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Ambient Music
- Wesleyan University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Ambient Music In 1978 I released the first record which described itself as Ambient Music, a name I invented to describe an emerging musical style. It happened like this. In the early seventies, more and more people were changing the way they were listening to music. Records and radio had been around long enough for some of the novelty to wear oV, and people were wanting to make quite particular and sophisticated choices about what they played in their homes and workplaces, what kind of sonic mood they surrounded themselves with. The manifestation of this shift was a movement away from the assumptions that still dominated record making at the time—that people had short attention spans and wanted a lot of action and variety, clear rhythms and song structures and, most of all, voices. To the contrary, I was noticing that my friends and I were making and exchanging long cassettes of music chosen for its stillness , homogeneity, lack of surprises and, most of all, lack of variety. We wanted to use music in a diVerent way—as part of the ambience of our lives—and we wanted it to be continuous, a surrounding. At the same time there were other signs on the horizon. Because of the development of recording technology, a whole host of compositional possibilities that were quite new to music came into existence. Most of these had to do with two closely related new areas—the development of the texture of sound itself as a focus for compositional attention, and the ability to create with electronics virtual acoustic spaces (acoustic spaces that don’t exist in nature). When you walk into a recording studio, you see thousands of knobs and controls. Nearly all of these are diVerent ways of doing the same job: they allow you to do things to sounds, to make them fatter or thinner or shinier or rougher or harder or smoother or punchier or more liquid or any one of a thousand other things. So a recording composer may spend a great deal of her compositional energy eVectively inventing new sounds or combinations of sounds. Of course, this was already well known by the mid sixties: psychedelia expanded not only minds but recording technologies as well. But there was still an assumption that playing with sound itself was a “merely” technical job [ 139 ] brian eno ⢇ —something engineers and producers did—as opposed to the serious creative work of writing songs and playing instruments. With Ambient Music, I wanted to suggest that this activity was actually one of the distinguishing characteristics of new music, and could in fact become the main focus of compositional attention. Studios have also oVered composers virtual spaces. Traditional recording put a mike in front of an instrument in a nice sounding space and recorded the result. What you heard was the instrument and its reverberation in that space. By the forties, people were getting a little more ambitious, and starting to invent technologies that could supplement these natural spaces—echo chambers , tape delay systems, etc. A lot of this work was done for radio—to be able to “locate” characters in diVerent virtual spaces in radio dramas—but it was popular music which really opened the subject up. Elvis and Buddy and Eddy and all the others sang with weird tape repeats on their voices—unlike anything you’d ever hear in nature. Phil Spector and Joe Meek invented their own “sound”—by using combinations of overdubbing, homemade echo units, resonant spaces like staircases and liftshafts, changing tape speeds and so on, they were able to make “normal” instruments sound completely new. And all this was before synthesizers and dub reggae . . . By the early seventies, when I started making records, it was clear that this was where a lot of the action was going to be. It interested me because it suggested moving the process of making music much closer to the process of painting (which I thought I knew something about). New sound-shaping and space-making devices appeared on the market weekly (and still do), synthesizers made their clumsy but crucial debut, and people like me just sat at home night after night fiddling around with all this stuV, amazed at what was now possible, immersed in the new sonic worlds we could create. And immersion was really the point: we were making music to swim in, to float in, to get lost inside. This became clear to me when I was confined to...