The Sound of Thinking: A Guide to Ambient Music

The story goes that Brian Eno, recovering from an accident in 1975, received a record of harp music from a visitor. Too weak to get up and adjust the volume, he listened to it at a level barely above the threshold of audibility—competing with the sound of rain outside the window. The effect was revelatory: the music and the environment merged into something neither had been independently. From this accident, Eno developed a theory. Ambient 1: Music for Airports arrived in 1978 with a manifesto attached.

Eno’s concept proposed music that could accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing any one in particular—that could exist in the environment rather than demanding to fill it. The precedents were clear: Erik Satie’s furniture music, the long-form compositions of La Monte Young, the prepared piano experiments of John Cage. But Eno gave the idea commercial form and a name, and the name stuck. Music for Airports was actually played in some airports, and the experience—cool, clean, faintly melancholy—was unlike anything that had been piped through a public address system before.

Harold Budd brought a lyrical warmth to the ambient project. His collaborations with Eno—The Plateaux of Mirror, The Pearl—placed slowly decaying piano notes in reverb fields of extraordinary beauty. The harmonic language was simple; the emotional effect was complex. Stars of the Lid, two decades later, built their drone-based orchestral pieces from string arrangements and slowly evolving guitar tones that seemed to breathe rather than play.

Ambient music asks nothing of you, which is how it asks everything.

The new age movement represented ambient music’s commercial dilution and, many felt, its betrayal. Where Eno’s concept had been rigorous and philosophical, new age deployed similar sonic materials for relaxation and therapeutic effect, softening the edges of the tradition rather than sharpening them. And yet the market it created—for music without pulse, without lyric, without conventional structure—made it easier for genuinely experimental ambient artists to find listeners than might otherwise have been the case.

Contemporary ambient has been transformed by the tools of digital production. Fennesz, working from Vienna, produces music by processing guitar through laptop software, creating textures that are simultaneously organic and electronic— shimmering, corroded, unmistakably of the twenty-first century. William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops—recordings of deteriorating tape, made as the World Trade Center burned—gave ambient music one of its most profound and specific documents. Oneohtrix Point Never draws on library music and early computer music to produce work of considerable conceptual sophistication.

Ambient’s gift to music is the proposition that listening is not always active— that sound can move through the listener as well as to them. In practice, the best ambient records reward close attention as richly as they accommodate passive reception. There is more happening in a minute of The Pearl or Music for Airports than ten minutes of more conventionally demanding music might contain. The genre quietly insists that what you hear and what you attend to are not the same thing.