1.
There’s a moment in Brian Eno’s hour and a half interview at the Red Bull music academy in New York where the presenter is about to cue up some of Eno’s music for a BBC program. He accidentally cues up the wrong piece of music and attempts to cue up the correct one. “Oh who cares,” Eno jokingly exclaims, “they all sound the bloody same.” The audience and interviewer chuckle. If any other musician would say something so blatant, admitting that perhaps not each piece of music is its own singular work, it might be tantamount to admitting something that Eno’s critics have been arguing for a long time: it’s all basically the same. However, as fans of Eno have known since he started making ambient music in the mid-70s, these pieces of music are designed to be interchangeable, designed to be ignored. Here’s part of the original liner notes to Discreet Music (1975):
"In January this year I had an accident. I was not seriously hurt, but I was confined to bed in a stiff and static position. My friend Judy Nylon visited me and brought me a record of 18th century harp music. After she had gone, and with some considerable difficulty, I put on the record. Having laid down, I realized that the amplifier was set at an extremely low level, and that one channel of the stereo had failed completely. Since I hadn't the energy to get up and improve matters, the record played on almost inaudibly. This presented what was for me a new way of hearing music - as part of the ambience of the environment just as the colour of the light and the sound of the rain were parts of that ambience.
Since the music was at an almost inaudible level, it becomes part of the environment: as natural as the rain, as natural as the light."
Eno finally came up with a name for this music, ambient music, and named a series of records after this new musical form. In the liner notes to his first ambient record, Music for Airports, Eno situated this music within the context of the ubiquitous pre-programmed music that was beginning to pervade everyone’s lives in the late 70s. His liner notes are worth quoting in full:
"The concept of music designed specifically as a background feature in the environment was pioneered by Muzak Inc. in the fifties, and has since come to be known generically by the term Muzak. The connotations that this term carries are those particularly associated with the kind of material that Muzak Inc. produces - familiar tunes arranged and orchestrated in a lightweight and derivative manner. Understandably, this has led most discerning listeners (and most composers) to dismiss entirely the concept of environmental music as an idea worthy of attention.
Over the past three years, I have become interested in the use of music as ambience, and have come to believe that it is possible to produce material that can be used thus without being in any way compromised. To create a distinction between my own experiments in this area and the products of the various purveyors of canned music, I have begun using the term Ambient Music.
An ambience is defined as an atmosphere, or a surrounding influence: a tint. My intention is to produce original pieces ostensibly (but not exclusively) for particular times and situations with a view to building up a small but versatile catalogue of environmental music suited to a wide variety of moods and atmospheres.
Whereas the extant canned music companies proceed from the basis of regularizing
environments by blanketing their acoustic and atmospheric idiosyncracies, Ambient Music is intended to enhance these. Whereas conventional background music is produced by strip ping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities. And whereas their intention is to `brighten' the
environment by adding stimulus to it (thus supposedly alleviating the tedium of routine tasks and levelling out the natural ups and downs of the body rhythms) Ambient Music is
intended to induce calm and a space to think.
Ambient Music must be able to accomodate many levels of listening attention without
enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting."
There are several differences between the conception and execution (as well as explanation) for Discreet Music and Music for Airports. Whereas the former was created through chance and accident (both literally and figuratively), thus recalling Eno’s earliest recordings with Cornelius Cardrew on “The Great Learning,” the later has a specific programmatic purpose. Moreover, Discreet Music, despite Eno’s insistence that it become part of the environment, is still private listening: a man, in bed, unable to fix the stereo. Music for Airports (as suggested even by the title) is a public listening experience, albeit one that does not direct the listener into any prescribed state. A space to think, as Eno calls it.
