Brian Eno - Así comenzó la música ambient

19 de septiembre 2014

El disco Music for Airports de Brian Eno prácticamente dio comienzo a lo que se conoce como música ambient. Compré este disco en formato elepé en Discomanía cuando estudiaba en la UPR, si mal no recuerdo fue en 1988.


Dice la sagrada Wikipedia:

Ambient 1: Music for Airports is the sixth studio album by Brian Eno. It was released by Polydor Records in 1978. The album consists of four compositions created by layering tape loops of differing lengths. It was the first of four albums released in Eno's "Ambient" series, a term which he coined to differentiate his experimental and minimalistic approach to composition from "the products of the various purveyors of canned music".^[11] Though it is not the earliest entry in the genre, it was the first album ever to be explicitly created under the label "ambient music."

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The music was designed to be continuously looped as a sound installation, with the intent of diffusing the tense, anxious atmosphere of an airport terminal. To achieve this, Eno sought to create music "as ignorable as it is interesting."^[11] Rather than brightening the atmosphere as typical background music does, Music for Airports is "intended to induce calm and a space to think."^[11] Eno conceived this idea while spending several hours waiting at Cologne Bonn Airport in Germany in the mid-1970s and being annoyed by the uninspired sound atmosphere.^[12]

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...in "1/1", a single piano melody is repeated and at different times other instruments will fade in and out to create a complex, evolving pattern as the sounds fall in and out of sync with each other.

Talking about the first piece, Eno has said:

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I had four musicians in the studio, and we were doing some improvising exercises that I'd suggested. I couldn't hear the musicians very well at the time, and I'm sure they couldn't hear each other, but listening back, later, I found this very short section of tape where two pianos, unbeknownst to each other, played melodic lines that interlocked in an interesting way. To make a piece of music out of it, I cut that part out, made a stereo loop on the 24-track, then I discovered I liked it best at half speed, so the instruments sounded very soft, and the whole movement was very slow.[14]