped, with Wyatt’s trusty piano pattern recurring like mileposts on some desolate and enchanting highway.
True to Eno’s aviation intent, “1/1” suggests the feeling of being held aloft by a partner, parent, friend, mattress, or anything else that buoys you as you begin to sag. His synthesizer passes—faint at first, gradually growing bolder—reinforce that sensation by cradling Wyatt’s piano phrase, by lifting higher the very thing that is doing the uplifting. Sure, death had been on Eno’s mind at the Cologne airport, but the future feels suddenly limpid during “1/1.” A haze steadily dissipates, and the sky brightens, with something new now lingering on the horizon.
Both “1/2” and “2/1”—twin outgrowths of that vocal experiment with Plank and company in Cologne—maintain that sense of the future with vastly different instrumentation and implications. Though his voice is indeed nestled inside the quartet, Eno is nearly a phantom during “1/2,” letting the spools of tape move in and out of sync to create harmonies so soft and slow they almost feel inhuman, pillowing and billowing and collapsing and returning.
“As the piece progresses, what you hear are the various clusterings and configurations of these six basic elements. They stay the same,” Eno told a rapt San Francisco audience in 1996. “But the piece does appear to have quite a lot of variety.” This, then, is the sheet of clouds in the sky, the same few substances morphing in endless permutations. They suggest that there is an upper limit, that a ceiling has been reached; you can float in that state of grace for as long as you like but can go no higher. On Music for Airports, “2/1” lasts nine minutes. Eno has teased a 30-minute rendition, and you can spend much longer inside it during this radiant time-stretched take. It is music that seems to begin and end only because physical media has material limits.