However, it’s important to read the second essay a bit more closely for what is elided, or what often gets elided, in discussions of Eno’s ambient music. From the start, Eno places his music in direct competition with the company, Muzak Inc. which, as Eno points out, had been providing instrumental background music for spaces since the 1950s. Eno recognizes in Muzak, Inc. a kind of social control (“regularizing environments by blanketing their acoustic and atmospheric idiosyncracies,” “supposedly alleviating the tedium of routine tasks and leveling out the natural ups and downs of the body rhythms”) and sets his ambient music not only as a antidote to background music that functions as covert social control (echoing similar arguments made by Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer against “light jazz” in The Dialectic of Enlightenment) but suggests that his music might be used in direct commercial competition. Read a certain way, the liner notes to Music for Airports might be construed as Eno’s pitch to brand his own form of background music.
What is also elided in Eno’s liner notes is the title itself: why Music for Airports. One can
surmise that the album itself is a site specific album. In a story that is now well known, the original impetus for the album specifically was a long layover in the Cologne-Bonn airport Eno had in the late 70s, and his reaction to the depressing music he heard playing over the loudspeakers. In an interview just published in the Süddeutsche Zeitung this past weekend Eno added this to his reaction: “I was sitting in the airport and thought, my God, you’ve just spent $500 million dollars on this airport and you play this depressing music?!” The addition of a monetary figure to this already well known story suggests that Eno, in hindsight, already knew that his ambient music might make a better fit for multi-million dollar airports than the “canned” music offered by companies like Muzak. Though it took a while, someone at the Cologne airport eventually agreed:
"In 2003, inspired by Eno's effort, the Cologne based band plus49 (the country code for Germany) teamed up with a design firm to create music specifically for the Cologne-Bonn Airport. They wrote on-hold music for the telephones, special elevator music and an airport "gong," a four-second piece of music called Happy Sky played before every overhead
announcement in the airport. The band's song Symbols & Gateways, written to honor the launch of the Germanwings-Airbus 'Spirit of Cologne,' is now the airport theme song and included on an album of airport-inspired music."
Eno’s ambient music had been instrumentalized (and nationalized!) for use in the airport. Music for airports means more airports for music. Rather than the music being a kind of one off performance for a specific airport at a specific time (which has happened several times since the album was originally released in 1978), it can be branded and sold as pre-packaged ambient music to suit the multi-purpose needs of each city’s airport.
The rest, as they say, is history: the demand for Muzak declined over the next two decades, with the company finally filing for bankruptcy in 2010. Although it still exists in some form today through various holding companies, the remnants of the company now have to compete with various other platforms in creating background music. In the 90s and 00s, Muzak had pretty much ditched its self-created instrumental music, using pop songs instead. In a world where now several free and subscription music services can be accessed via one’s phone, there is no need for a subscription service dedicated to streaming music for business and public spaces. Recently, Spotify has begun offering playlists targeted for moods, activities, times of day, etc. suggesting that the need once filled by Muzak is hardly a thing of the past. Quite the opposite: as public spaces have become increasingly obsolete under neoliberalism, the need for mood enhancing, task enabling music has multiplied. Now virtually the only place you don’t hear music out in public IS in outside public spaces, unless you happen to be poor, urban and part of a minority, as predominantly white business owners attempt to chase you away by pumping music they assume you hate: classical music, country music, etc.
If things got tough for Muzak, Inc. since the release of Music for Airports, things only got better for Eno’s new ambient music. Not only had he created an entire genre of music, but he was prescient in realizing that ambient music could become lucrative. Eno has been commissioned to create music from video games, site specific installations, soundtracks and phone apps. Perhaps his most iconic sound is the 3 1/2 second start up music originally used in Windows 95. He has never mentioned how he was paid to create the sound, but one can only imagine it has funded many of his less commercially successful ventures. More than this, the idea of ambient music as a more personalized form of background music has certainly taken hold as older forms of “elevator music” have vanished. Eno understood that the type of cloying harmonies and syrupy strings would create resistance in the listener. Non-identifiable sounds which, as Eno suggests creates “calm and a space to think”, rather than directly confronting the mundane tasks of life under capital, seems to have been taken up by that very same system to create a highly subjectivized psychological space that, in itself, seems to in its own way erase “all sense of doubt and uncertainty.”
