Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports is a landmark album in ambient and electronic music. Although it wasn’t the first ambient album, it was the first album to be explicitly labelled as ‘ambient music’. [..] In this article, I’ll discuss how Music for Airports was created, and I’ll deconstruct and recreate the tracks 2/1 and 1/2. Hopefully, the article will demystify some of Brian Eno’s techniques, and give you some ideas about how to adopt some of his ambient music techniques yourself.
I’m a sucker for this nerdy stuff. I didn’t know Brian Eno designed the cover art for the whole Ambient series himself. Also, oh my God, take a look at the graphic score. It is mesmerizing. It looks like mysterious alien notation, gifted to us, humble hearthlings, to ponder1.
How Brian Eno Created Ambient 1: Music for Airports
“Not a trained musician and unable to read or write sheet music, he used graphic symbols to denote each musical phrase or loop”. ↩︎