Our weekly podcast includes in-depth analysis of the music we find extraordinary, exciting, and just plain terrible, along with interviews with some of our favorite artists. This week Reviews Director Jeremy D. Larson hosts longtime Contributor Grayson Haver Currin for a deep dive into Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports, perhaps the most important ambient album ever made. Currin also recently wrote about the record for our Sunday Review series, in which we revisit significant albums from the past.
Listen to this week’s episode and read an excerpt from it below. Follow The Pitchfork Review here.
Grayson Haver Currin: No matter how many times I listen to this record, I always marvel at how it is about limitation. It’s about knowing when to say when. In terms of actual sonic events, they’re pretty few and far between. It is an impressionistic piece of music built on repetition where the idea is that Eno has created a world of sound, but you create a world of meaning within it. That’s something that keeps bringing me back to this piece of music.
Jeremy D. Larson: Yeah, it’s confrontational. I’ve always made this connection that there’s this horseshoe theory: The loudest music is confrontational, and the quietest music is also confrontational, because it’s demanding a lot from you the same way that extreme black metal demands a lot from you.
Another interesting thing is that this album came out right around the time the Walkman was invented, in the late ’70s. You can take a cassette of Ambient 1 and walk around with it, and the world that was once confined to a hospital or an airport is now just traveling with you.