Before I continue I would like to offer a disclaimer: I love Brian Eno. I love Brian Eno’s ambient music. I have loved Brian Eno’s ambient music ever since I read Thom Holmes Electronic and Experimental Music: Technology, Music and Culture in high school and became obsessed with the reproduction of the back cover of Discreet Music in there. Until that point I had only thought of music as some kind of passionate expression of the soul screaming to get out. The idea that someone would sit down and draw a diagram of how the music was constructed, music that generated itself no less, seemed to go against everything I thought about music. When I finally found a copy of the record at Tower Records I played it over and over again to my mostly dismissive friends. They all thought it was boring as shit. I’ve listened to Eno’s ambient records on and not on drugs. I’ve listened to those records when I was happy, sad, needed comfort and also needed to challenge myself to sit still and do nothing for 30, 40 (and if I’m listening to Neroli) more than an hour at a time. My first child was born listening to Eno’s ambient records. My second child, born with a congenital heart defect, listened to a cd of Eno’s ambient tracks in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Eno acknowledged this phenomenon in the Red Bull Music Academy interview: “I’ve been told that my music has birthed a whole generation of babies,” he joked. I have no doubt. And so I write this essay not as a take down of Eno, but to critically engage with the category that he came up with. A practice of listening that, while not inventing, has probably done more than anyone else to make a worldwide phenomenon.
It was my own experience with childbirth, and Eno’s offhand remark, that partially inspired this essay. What does it mean to have one man’s music soundtrack what is, for many, one of the most intimate events in a person’s life? It’s one thing to create challenging background music for airports and art pavilions, it’s another thing for so many people to allow ambient music to part of the experience of creating life itself. I mean, it’s not like you’re going to soundtrack your childbirth with Muzak. Let’s hold that thought for a minute. The other inspiration for this essay was a particularly nasty review the Wire ran of Eno’s album Small Craft on a Milk Sea (2010). Written by Ian Penniman, the review, which sees the below par quality of the music as a much longer descent for Ian, asks a provocative question: how could Eno, who has become one of the most outspoken political voices in England, produce music that is so facile and unoffensive? The predictability of the music seems to be at odds with the unpredictability of the public persona. Indeed, since the end of the 00s, Eno, who had previously been somewhat mute when it came to political matters (although he did name the B-Side to “King’s Lead Hat” after the Red Army Faction), had become an outspoken advocate for refugees, opponent of Israel and penned a passionate essay in support for labour party chief Jeremy Corbyn in 2015. At the end of 2015 Eno appeared in a public forum on basic income and participated in a long filmed discussion with anthropologist David Graeber. It seemed that Eno was happy to allow his ambient music to do what it was always intended to do, create a space of calm, while using his relative fame to voice a plea for engaged leftist politics.
2.
This is where The Ship comes in. It represents a real departure in Eno’s music. It is almost as if he read Penniman’s review and offered his own response. The Ship is unlike any of Eno’s other albums in that it marries the long form style of his ambient pieces with the vocals of his earlier albums. Missing in this essay is any mention of the pop oriented albums Eno has released throughout his career. He has an amazing singing voice and for many, including myself, there has always been a disappointment that he doesn’t release more of them. Eno, however, has said in many interviews that the lyrics he writes in his pop songs are mere word play, a kind of joy in making up nonsense lyrics that fit well with the music rather than meaning anything per se. One of his favorite artists in Kurt Schwitters, the Kurt sampled on “Kurt’s Rejoinder” from Before and After Science, who used a cut-up technique to write lyrics—again, betraying his earliest involvement with Cardrew and the avant garde art world.
