This essay is part of Analog Roam's ongoing Great Albums feature.

Ambient
Release date: 1978

Some records are just easy to get along with. Music for Airports is one of them. Brian Eno was needled endlessly in the 70's for being cold and distant and overly spare and wintry and chilly and... did I mention cold? And his detractors held up Music for Airports as a prime example. Just listen to this, they said. It's all brains, and no heart. It's some weird intellectual experiment instead of music. It's worthless.

You know the phrase "history will decide"? Well, it has in this case, and history has said, "Nonsense." Just listen to this, I say. It's beautiful. And what's more, it has helped shape the way we hear music.

Of course, it wouldn't quite be Eno if it didn't have a brainy concept driving the music. In this case, it's "ambient," a word so well worn in today's music that we forget someone had to invent it. Music for Airports is a peculiar and representative example of the way Eno thinks when he sets about thinking different. Everyone makes music to be listened to, Eno said. What if I made some music designed specifically not to be listened to? The result is something less than proper music, but something more than wallpaper. Airports may not be the kind of music one calls "involving," but neither is it alienating.

Eno, in a 1995 interview, compared himself to John Cage, who most certainly is chilly composer:

"I had a conversation with Cage once, and I said, 'Well, you're a polar explorer', and that's what he is really, he's someone who's staked out the, some very remote poles of modern music. I'm not a polar explorer actually; I would rather live in the South of France [laughs]." (from hyperreal.org)

You can hear the difference on the four tracks of Airports, compositions that are as simple and, at times, incomplete as music has ever been, and as quiet. The "songs" are nothing but tape loops made of tiny snatches of piano and voice — "samples," if you will — that never progress or build or go from A to B. There is no A or B in this music, but only the fact of its existence — the long, thin fact. Minute-long silences separate the songs, to deliberately let the listener forget that he has a record playing at all. And yet, this manages not to come across as math, and only barely sounds like an avant-garde experiment. It's warm and inviting, textural to an extreme, comforting and very pretty.