Brian Eno & Harold Budd
Ambient 2: The Plateaux Of Mirror

Essential History of Electronic Music

VIII. Eno and the Non-Musical Revolution

Decades of debates have raged over the most recognized question in modern music: Who are greater, the Americans or the British? It would take an excess of presumption to hope to untie this Gordian knot, a bold insight aimed at tipping the scales in favor of one based on supposed merit, a boasted endowment. Not that presumption has nothing to do with the world of music criticism, but in an analysis neither here nor there like this one, it will suffice, merely for the sake of record, to note that England simply had Brian Eno.

Eno was not only the reinterpreter of a new form of rock, an eclectic musician and versatile talent, but he was also and above all an aesthete, an histrionic figure capable of inventing a new approach to music in the controversial rock era of the '70s. In homage to Brit-rock like The Who and Pink Floyd, Brian released in the early '70s a precious sequence of musical works where, based on a constant use of electronic elements, he mixed rock, avant-garde, and ethnic contamination. The result is a rudimentary form of electro-rock, the first effective example of rock with traditional foundations but innovative and atypical instrumentation: "Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy" (1974), "Another Green World" (1975), and "Before And After Science" (1977) form a commendable triptych in which masterpieces like "True Wheel", "Backwater", "King's Lead Hat", and "I'll Come Running" betray a new forward-thinking conception of pop-rock, a new characterization of recreational music through synthesizers and electronic keyboards. In this sense, Brian Eno is a visionary experimenter, a musician capable of revolutionizing a genre starting from its foundational bases, an artist able, in essence, to associate his name with the various branches of an entire musical container. In a talented mystical insight, just a year after his last synthetic rock masterpiece "Before And After Science", Brian Eno is able to reinvent himself by totally changing direction. It's 1978 when, inspired by the teachings of Erik Satie, he publishes the first forward-looking example of what he himself defines as "ambient music", the monolithic "Music for Airports", a soundless symphony in four movements for piano, synthesizer, and vocal sampling. It is a work of monumental importance, a solid electroacoustic opus through which a new approach to musical matter is theorized: as Eno himself states in the album notes, music for airports is music to be conceived as background ambience, a "hue" capable of enriching spatial backgrounds generally stigmatized by normal musical productions, an object without emotional and pathetic attributes, not perceived through any particular level of attention except the personal one depending on the degree of interest invested. Ambient music is essentially an object to "be heard", not "listened to", to be perceived in such a large space that an ad-hoc listening session cannot be conceived, an airport that is both a physical location and mental space. It is the true revolution in the approach to musical matter, a new theory capable of inspiring dense throngs of interpreters in the '80s and '90s, all those who devoted themselves to genres such as entertainment electronics, chill-out, and ambient house. The use of electronics, very dear to Eno, is epitomized in the use of the electric piano and the synth (in the fourth movement an ARP 2600 is used), marvelous examples of the British musician's need to portray ambient watercolors primarily through synthetic manipulations. The ambient project will soon count three more chapters: "The Plateaux Of Mirror" written with the minimalist genius of Harold Budd, "Day Of Radiance" and "On Land"; of these, only the second will deviate little from Eno's electronic design, lending itself to the rich personal instrumentation of the American musician Laraaji, collaborator, and co-executor of the project.

"The Plateaux Of Mirror" in fact continues the discussion started with "Music For Airports", indulging in more melodic and structured representations capable of partially distancing themselves from the ambient uniformity of the first work. Harold Budd is a master carver of sounds, a refined artist capable of forging small instrumental haikus suspended between surreal and real, mindful of the poignant dream lesson of "The Pavilion Of Dreams" that four years earlier was a gentle and admirable example of subconscious music. "First Light" and "An Arc of Doves", of stirring beauty, express in a purely minimalist style, personal and collected expressions, frugal sources that lead the listening to a meticulously individual experience. Eno's ambient music redefines itself through the emotional element, blending the acoustic base of the piano with the usual electronic manipulation capable of staining and spatially dilating an elemental sound. The meta-melodic texture of "Above Chiangmai" and "Not Yet Remembered" clearly traces back to music for airports, indulging in those vocal insertions and minimal cells so dear to Eno, and through the cosmic parade of "Wind In Lonely Fences", it accesses the insights that will characterize the hyperuranic "On Land". "Failing Light", in closing the anthology promptly started with "First Light", sets the stage for the third chapter of ambient music, the "acoustic" "Day Of Radiance". It is, as said, the most atypical of the four chapters, though exquisitely filling and ambient, as much and more than the previous works: performed by the American artist Laraaji, it is a work performed through electronic versions of some string instruments such as zither and dulcimer; Eno's imprint is here present only at the production level, and the overall effect, although still magnificently enhanced by electronic innovation, is noticeably acoustic. In this sense, the work breaks the deaf rhythm of Eno's metaphysical setting, instead profiling as a long instrumental mantra of oriental inspiration.

Of an entirely different style is finally "On Land", the concluding chapter of the Briton's ambient work, a dark and murmuring description of a landscape teeming with subcutaneous sounds. Once again, the synth is the key element, the composed stitch through which are tied a few bass notes, hints of transfigured brass, and concrete music. In "On Land" Eno accesses thus the most faithful description of ambient music, recording on tape the noises that the environment itself produces: the rustle of the wind, the buzz of insects, the cawing of crows. It is the lesson of Stockhausen and Boulez translated into music conceived as furniture, further demonstration of a musical culture, that of Eno, capable of contemplating varied and multifaceted languages. It is the definitive culmination of a journey that has just found conclusion, an excursion that, starting from the conceptual definitions of "Music For Airports", arrived first at the expressionism of "The Plateaux Of Mirror", then at the transcendence of "Day Of Radiance", finally at the concrete music of "On Land".

Through the versatile genius of Brian Eno, the ambient form of electronics has been realized, the use of music as a non-listening experience and psychic space. It's an unparalleled alternative path, capable of determining a unique and imitable experience in the history of contemporary music. Artists like Orb and Aphex Twin will make much of it, but that's already another story...