However, despite the fact that Eno has said he used a similar cut-up technique on the album, the lyrics on The Ship are different. He has mentioned in interviews that the Ship was inspired by the sinking of the Titanic and the concurrent first world war. What connects both events, for him, is the human hubris involved in both events. This isn’t the first piece of music that Eno has been involved with that addresses the Titanic’s sinking. The record label Eno started in the mid-70s, Obscure, released Gavin Bryers’ Sinking of the Titanic, a beautiful piece of music which uses recordings of survivors of the sinking against a mix of “Nearer My God, to Thee” and “Amazing Grace,” two songs reportedly played by the ship’s musicians as the ship went down. As the piece develops, it is as if the music and voices themselves are sinking deeper into the mix (the album was produced by Eno). It seems by the end as if everything has been subsumed by water, vanishing into history itself. The Ship, by contrast, seems to begin in the water itself: the mix keeping the listener barely above the water for most of its duration, only to be brought somewhere else (land, the afterlife) by the final piece “Fickle Sun iii (I’m Set Free).” The singing on the first piece, “The Ship,” is sung very low, almost as if Eno were mimicking the tradition of voice singing he has praised elsewhere, combing with the gongs and low electronic tones to become, at times, almost indistinguishable from the music itself.
The difference between Bryers’ piece and The Ship isn’t just in the mix. Time and context have also altered the meaning of the shipwreck: whereas Bryers seems to take the perspective of the historian, hazily recording the remembrance of an event that was then, 1975, almost lost to history itself. The use of the eyewitness accounts makes this explicit. It isn’t just the aquatic mix that buries the voices, it’s time that is literally erasing the voices of the participants and the music. The Ship, by contrast, makes the event something present, incapable of being erased by time or the inevitable sinking. The song “the Ship” begins: “The Ship was from the willing land/The waves about it roll
And as aglow by powder band/We lift, we loot, we haul” The past tense of the first line is contrasted with the present tense of the second: this isn’t something taking place in the past but in the present. The “willing land” of departure is contrasted with the passengers themselves who are described as “undefined” and then “unrefined.” Whereas the “willing land” sets the ship to see, the inhabitants of the ship seems at odds from the land itself. The interim lyrics expand the picture of the ship’s inhabitants, at least the man who is singing the song: “Oh hallelujah, pray for me,/ the man who turned away./ My desert in a grain of sand./ My life within a day.” Who is this man who turned away? We know historically that there was a tremendous effort to save the victims of the Titanic, but not so this man who sees his life pass by “within a day.” Perhaps it is the next line that offers a clue: “My desert in a grain of sand.” The dryness of the desert is in contrast to the wetness of the sea, but it also suggests that the passenger aboard the ship is from the desert, on board a ship where he is “undefined” and “unrefined.”
As I write this essay, the new is reporting that 1,000 people have drowned in the past week making the dangerous trek from Syria (among other countries) and the EU via the Mediterranean sea. Though he has not explicitly said so, given his comments on Palestinian refugees, and refugees and war orphans in the last twenty years, it’s hard not to imagine that this is on Eno’s mind during “the Ship”. A female voice soon joins the male in the song: “Can I take the freedom and forget you?/ How can it, form contractions/ Don’t talk that I'm frightened/Do I know exactly my husband?/That I Love You. We miss you, after that/Go get brethren (grab her then)/I still act.” The question in first line offers an impossible choice: for most refugees crossing the sea, it is presented as a choice between reaching “freedom” in the EU or leaving friends and family behind. Of course, the sad reality is that often this is no choice: the freedom promised to refugees by European leaders often results in extended detention and eventual deportation (in the best case) and death (in the worst case). The loss is made palpable by the final lines “That I love you. We miss you, after that” only brightened by the hope of being able to eventual save the ones left behind “Go get brethren (grab her then)/ I still act.” But at this point it is too late: the words become non-sensical, chopped up, images as the water rolls over the passengers until finally a whispering male voice (heavily processed by electronics) overwhelms everything else simply intoning: “As Wave/ After Wave/After Wave….” as the sounds die away and, we assume, the ship finally sinks.
