Fullness of Wind: 40 Years of Brian Eno’s ‘Discreet Music’
Who knew such beauty would be the result of a car crash? Forty years ago, Brian Eno found himself in the hospital, recovering from a leg injury. To lift his spirits, someone brought the former Roxy Music sideman a record of 18th-century harp music. Upon returning to his bed after struggling to put the record on in his debilitated state, Eno found that the volume on his record player was turned down much too low. But he had expounded too much energy to put the record on in the first place, and so he resigned himself to listening to this celestial music in an entirely different way. Suddenly, Eno realized that he had happened upon what he said was “for me, a new way of hearing music — as part of the ambiance of the environment just as the color of the light and the sound of the rain were parts of that ambiance.” We’re still feeling the impact of that realization today.
Contrary to what you may have heard, Brian Eno did not invent ambient music. In fact, he was merely building upon an idea coined by the eccentric French pianist Erik Satie, which he called “furniture music,” meaning music intended to be sort of like another object in the room, to just blend into the couch or the ottoman or the coffee table. A more hip, drugged-out variety of this idea would become vogue in the 1960s thanks to composers like La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Tony Conrad, and future Velvet Underground member John Cale. Eno’s interpretation of this idea would aim to remove any trace of human objects; music stripped to its most basic essence. No lyrics, no verses, no choruses, no middle-eights, just a simple melody repeated over an extended period of time. Nor was Eno the first to utilize electronic instruments; just look at NYC duo Suicide, or one of the many German artists working with synths and electronics at the time, like Kraftwerk or Tangerine Dream. But these artists still relied on human hands to craft their art. For Eno, ambient music was as much about the simplicity of the music itself as it was about removing the human process from the creation of said music, instead leaving the finished product up to chance.
In 1975, Eno released Discreet Music. Using a technique he had been tinkering with alongside King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp, Eno played two different melodic lines on a EMS Synthi AKS, which was then run through a graphic equalizer which occasionally changes the timbre of said notes, which was then run through an echo unit before being recorded to tape. From there the tape is run into a second machine, and then fed back into the first machine, creating randomly overlapping signals. The technique, which would eventually come to be called Frippertronics, was put to brilliant use on the album’s titular 30-minute centerpiece. Even today, 40 years later, it’s a stunning composition, creating the audio equivalent of watching cotton candy-colored clouds float endlessly across the evening sky. Care to guess what the photograph on the front cover depicts?
As if that weren’t enough, the B-side of Discreet Music holds even more awe-inspiring beauty, in the form of three shorter orchestral pieces which make up a suite entitled “Three Variations on the Canon in D Major by Johann Pachelbel.” Working with the arranger and conductor Gavin Bryars — who would go on to make his own indispensable contribution to ambient music with “The Sinking of the Titanic” — Eno selected short excerpts from the “Canon” with instructions to the musicians on how often to repeat said sections and when to alter those sections by changing the tempo or other elements. If you can make it through any of these pieces — especially the first one, “Fullness of Wind” — without crying, you just may be an android.
Eno would return to the ambient well many times throughout his restlessly experimental career. In the wake of Discreet Music, this idea of simplicity and repetition lead to many fantastic pieces of sound: the complex minimalism of Philip Glass and Steve Reich, the wobbly experiments of Aphex Twin’s Ambient Selections Vol. 1 and 2, the mournful tape decay of William Basinski’s 9/11-inspired masterpiece The Disintegration Loops, and the celestial compositions of Texas’ Stars of the Lid, whose fans often bring blankets and pillows to concerts. For Eno, Discreet Music is surely just another high watermark in a lifetime full of high watermarks. Few musicians have so thoroughly altered the way we create and interact with music and reminded us in such a poignant way that we are surrounded by music everywhere we go. We don’t even have to strain to really hear it.
