Brian Eno: Discreet Music [VIRGIN]

Why you'll love it

This Virgin edition is remastered and pressed on 180g vinyl, with a download card. Eno himself called Discreet Music the most successful of his recordings, and it set the course for Music for Airports three years later.

This edition

• Remastered
• 180g vinyl
• Download card included

About the album

Ambient music began, as Eno tells it, with a record played too quietly. Laid up in bed after an accident, he was given an album of 18th-century harp music by his friend Judy Nylon, couldn't reach the stereo to turn it up, and found himself listening to rain and strings as one landscape. Discreet Music is where he turned that idea into a method.

The title piece runs about half an hour. Two melodic phrases of different lengths loop from the sequencer of an EMS Synthi AKS, pass through an echo unit and feed a pair of tape machines that keep layering them, and Eno set it running as a drone for Robert Fripp to play over. The second side hands three variations on Pachelbel's Canon to the Cockpit Ensemble, conducted by Gavin Bryars, with each player following instructions that slow, stretch or overlap the fragments. The titles "Fullness of Wind," "French Catalogues" and "Brutal Ardour" came from wobbly translations of a French sleeve note.

Robert Christgau found it good for hard bits of writing, and it has been soundtracking desks ever since. Eno answered the door and the phone while the piece was being made, and it didn't seem to mind in the least, which makes it ideal for any household with a doorbell.

Also at Kops: more Brian Eno on vinyl · browse Electronic

Tracklist

Listen

On Virgin (cat# ENOLP5), a reissue of the 1975 album.