But the story is not over. The next piece of music, a long, multi-part work entitled “Fickle Sun,” seems to begin where “the Ship” left off. Ominous fragments of sound and the still ever present gong tones greet us, as if the man/woman/people have emerged from the water destitute but alive: “And all the day the work is done/ We toil away in fickle sun/ And all the day the wire is spun/ and so the dismal work is done.” Have they survived? Are they now working in the willing land on the other side of the sea? Eno has said that “Fickle Sun” is specifically about World War I but, unlike say Radiohead’s very moving song “Harry Patch (In Memory Of)”—a tribute to the last living British soldier who died in World War I in 2009—Eno’s World War I piece doesn’t make it’s setting, politics or message as explicit. Eno’s first lines could describe soldiers on a beach, or migrant workers manufacturing goods for the global economy. The music becomes more ominous, overwhelming, an electric guitar seems to come out of nowhere: “and now the boats are all astray/ as no one rowing anyway/ there’s no one rowing anymore/ abandoned far from any shore.” Eno has returned to the ship metaphor of the previous piece, but now we are clearly on land, albeit not before we are told that the rowing has stopped thus leading the boats astray. The boats aren’t firmly moored to their docks, we imagine them floating, adrift, beyond the horizon of the coast. Perhaps we can’t even see them anymore because the sun itself has become fickle.
Eno has used this metaphor of boats adrift before: most notably in the songs “Backwater” and “Empty Frame.” However, in both of those songs the notion of a ship adrift leads to comedy rather than tragedy. In “Backwater” a group of people who seem to be in some position of power: a senator from Ecuador, two porter’s daughters, the narrator himself all of whom are drifting in “the deadly waters” (“there were six of us but now we are five”). So death pervades their trip as well, although the turmoil seems to be a way to mock the obliviousness of the passengers who pass the time talking about meteors, conquistadors, emperors, Turkish gurus, logicians, mystics ultimately resigning themselves to being nothing more than “trapped on a leaf in the vine.” It’s no less pessimistic about the fate of the world than The Ship, but the pessimism is more of an emoji shrug than a sea soaked elegy. Something similar happens in “Empty Frame,” although there is a kind of joy contained in the final resolution of that song: “At the edge of the sea/Were the signs of the dove/But the wrong way out/ And the wrong way up. / We pushed the empty frame of reason out the cabinet door, /No we won't be needing reason anymore.” The resignation at the end of “Backwater” has turned into the wisdom that, when you’re adrift as sea with a captain who knows they are “going round in circles,” the best solution might be to push reason out the cabin door and enjoy the drift (indeed, Eno entitled one of his other instrumental albums the Drift).
On the Ship, though, the people on shore are abandoned by the drifting ship, left to toil in the fickle sun on land. After these lines an orchestra sweeps in, breaking the song in two, letting in the light, the horrible light, from the fickle sun only to be overtaken by the sharpest electronic overtones of Eno’s career. If we can possibly label this music ambient, which it seems to me we cannot—though it, like many of Eno’s ambient pieces, was originally conceived as a site specific piece—then the ambience it creates is fear and despair rather than calm. Finally the tumult subsides and Eno’s voice, accompanied by an organ, intones “All the boys are falling down/ gone to soldier every one.” This makes the World War I reference explicit, although we are also reminded that many of those refugees who attempt to cross the Mediterranean are escaping their fates of being soldiers in the unceasing Syrian civil war. At this point a second, electronically processed voice changes “fickle sun” into “wicked sun” and “checkered sun”. Nature itself is changing, and it would be remiss to point out that underneath all of this man made catastrophe lurks the much larger ecological catastrophe. Finally the phrase “when I was a soldier” recedes into the background and a serious of grotesque, barely recognizable electronically processed voices overwhelm the track. Are these the voices of the dead themselves coming back as revenants? What the listener also notices is a type of chattering going on in the background: what seems like a female voice on the left channel and a male voice on the right. These voices are clipped, glitched, barely recognizable as human speech. They recall the voices which conclude Kraftwerk’s “Computer World 2” at the end of the first side of Computer World. Many have remarked how prescient that album is in predicting our own “computer world,” and Eno certainly knows Kraftwerk’s work well (being an early advocate of all things electronic and all things German). But Eno now lives in the computer world, and the jarring contrast with the “oil and steel” from the hellscape of World War I is set against the few benign fragments of “official language” that can be heard on the right/male channel: “This email and any files transmitted…”, “if you receive this email…”, “please notify the system manager” “this email contains confidential information” etc. It’s the everyday speech of our online lives, agreeing to give corporations personal information just so we can live more conveniently. Eno, an artist who has collaborated online for over twenty years now, is no stranger to this and purposely included such “extraneous” information in his work.
