Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports

by John T. Lysaker

Brian Eno's seminal album Ambient 1: Music for Airports continues to fascinate and charm audiences, not only as a masterpiece of ambient music, but as a powerful and transformative work of art. Author John T. Lysaker situates this album in the context of twentieth-century art music, where its ambitions and contributions to avant garde music practice become even more apparent.

To appreciate the album's multifaceted character, Lysaker advocates for "prismatic listening," an attentiveness that continually shifts registers in the knowledge that no single approach can grasp the work as a whole. Exploring each of the album's four tracks and their unique sonic arrangements, Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports argues that the album must be approached from at least three as an ambient contribution to lived environments that draws upon cybernetics and the experiments of Erik Satie, as an exploration of what John Cage has termed the "activity of sounds," and as a work of conceptual art that asks us to think freshly about artistic creativity, listening, and the broad ecology of interactions that not only make art possible, but the full range of human meaning.

If one listens in this way, Music for Airports becomes a sonic image that blurs the nature-culture distinction and rescues the most interesting concerns of avant-garde music from the social isolation of concert halls and performance spaces.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction

184 pages, Paperback

Published December 17, 2018

Reviews

[Alex Daly · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you're familiar with the Wikipedia page of Brian Eno's "Music for Airports," then you've already read most of what this book takes far too long to explain. The rest is a nauseatingly apologetic account of a work that Lysaker implicitly argues needs no apology. The last third of the book amounts to little more than fashionable nonsense that made this reader wonder if the author was taking him seriously.

[Stefan · Rating 1 out of 5]

This short volume presents itself as an in-depth exploration of Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports – but ultimately leaves the impression that it doesn’t quite know what it wants to be.

While some chapters offer genuinely interesting reflections, the book often drifts into broader meditations on ambient music in general, without ever fully committing to a comprehensive genre study. At the same time, it fails to deliver the focused, album-specific insight the title promises. One chapter, for instance, briefly recounts Eno’s biography – something that feels more like filler than substance, especially for readers already familiar with his life and work.

In the end, the book lacks both depth and direction: too superficial for those seeking rigorous musicology or serious cultural analysis, and too scattered to serve as a satisfying deep dive into Ambient 1. It reads, at times, like a padded essay, extended just far enough to fit the format of a slim paperback. A missed opportunity.

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very thorough academic exploration of the record. Not for everyone but I enjoyed all the brain fuel.