Thursday 14 February 2019

music for airports

Our thanks to the always engrossing and enlightening Open Culture for turning our ears to this special, time-dilated edition of Brian Eno’s electronic music improvisational session from 1978, a collaborative tone poem of meditative incidental music called Ambient 1. Establishing the genre, the artist hoped to produce something as “ignorable as it is interesting” and conducive of reflection amid all the chaos and cacophony of an international terminal. The sound installation was set up in the Marine Air concourse of the LaGuardia airport during the mid-1980s but is not currently soothing anxious passengers—at least not over the public-address system.