The final two pieces on the album, “Fickle sun (ii) the hour is thin” and “Fickle sun (iii) i’m set free” return the voice front and center to the album. The former recalls the vocal experiments of Eno’s 2011 album Drums Between the Bells where various people read texts written by the poet Peter Holland. Like that record, the words are spoken by someone else. The lyrics were generated randomly by Eno feeding alternate, pornographic lyrics of patriotic war songs sung by soldiers during world war one. Pornography has always been a fascination of Eno’s: his first solo album was entitled Here Come the Warm Jets after Japanese water-sports films he had seen in the early 1970s. His first two releases, Jets as well as his collaborative album with Robert Fripp No Pussyfooting, featured pornographic playing cards on their covers. On “fickle sun (ii)” the source material is never made explicit, rather Eno transforms pornography into the most obscene form of expression: warfare: “Tired with what the world has yet brought forth,/ With the women waving at war,/ And the news that war is faith.” “Fickle Sun (ii)” is a continuation of sorts with a line from Eno’s collaborative album with David Byrne Everything that Happens Will Happen Today “when we fall in love with war.” “War is faith” speaks to the nationalism brought forth by the first world war, but it also (as with all the songs on the album) speaks to our current moment: whether it is the caliphate’s call to the faithful to commit jihad, or the West’s faith that continued drone bombings will make the world safer: war has become a doctrine of faith.
The destruction and violence of the previous movement of “fickle sun” has been replaced with a quietude, musically recalling Eno’s earliest ambient albums. But the voice, as soothing as it is, remains persistent. It’s post-war, but it also anticipates the next one: “The phoenix broods serene above the tower of time./ Not enough boats./ He admitted without shame/ That he had entered into the dreams of the named addressee/ In the velvet of war.” The phoenix in Eno’s piece is similar to Walter Benjamin’s angel of history: it stands above the “progress” of mankind, observing that there hadn’t been enough boats (we return, again, to the ship metaphor that began the album) to save those who fell and drowned. But unlike the angel of history, it was the phoenix itself who placed his figure in the dreams of those addressed in the “velvet” of war. He cannot fix the world because he is as responsible for the dreams of war as anything else: the dream of death and rebirth. But the dead at the bottom of the sea will not come back, no matter how much women might wave at war and no matter what doctrine of faith (AK-15 in a nightclub, drone bomber over Syria) we may hold, the dead cannot speak any more.
But there is a detachment in both the music, the timbre of the voice and the lyrics which does not only mourn but seems to suggest a kind of peace, a true peace, after the death and destruction of the first movement. We are told that the phoenix feels “no shame” for having placed the velvet of war into the dreams of the named addressee. The piece continues: “Before ever there was writing, they were taking up stones/ To hurl at last stroke,/ But nobody looked back./ There were soldiers,/ There was a cradle.” Warfare predates writing, to imagine a world without warfare is a fools errand. Herein lies the final statement of the record (it’s final original statement, that is): while we can never turn back to an imagined pre-historic time wherein we haven’t been seduced by the velvet of war, we have a moral obligation to mitigate its effects: we have a moral obligation to make sure that the fewest amount of bodies end up at the bottom of the sea, that the fewest number of boys go to soldier. This is Eno as political artist: still using the random and the generative (and the banal and pornographic) to work out where he is as a commentator on current and previous politics. There will always be soldiers, but there will also always be cradles: one must remain cautiously optimistic in the face of horror.
