I just found a remarkable live version of the song I listened to probably more than any other song in the last five years. Well, not so much a song as it is, um, a composition.
Soap box alert.
In 1978, the British multimedia artist Brian Eno more or less invented ambient music with the release of an album he titled “Ambient 1: Music For Airports.” This was back when experimental music was still hypothesis-driven and, as with much of his work, Eno approached the project with a strong sense of intentionality. His goal, a recording that would “accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular,” was later famously compared to the effect of visual art, acting on the viewer through many planes of consciousness, often in the background. It was not to be confused with background music (Muzak), which fixed non-challenging, derivative bullshit in the world’s elevators and supermarkets.
Lots of the so-called ambient music that followed (including plenty of Eno’s own, including plenty from this album) made a poor case for this distinction and it always struck me as ironic that the pinnacle of the art came in the form of the first track of this first ever ambient-with-a-capital-A record. At first listen, the track “1_1” sounds like not much more than a minimal repeating figure (future listens reveal another level of complexity), and what blows me away about this 17 minutes of music is how something so simple can achieve such complete transcendence. The composition isn’t overtly emotional in any one direction (happy, sad, afraid, or mad, as my therapist would have said). Rather, this is their elusive equilibrium, perfectly modulated for the potential to become anything and to shape any environment. It is the musical equivalent of the stem cell and it is rare.
Anyway, I spent many days and nights wandering around San Francisco with this shit on my headphones and it took over a special place in my heart. Eno’s original was arranged using a combination of tape loops and early analog synths, and in 1998 the avant garde chamber music collective Bang on A Can re-recorded the entire album note for note, using classical instruments. That type of bullshit usually makes its way to the novelty discount rack real quick, but these guys have managed to maintain the balance of the original piece while installing it with a new sense of power. And it was recorded live, something Eno could never do. Fucking outstanding. Put it on and go do something else.
Bang on a Can: “1-1”
[audio:1_1.mp3|text=0xHHHHHH]
