Brian Eno: Ambient 1: Music for Airports [EG / VIRGIN / UMC]

Why you'll love it

Music for Airports was the first album billed as "ambient music" and it popularized the term. Designed to make airport lounges calmer, it's become a timeless record for thinking, working and winding down.

This edition

• Music for Airports on vinyl
• EG / Virgin / UMC pressing

About the album

Stuck in Cologne airport one morning in the late '70s, Brian Eno started imagining music that could make a waiting room calmer, music "as ignorable as it is interesting." Music for Airports is the result: four pieces built from tape loops of different lengths, so the piano notes and wordless voices drift in and out of phase and never quite repeat.

Robert Wyatt plays piano on the gorgeous "1/1," and "2/1" layers soft female voices into something close to a hymn. Put it on and the room changes. The whole ambient genre, from Aphex Twin to Grouper, starts here.

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

Tracklist

Listen

On EG / Virgin / UMC, a reissue of the 1979 album.