It is in this spirit of cautious optimism that the album ends. “Fickle sun (iii) I’m set Free” is a cover of the Velvet Underground’s song. It is elegiac but in a different way than the other pieces on the album: it is a tribute to Lou Reed, who passed away in 2013. Actually Eno had recorded the cover many years ago, but hadn’t released it until after Reed’s death. Eno has spoken eloquently on how much the VU’s music had meant to him, and is responsible for perhaps the most memorable quotation on the group (“The Velvet Underground didn’t sell many records in their time. However, everyone who bought a VU record started their own band”), as well as continuing a career-long collaboration with VU co-founder John Cale. Here, however, the cover isn’t just a tribute to a fallen mentor, but fits with the album’s thematics. We have violence: “I saw my head laughing/ rolling on the ground”, we have the faith of the faithless: “I’m set free/ to find a new illusion” and speaks to those who are imprisoned either through ideology or physical restraint: “I’ve been set free/ I’ve been bound”. The music is some of the most beautiful of Eno’s entire career: over strings, guitar and drums and multi-tracked vocals (Eno has a genuinely moving voice when he wants to use it) Eno describes a kind of hesitant transcendence: or, to put it another way, we’re always going to find a new illusion (war, refuge, freedom, capitalism, ambient music, art, love, etc.) that will replace the old one. If only, like the phoenix itself, we can embrace without shame the velvet dreams (horrible and beautiful) that make up our experience, we might be set free, if only to find a new illusion.
3.
As I mentioned earlier, I would return to this notion of Brian Eno soundtracking birth. In our particular historical moment, with the multitude of streaming platforms, websites, lifestyle coaches, etc. we can transform our most intimate events into curated experiences. Though one would hardly want to fault people who want to have healthy, calming births in a relaxing atmosphere, what I have partly tried to do with this article is demonstrate, by critically engaging the interplay between ambient and capital, the way in which the music Eno developed in the 1970s has been deployed to not only create calm (whether in an airport, a bedroom, a museum or, yes, even a delivery room) but to manage life experiences closely connect with our bodies. In a sense, this is not that different from what the French philosopher Michel Foucault has attempted to describe with his work on biopower: to make live, and let die (here in almost to literal a way). Eno’s music, unofficially for the most part, has had a far more effective way of controlling the health of the population than Muzak or the endless parade of popular hits has ever had. Eno, by his own stated goals (“My intention is to produce original pieces ostensibly (but not exclusively) for particular times and situations with a view to building up a small but versatile catalogue of environmental music suited to a wide variety of moods and atmospheres.”), has always been aware of the palliative nature of his work. This isn’t to condemn Eno, but rather to critically engage what it means to have ambient music soundtrack our lives and to contrast that stated task with a more forceful politics espoused by Eno.
In 2013, Eno unveiled a new project: a quiet room for the Montefiore hospital based on his 77 Million Paintings installation. Eno has become interested in the way his music and installations can promote healing, and specifically thought of the hospital in Motefiore because it takes 30% of its patients from National Health Service referrals. He has now started offering this service to other hospitals around the word for similar healing rooms which, as researchers have shown, “can produce improved psychological, physiological and biological outcomes of clinical significance in patient care.” As we can see, Eno’s project of ambient music has now begun to embody the very ideas first espoused in his earliest writings on ambient music, albeit with a twist: whereas the Eno of 1978 critiqued Muzak by stating “their intention is to `brighten' the environment by adding stimulus to it (thus supposedly alleviating the tedium of routine tasks and leveling out the natural ups and downs of the body rhythms)”, the Eno of 2013 attempts something similar in hospital rooms. There is also alleviation in Eno’s 77 Million Paintings installation, one that might have just as great an impact on the body as Muzak did for “mundane tasks” back then.
Yet, it’s worth noting the change of venue: whereas the Eno of 1978 imagined ambient music being pumped into the gleaming terminals of the airport (an almost too perfect metaphor for the flow of capital and people) he now imagines ambient music to heal the body and rest the mind, significantly of those who might not be able to pay for that experience otherwise. The Brian Eno of the last couple of years has begun to use his music and art towards political ends, even if it often seems to be the same art that he has been creating for forty years.
