Brian Eno
Ambient 1: Music For Airports

So, let me get this straight… it was 1978, and at that time, the then thirty-year-old Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste De La Salle Eno (!) was simultaneously engaged in: 1. Releasing with Talking Heads the great “More Songs About Buildings and Food”; 2. Presenting three (3!) albums created and arranged under his avant-garde direction: “After The Heat” with Cluster, “Music for Films” and “Ambient 1/Music for Airports” under his name; 3. (Last but not least) touring the world alongside David Bowie in the celebratory tour of “Low” and “Heroes”. The incredible amount of work that the imaginative musical “superintendent” was shouldering might lead one to assume that quantity would come at the expense of quality in his works. But this prejudice is dramatically disproven by listening to his works: never trivial, sophisticated, in-depth, in a word “complete”.

Eno had started his career as a sound technician. After studying at the Academy of Fine Arts, he entered the “music world that matters” through his collaboration with Bryan Ferry's Roxy Music. He would soon move from collaborator to a true integral part of the group, but major contrasts precisely with Ferry would lead him to new experiences.
After eight albums under his name (among which stand out Another Green World with Phil Collins as a guest on a couple of tracks and Evening Star in cooperation with Robert Fripp) we arrive at this album with which Eno “architects” an entirely new musical way: “ambient” music. It's no coincidence the title reads: “Ambient 1/ Music for…” with the clear intent of revealing how this is music intended for listening in particular places and situations.
This album ties up the threads of an ambitious discourse started years earlier both with “Another Green World” and “Discreet Music” resulting in the peak of incorporeality Eno has always infused in his works.

The visionary and slightly paranoid character that distinguishes all of Eno's works receives particular consistency in this album. Starting from the titles of the tracks (four in total, but it is preferable to define them as “moments” or “movements”) that practically do not exist, leading up to the refined deconstruction of the work that is “released” slowly, with an almost imperceptible crescendo, interspersed with minimal plunges into the void, up to a climax that eccentrically will never arrive, leaving in the listener a subliminal desire to immediately re-listen to the entire album. Or at least that's what happens to me. In reality, the meaning of the work perfectly captures Eno's project: a record that can be listened to endlessly, giving a sense of novelty with each new listen and simultaneously the semblance of a sibylline incompleteness.

Four moments, as I was saying, united by a minimalist underlying setup. In the first, a gigantic Robert Wyatt produces delicate and harmless piano phrases repeated and reconstructed with a skillful game of mixing. The second moment, a result of pure arrangement and experimentation at the console, is the deconstruction and reconstruction of a female choir. The third moment is nothing but the right compromise between the two previous ones. The fourth is the passage designed to promote that sense of elegant incompleteness I was telling you about.
I can't affirm that it is a monumental work, but I can safely go as far as saying it is a record endowed with an irresistible and immutable charm. Sure, today, with electronics available to all musicians, creating such work would be child's play. But today for all of us, it's child's play to write after someone has already invented writing…