Brian Eno
Discreet Music

Brian Eno was walking along Harrow Road, his mind elsewhere. It was 1974. He had left Roxy Music 2 years earlier and now, after "Taking Tiger...", he needed some good ideas. However, for some time, strange thoughts had been swirling in his mind, vaporous thoughts... watery... elusive thoughts, difficult to grasp. What would happen if someone, having finished a tempera painting that seems very interesting but still needs to be seen clearly under the light, decided to run their hand over it to remove the bits of already solid color and the brush hairs left behind? The painting would be smeared in a completely chaotic way, and droplets of water would trickle down like little pearls towards the edges of the paper... And in this way, Brian's thoughts disappeared, and if he tried to catch them again, because he couldn’t wait, they would dissolve once more...

THEN A SCREECH OF TIRES, A CRASH, DARKNESS.

When he reopened his eyes, he found himself in a bed in his Maida Vale house, bandaged. He noticed the presence of his musician friend Judy Nylon in the room.
"What happened?"
"You were hit by a taxi, Brian."
"Hit? I don’t remember..."
"Now you just have to rest!"
"And for how long?"
"For a long period. You just need to stay calm..."
A few days had passed. Brian's eye fell on the bedside table. On it was the record that Judy had gifted him: 18th-century harp music. He played it. He lay back down, exhausted, and listened intently. Shortly after, he reopened his eyes: he must have fallen asleep... Gradually he began to hear a dull noise, almost imperceptible, in the background. Brian Eno didn’t know that one speaker of his stereo was broken and that the volume knob was almost completely low. Slowly, something began to form in his head, at first very confused, then gradually clearer and more distinct. He clearly saw the "pieces" of that thought coming together gradually and harmoniously, and when that thing fully formed, he grabbed it quickly. It was done!...

Brian Eno didn't know that that day, immobilized in bed, he had witnessed the birth of the so-called ambient music. A year later, a Brian Eno album titled "Discreet Music" was released. This was perhaps the first album that ventured into a new kind of music, a sort of non-music music, meaning music that exists but shouldn’t be there... new atmospheres of static drifting, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!, NEW ATMOSPHERES OF STATIC DRIFTING!... an invisible music, a music that describes the reflection of light on glass, a music that floats in the sleepy and silenced early afternoon and in the colorful neon of the night.. a music made of slight variations on a theme, similar to light brushstrokes that describe the things around us... a very relaxing music... "Discreet Music": sounds that exist to enable us to listen to silence. Just think about it...