My “first contact” with Brian Eno was through the 1997 “Space Night 3” compilation. Space Night was a late-night/early (early!) morning TV show on “BR” (Bayrischer Rundfunk, Bavarian Broadcasting) – photos/film sequences from/of Space were combined with Ambient and Chill-Out music. It was my personal “chill out hour” during the weekends after Saturday nights that turned into Sunday mornings while clubbing. The track on that compilation was “Mountain of Needles” (YouTube) from his collab album with Talking Heads’ David Byrne*, “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts“.
I became more interested in his music after reading David Toop’s book “Ocean of Sound” (Amazon) where he describes “Ambient 1 / Music for Airports” as a work that was meant to be not consciously listened to. I bought a copy and tried that myself, and indeed, I could play this music while reading a book and not be distracted by the music. With my interest sparked, I acquired the other albums in the “Ambient” series. While neither Ambient 2 nor Ambient 3 did a lot for me, Ambient 4 / On Land really hit the spot.
And clearly, this is an album that is meant to be consciously listened to. Unlike the crispy, clear and cold atmospheres of Biosphere’s “Substrata” (previous post), this entire album has a very “organic” feeling to it – with it’s warm, fuzzy, sometimes a little eerie, enveloping analogue sounds and drones, it conjures up images of sweltering, hazy marshlands, or foggy forests at dusk with fireflies dancing around; a moonlit swampland in summer with buzzing mosquitoes, and perhaps beaches, hazy with ocean spray from onshore winds.
And I had this feeling and these associations with music before I read the liner notes. 🙂 And most likely, there was no genre definition such as “Dark Ambient” back in 1982, but I consider Ambient 4 / On Land definitely crossing into this terrain at times (track 2 “The Lost Day” is such a hauntingly beautiful dark piece, with quite an amount of tension brooding beneath the surface).
Other than Bandcamp, I’m not using any streaming services – maybe the album is available on Spotify or iTunes and whatnot, I don’t know. It is available both remastered and as MP3 on Amazon. And of course, the whole album can be found on YouTube, multiple times even. I hope that Brian Eno benefits from your clicks there. Personally, I think it would be about time that he’d be granted knighthood – I mean, come on! Elton John being a “sir” and Eno not? That’s just wrong. 🙂
*) outside the scope of this blog post series, I’d definitely like to recommend David Byrne’s album “The Forest“