Learning to Listen to Ambient Music

Brian Eno’s famous dictum that ambient music should “accommodate many levels of listening attention without forcing one in particular; it must be ignorable as it is interesting” leaves the music with a tightrope to walk: it must be interesting enough to sustain an attentive listener, but ignorable enough to serve as background noise. It also leaves a unique challenge to the listener, as the ambiguity inherent in the mission of Eno’s ambient leaves them to decide: how best to listen to the music?

While Eno’s formative experience with ambient – a friend left music too low to be fully heard while he was hospitalized after a car accident – wouldn’t come until later that year, and he wouldn’t consciously pursue something he called “ambient” until three years later, the beginning traces of his ambient work can be found in the 1975 album Another Green World. Typically lumped in with his early “vocal” albums, only 5 of the 14 tracks feature vocals; they are scattered throughout the album (unlike the Eno-assisted Low), as if to re-center the listening experience on something recognizably human in an otherwise alien landscape. A fixation with the inhuman would come to haunt Eno’s ambient works, but here his voice is there to ground us, and the album cover features humanoid figures, which, starting with Discreet Music, none of his ambient albums would. The vocal tracks are good as far as they go, if they sometimes seem a little de rigueur for Eno.

The instrumental tracks on Another, on the other hand, are as interesting as they are impossible to ignore. A melancholic synth fades in and out, backed by a hypnotic drum beat, as the music swells on “The Big Ship,” a track which seems to me an ode to the march of progress. It is one of the few hopeful instrumental songs on the album. “In Dark Trees” disturbs with its central riff, repeating, echoing xylophone and dark synth undercurrents, which defy the naturalness suggested in the title. “Sombre Reptiles” is similarly melancholic. But as the album progresses the songs lose their emotional clarity, prefiguring Eno’s later ambient works. “Little Fishes” is playful and small, a musical equivalent of a nursery rhyme. “Becalmed” and “Zawinul/Lava” build themselves up to no avail, ending as mysteriously as when they began.

Nonetheless Another Green World does seem to suggest a certain style of listening on the continuum of background noise and full attentiveness. The songs share a hypnotic repetition – reminiscent of the “Oblique Strategies” card (which Eno would develop with Peter Schmidt later that year) that reminds us that “repetition is a form of change” – that encourages a peculiar form of engagement. Especially in the first half of the album, where the tracks have a clear emotional tenor, the songs allow one to get lost in oneself, in one’s thoughts and dreams, while being unobtrusively guided by the music. The songs shape the experience without overpowering it, suggesting certain reactions without forcing them.

Discreet Music is where the vision of ambient first coalesced (though it still didn’t go by the name). The 32-minute title track is made up of a few synth notes gently floating in and out of consciousness, with minor variations throughout. The song seems to cyclically expand and contract, benignly peaceful – the experience can be transcendent. This would turn out to be at odds with the project of Ambient 1/ Music for Airports, whose liner notes are the source of the “ignorable as it is interesting” moniker. Where Ambient 1 defies the expectation that art be a self-contained entity, metaphysically higher than ordinary experience and utilitarian objects, Discreet Music exemplifies it. Ambient 1 becomes part of its environment, its sound mixing with it in ways Eno cannot control; Discreet Music is an all-encompassing aesthetic experience, despite its ignorability. Their disunity hints at the fundamental ambiguity in the promise of ambient, the alternative directions it can take; both live up to Eno’s phrase, but entirely differently. They demand to be listened to differently.

Ambient 1 shares a guiding premise with John Cage’s 4’33” (1952): to highlight the incidental sounds of the listening space – in Cage’s case, the conversation of those in the concert hall, seats shifting, coughs, staff moving in and out – thereby revealing the social construction of the concept of music. The idea that Cage’s piece is about silence seems to me a misinterpretation. The silence of the composer only serves to display the sounds of the audience, the ambient noise generated in the space. Once the composer has shifted one’s attention to it, the “non-musical” (i.e., ignorable) sounds of the audience can be heard for the first time, not as a distraction from the music but as constituting it. Like 4’33”, Ambient 1 gives its audience very little; even the titles have lost their descriptiveness (compare “1/1” and “2/1” to “The Big Ship” or “Unfamiliar Wind”). The sound, like that of 4’33”, is meant to be uncontrolled to some extent. Both thus share a central thought with the “Oblique Strategies” deck – to welcome randomness into not only the production but the product itself. Chance is not incidental but crucial to the art itself. But Eno’s ambient music after Music for Airports would lose this shared purpose with 4’33” as he pursued more of the aesthetic wholeness of Discreet Music.

These elements of ambient – and minimalist music generally – were roundly criticized by the music press of the time. It was uninteresting, unoriginal (mirroring the classic dig at modern art of “even I could do that”), in a sense hardly even music. Rolling Stone found Music for Airports boring, and a failure by its own terms. One critic compared a minimalist composer’s music to waves rolling on a shore: pretty, but meaningless. Meaninglessness was a common theme of the criticism, as ambient and minimalism lacked melody and progression, elements typically thought to impart meaning on a song. But these critics were listening for the wrong things; they hadn’t yet learned how to listen to ambient.

After his collaborations with Harold Budd and Laraaji on Ambient 2 and 3 (on the latter of which he is credited only as a producer), Eno produced his most haunting album of the ambient series in Ambient 4. Listening to On Land gives a disquieting sense of dislocation in time, a past sense of a future never come. It is the specter of the futures foretold in Blade Runner, Dune and Solaris, with their attendant mixture of futurism and dystopia, and confusion of the human and inhuman. What haunts us is a melancholy imposed retrospectively by an audience who knows that that future hasn’t come, that it won’t come. The music constantly shuttles us between this lost sense of the future and the past, the past of human vulnerability to the environment. The sounds of nature oppress on this album in a way nature rarely dominates us anymore.

The song titles typically suggest something natural, as though ambient here seems to mean simply capturing, rather than creating a soundscape. All human elements have been abstracted away, leaving only an eerie sense of the nature indicated in the titles. It’s as if Eno recorded a Jurassic swamp transplanted into the 70’s and early 80’s idea of the future, with its juxtaposition of the sounds of frogs and crickets (and are those monkeys on “A Clearing”?) and synths. On “Tal Coat,” for example, synths bubble up, as if from a swamp, in an odd mix of the protean and futuristic. “Lizard Point” and “Lantern Marsh” are oppressive and minimal, reminiscent of Burial. The sound opens up slightly on, fittingly, “A Clearing,” before the sun rises on “Dunwich Beach.”

I find Ambient 4 to be the best of Eno’s ambient series, but with it the fibers connecting the four albums of the series are definitively cut. No longer is the music ignorable. But if on 4 it becomes clear that Eno has moved beyond “ignorable as it is interesting” as a guide for the project, it still fulfills the promise of ambient in its own way. It shares Discreet Music’s desire to create a total musical experience, but lacks its trance-like function. Rather, ambient in On Land is, as noted above, about creating the illusion of having captured sound rather than having created it. One has a sense of having stumbled on a pre-existing environment. On Land, therefore, suggests its own pattern of activity and passivity, attention and distraction for listening, quite different from any of the other ambient works.

Despite the disunity of his projects, Eno’s ambient work instigated (and catalogued) a revolution in the uses of sound. He eroded how we thought to listen, like waves lapping on a shore.

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