- Brian Eno Ambient 3 Zipper
- Brian Eno Ambient 4
- Lisa Loeb Eno Ambient #5
- Brian Eno Ambient 4
- Brian Eno Best
- Brian Eno Ambient 3
From field recordings to full-throttle drone music, ambient music is as varied as the spaces it is created to fill; a dream made of moving air, it might be psychedelic music’s purest form. Playlist 100 Songs — The genre that Brian Eno famously said should be “as ignorable as it.
Editors’ Notes Recorded in 1983 to accompany a documentary about the moon landing, Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks is the most accessible of all of Brian Eno’s ambient works. (Originally titled Apollo, it was later recut and rereleased as For All Mankind.)Though the music at times seems effortless and even plainspoken, it's the result of a tight-knit exchange among three individuals. Listen to Brian Eno – Ambient Vol. Listen to Brian Eno – Ambient Vol. 1 - 4 in full in the Spotify app. Play on Spotify.
Biography
Celebrated English musician and producer Brian Eno was born in Suffolk, May 15, 1948. He reached his first tangible success as a member of the art-rock outfit Roxy Music playing there from 1971 to 1973. Initially, he was placed behind the mixer desk equalizing the instruments of the other participants. However, he gradually began experimenting with the sound processing it with his synthesizer and other electronic devices. This soon made Eno a full member of the band, who was no longer hiding behind the backs of the others, but was playing and singing with them. When the promo tour for the group’s second album, For Your Pleasure (1973), was over, Brian exited Roxy Music and embarked on a solo career. His opening efforts were based on pop music strongly impacted by electronica.
After releasing the debut record, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) in 1974, Eno was forced to suspend his activities due to the long and difficult recovery after a car accident he had suffered in 1975. This could be the reason why the musician changed his musical preferences drastically after this event. This resulted in the 1975 record, Another Green World, bearing the first features of the emerging ambient style. The same year, Eno released an instrumental long player under the title Discreet Music, the first of the ten parts of the immense ambient artwork, fully and completely issued by the musician’s own label Obscure. In 1977, Eno made an attempt to come back to pop music with Before and After Science, but his main focus remained on experimentation. For instance, Music for Films (1978) became a certain type of soundtrack to a nonexistent motion picture. A year later, Brian delivered a peculiar album called Music for Airports. Its music had the purpose to free passengers from the fear of aircraft flights. At the same time, Eno maintained fruitful cooperation with several performers as a producer and musician. The most outstanding partnership of all was working with David Bowie and Talking Heads. As he entered the eighties, Brian Eno produced some of the famed U2 studio works. Still, this never posed him a problem to commit himself to his own music career.
In 1983, Eno recorded the Apollo Atmospheres and Soundtracks CD, based on the space inspired themes. In 1991, the album My Squelchy Life was already recorded and even released, but called off a little bit later. It was replaced by Nerve Net. In a short while, Eno released The Shutov Assembly. He kept working in several directions at a time and again formed top class tandem with David Bowie as he produced the singer’s album Outside (1995). Approximately at that moment, Brian explored deeply the concept of self-generating music. It implied creation and combination of separate music fragments and other sounds with their consequent reproduction in random order. In the new millennium, Brian Eno’s musical and producing activities did not cease in any possible manner. In 2001, he received Grammy for the excellent producing work on the U2 outstanding All That You Can't Leave Behind. One more year later, Brian again proved the endlessness of his creativity by releasing the experimental studio work Bell Studies for the Clock of the Long Now. 2005 saw him make Another Day On Earth, the first record in fifteen years featuring his vocals. It remains a great mystery what Brian Eno will bring to his listeners next time.
Brian Eno Ambient 3 Zipper
Studio Albums
Drums Between The Bells
![Zip Zip](/uploads/1/1/4/1/114184323/430909935.jpg)
Electronica guru Brian Eno presents his new studio effort, a gigantic album Drums Between The Bells, made in collaboration with poet Rick Holland
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Brian Eno Ambient 4
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Ten milestone recordings by the godfather of ambient music Brian Eno.
Words: Chris May
Until recently, aside from his early 1970s spell as Roxy Music’s flamboyant synthesiser player, the composer, musician and producer Brian Eno has favoured a generally quiet and retiring public presence. His work has attracted controversy: the genre-defining 1978 album Ambient 1: Music for Airports unleashed as much critical bile as it did praise, and 1981’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, a collaboration with David Byrne, attracted allegations of cultural imperialism in some quarters, and praise for weaving previously excluded traditions into rock in others. Even at the height of those debates, however, Eno mostly let his music speak for itself. He dislikes giving press interviews, and probably agrees with Frank Zappa’s observation that “rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read.”
