Episode 115: Transience & Immersion: On Brian Eno's 'Music for Airports'

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 2 February 2022

⏱️ 76 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Soft, soothing, and understated as a rule, ambient music may seem the least weird of all musical genres. Not so, say JF and Phil, who devote this episode to Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports, the 1978 album in whose liner notes the term "ambient music" first appeared. In this conversation, your hosts explore the aesthetic, metaphysical, and political implications of a kind of music designed to interact with the listener -- and the listener's environment -- below the threshold of ordinary, directed awareness. Eno and Peter Schmidt's famous Oblique Strategies, a deck of cards designed to heighten and deepen creativity, lends divinatory support to the endeavor. Support us on Patreon Find us on Discord Get the new T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau! Get your Weird Studies merchandise (t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.) Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack REFERENCES Brian Eno, Ambient 1: Music for Airports Gabriella Cardazzo, Duncan Ward, and Brian Eno, Imaginary Landscapes Oblique Strategies Deck Theodore Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music Marc Auge, Non-Places Anahid Kassabian, “Ubiquitous Music” Sigmund Freud, “On Transience” Weird Studies, Episode 104 on Sgt. Pepper Joris Karl Huysmans, A Rebours Roger Moseley, Keys to Play Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Spectrevision Radio
0:03.3	Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.
0:23.3	For more episodes or to support the podcast, go to weird Studies. This is Phil.
0:52.8	This week, J.F. and I are discussing the composer, producer,
0:56.8	artist, and conceptualist Brian Eno, focusing on his 1978 album, Ambient One, Music for Airports,
1:04.6	but also touching on his oblique Strategies card deck, which we consult from time to time during
1:10.0	this episode. Brian Eno is a big
1:12.5	figure for both of us. He's a big figure for the art world at large, so big it's hard to fit all of
1:18.0	him in the frame. The man has collaborated on some of the greatest albums of the past half century,
1:23.6	including David Bowie's Lowe and Heroes, U-2's The Joshua Tree, and Talking Heads Fear of Music.
1:30.8	His own solo albums constitute one of the most formidable oeuvre's of any living composer.
1:37.0	But as Lester Bangs wrote, listing all the projects he's been involved with in his career so far
1:42.7	is a bit like trying to enumerate the variegate
1:45.4	colors and patterns on a lizard's back. Eno is one of those McLuhan-ish figures who, right from
1:51.6	the jump, saw the pattern in the media maelstrom and learned how to surf it. In this, he is comparable
1:57.5	to Glenn Gould, William Gibson, and McLuhan himself, all of whom we have
2:02.3	discussed in earlier episodes of the show. Like McLuhan, Eno is a thinker of the background. Inspired by
2:09.1	cybernetic thinkers like Stafford Beer, Eno reconceived composition as the engineering of self-regulating
2:15.3	systems, like the system of non-synchronous tape loops
2:18.4	that generates much of ambient one, music for airports.
2:22.8	He also conceived of music as being itself a part of larger environmental systems, for
2:28.3	example as music in an airport.
	...

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