Brian Eno, Meditation, and Aesthetics

 I have a love for ambient music and I feel a lot of the time people undervalue the sounds they provide. There is something disappointing to me about all the 'study relaxation' playlists on YouTube that take away the context from albums that artists put out. To show this I'd like to focus on one of the Ambient Music greats, Brian Eno. A personal favorite of mine and one of the most influential musicians of the last 50 years (seriously look at everything he produced on his Wikipedia page it is insane), Eno's ambient work shows how your personal experience shapes the world. I'm going to focus on two of Eno's albums to show some of the aesthetical work they do.


Firstly, Brian Eno's classic Ambient 1: Music for Airports. If you have yet to have ever listened to this album I beg you to put this on right now. Probably the best introduction to the genre as well as being a beautiful listen, Brian Eno created this masterpiece after being stuck in an airport for hours in order to relieve the stress of the airport experience (Baskas, 2008). Interestingly enough, Eno here seems to create this album with the intention of creating aesthetics. As Bull (2012) points out, the aesthetic enhancement of your emotions, your environment and whatever else the audio can interact with is central to your experience when listening to a personal audio device. I know personally from listening to this album at an airport that it brought a calm over me, and it made me observe the surroundings of where I was, heightening the experience. 


This Brian Eno album Discreet Music is much less popular then the other one displayed here and for good reason. The first half of the album is tame 30 minute drone track while the second half is just Canon in D Major three times. However, this review is slightly disingenuous as the first track Discreet Music was designed to be played listening to other music (O'Biren, 2016). However, Brian sold it on its own, with no intention of people playing it over other tracks. Most people who have listened to Discreet Music probably did not know this obscure fact and simply listened to it with no other mediated noise on. However, as Bull (2012) points out, unmediated noise can be music too. In this case, no two listening experiences are the same and Discreet Music makes the listener understand that. Give it a listen yourself if you're interested (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLZtnadL1s0) 

Questions:

1. What do you tend to notice first, mediated noise effecting unmediated noise or vice versa?

2. Do you have any specific aesthetic memories involving mediated noise?

3. Any favorite ambient albums? 

Lucas

Sources:

Baskas, H. (2008). "Better branding through music: Original airport theme songs". USA Today. 

Bull, M. (2012). The Audio-Visual iPod. In J. Sterne (Ed.), The Sound Studies Reader (pp. 197-208). essay, Routledge.

O'Brien, G. (2016). "New Again: Brian Eno". Interview.

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