In the 2010s, however, Eno is breaking cover. He is in the forefront of the public debate over the dangers and benefits of digital technology, championing algorithm-driven generative music, for instance, while continuing to laud analogue-era recording values. The issue figured in the John Peel Lecture he gave on BBC radio last year.
Eno’s biggest mainstream successes have been as a member of Roxy Music and, more recently, as the producer of U2 and Coldplay, but his most enduring music may well prove to be among his many solo and collaborative recordings. These span glam rock, art rock, avant funk, electronica, ambient, fourth-world and generative music. Eno self-deprecatingly describes them as “little ships floating on a sea of indifference.”
Eno has also produced over 50 albums for other artists, from U2 and Coldplay to Laurie Anderson, Seun Kuti, David Bowie, Baaba Maal and Grace Jones. For reasons of space, these have been put aside for later consideration. Here are ten of Eno’s most essential “little ships.”
Eno
Here Come the Warm Jets
(Island, 1974)
Here Come the Warm Jets
(Island, 1974)
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Eno played on Roxy Music’s first two albums, Roxy Music and For Your Pleasure, before quitting the band because of his increasingly dysfunctional relationship with lead singer Bryan Ferry, who wanted to be the visual focus of the line-up, a position threatened by Eno’s neon-lit sartorialism – heavy makeup, feather boas, corsets, stack heels and all – and who, in the studio, was also less experimentally inclined than Eno.
A high-proof cocktail of glam-rock and art-rock, Here Come the Warm Jets, Eno’s first album under his own name, features Roxy Music’s Andy MacKay, guitarist Phil Manzanera and drummer Paul Thompson, and suggests how Roxy Music might have developed under Eno’s leadership. Guests include King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp, a key Eno collaborator in the mid 1970s. Eno’s second own-name album, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), recorded a year later, is in a similar, though more nuanced, groove.
Fripp & Eno
(No Pussyfooting)
(Island, 1973)
(No Pussyfooting)
(Island, 1973)
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Recorded between autumn 1972 and summer 1973, while Eno was still a member of Roxy Music, this collaboration with Robert Fripp proved to be more indicative of Eno’s long-term approach to music-making than either Here Come the Warm Jets or Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy).
Lisa Loeb Eno Ambient #5
There are two side-long tracks, co-written by Fripp and Eno, which introduce the tape-looping technique, later known as Frippertronics, co-created by Eno and Fripp with a nod to American minimalist composer and audio innovator Terry Riley. Revolutionary for its time, (No Pussyfooting) still gets under the skin. Eno’s later ventures into ambient, fourth-world and generative musics are part-rooted here.
Eno
Another Green World
(Island, 1975)
Another Green World
(Island, 1975)
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This dreamlike, mainly instrumental album is a halfway post between the looping innovations of (No Pussyfooting) and the full-on new pastures of 1978’s Ambient Music 1: Music for Airports. Eno’s melody-rich compositions tend to foreground rather than dial-down the music, thereby disqualifying it from the description “ambient”.
Fripp guests on two tracks, as does Velvet Underground violist John Cale. Eno had recorded with Cale on the live-in-London album June 1, 1974, in an art rock supergroup which also included Kevin Ayers and Nico. (Gratuitous gossip: the cover shot of that album, taken minutes before the gig began, shows Ayers and Cale in an apparently relaxed, brotherly pose. The night before, however, Cale had caught Ayers having sex with his, Cale’s, wife. The show must go on).
Brian Eno
Ambient 1: Music for Airports
(EG, 1978)
Ambient 1: Music for Airports
(EG, 1978)
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Eno used the term ambient music to distinguish it from canned background-music such as Muzak. In his liner notes for this album, he wrote that while canned music regularised environments by smothering their acoustic and atmospheric idiosyncrasies in an audio comfort-blanket, ambient music was intended to subtly accentuate those idiosyncrasies. Eno has described ambient music as “rewarding attention but not being so strict as to demand it” – a definition which also highlights ambient’s key difference to new-age music, whose lack of substance is revealed if attention is given to it.
Ambient 1 was performed mainly by Eno (Robert Wyatt guests on piano on one track and there is a female vocal-trio on three) and mainly on electronic instruments. By contrast, another recommended album in the series, Ambient 3: Days of Radiance, featured the American zither player Laraaji, with minimal sound or tape manipulation by Eno.
