It’s Brian Eno, who invented “Ambient Music”, and he invented it with this album, “Music For Airports”. This is the first track.
At the time, everybody, freaked out and said, this sucks, you can’t focus on this kind of music. Eno said, you’re not supposed to, it’s supposed to be an element of your environment, a kind of background thing that shapes the environment’s mood, not a song that one focuses their attention on. It was kind of like furniture and quiet art for the air; what distinguishes it from elevator music, is that it has emotional resonance, and genuine artistic merit. Eno did a series of about 4 or 5 of these Ambient Albums.
For movie buffs, the film “Sex, Lies and Videotape”, “The Underneath” and “Solaris” were written while the writer, Steven Soderbergh, had these Eno albums playing, and the original temp version of those films had several of these Eno songs as their soundtrack, as did the film “Traffic”, before they were replaced in the final versions that were released in theaters.