Brian Eno Ambient 4
Brian Eno – David Byrne
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
(Sire, 1981)
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
(Sire, 1981)
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A forerunner of the so-called “world-music” which emerged later in the 1980s, the breathtakingly novel My Life in the Bush of Ghosts combines Eno’s ambient aesthetic with the culturally inclusive music of another collaborative album, Fourth World Vol. 1: Possible Musics, made by Eno with the trumpeter Jon Hassell and released in 1980.
Built on rock and funk foundations, and laced with Byrne’s singular take on gospel music, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts overlaid a variety of non-Western styles, notably from North Africa and the Middle East. Like Paul Simon’s South African-infused Graceland in 1986, the album attracted accusations of cultural imperialism from some quarters, including the Islamic Council of Great Britain, who successfully lobbied for the track ‘Qu’Ran’, featuring Koranic chanting recorded in Algeria, to be removed from reissues.
Harold Budd – Brian Eno
The Pearl
(Editions EG, 1984)
The Pearl
(Editions EG, 1984)
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Co-written by Eno and minimalist composer Harold Budd, The Pearl can be filed next to an earlier Eno/Budd collaboration, 1980’s Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror. The mix foregrounds Budd on looped and multi-tracked acoustic and electric piano, with gossamer-light background-washes by Eno on synthesisers. Co-produced with Daniel Lanois, another master of understatement, with whom Eno collaborated on the mid to late 1980s albums Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks, Thursday Afternoon, Hybrid and Textures. Glistening and spacious, The Pearl still stands as a high-benchmark of minimalist/ambient music.
Eno – Cale
Wrong Way Up
(Land, 1990)
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Wrong Way Up
(Land, 1990)
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This ultra-melodic, synthesiser-cored set is perhaps closer to art-pop than art-rock, and is unusual, too, for its vocals, which Eno had largely eschewed since the late 1970s. Wrong Way Up grew out of Eno’s production of Cale’s Words for the Dying in 1989, after which Eno invited Cale to spend a month living and recording at his home/studio in Suffolk. The music is gorgeous, but the creative process was not so harmonious, as the daggers separating the topsy-turvy Eno and Cale portraits on the front cover suggest. In a press release accompanying the release, Eno answered the question “Would you ever record with John Cale again?” with the words “Not bloody likely.”
David Byrne & Brian Eno
Everything That Happens Will Happen Today
(Todo Mundo, 2008)
Everything That Happens Will Happen Today
(Todo Mundo, 2008)
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Another rock going on pop production, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today was the first co-headlined album Eno and Byrne had made since My Life in the Bush of Ghosts in 1981. The album explores a theme that has since increasingly occupied Eno’s attention: the benefits of digital technology versus its threat to the retention of human values in cultural creation. But this is no modishly dystopian album, instead it is uplifting and ultimately optimistic.
Fripp & Eno
The Equatorial Stars
(Discipline Global Mobile, 2014)
The Equatorial Stars
(Discipline Global Mobile, 2014)
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Brian Eno Best
Another successful reunion. The Equatorial Stars – the title echoes that of Fripp and Eno’s last co-headlining album, 1975’s Evening Star – was recorded in 2004 and given CD-only release in 2005. The empathy between the guitarist and producer/keyboard player is undimmed after 30 years of, mostly, separation (the pair had worked together on some third-party productions along the way). Most of the tracks press the same, serene buttons as did (No Pussyfooting) and Evening Star. Others nudge the music towards more troubled waters or a touch of funk.
Eno – Hyde
High Life
(Warp, 2014)
High Life
(Warp, 2014)
Brian Eno Ambient 3
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One of two 2014 albums (the other is Someday World) co-headlined by Eno and Underworld vocalist/guitarist Karl Hyde. The production pays more than a nod to generative music, but the description Eno gave it in a 2014 interview was “Reickuti.” From Steve Reich, Eno said he was referencing repetition for its own sake: the idea that the more you repeat something the more your mind makes it appear to shape-shift and evolve. From Fela Kuti, he was referencing rhythmic-melodic interplay: such as the way the drum patterns played by Afrika 70’s Tony Allen implied many other parts, both rhythmic and melodic. In the band is Eno’s one-time Roxy Music colleague, saxophonist Andy MacKay, who played on Eno’s solo debut, Here Come the Warm Jets, four decades earlier. Which is where we came in.