A Film Canon

The first of Eno's albums to entirely disassociate ambience from art rock, Music For Airports is also the first to feature his characteristic map-like cover art - and this combination, along with the title, gestures towards the relationship between ambient music and those amorphous, disorienting, consumer spaces that were to emerge in the 1970s and 1980s, among which the shopping mall, multiplex and spaghetti junction might also be counted. In this light, Eno's definition of ambient music - as a form which both permits of close scrutiny, and is capable of being entirely ignored (as opposed to musak, which only fulfills the second criterion) - might be reformulated in terms of an aid to spatial cognition, whether by virtue of its ability to relax and thereby orient the mind, or its lingering echoes (particularly evident in the vocal backings on "2/1" and "1/2"), which seem determined to reclaim both space and sound as physical phenomena, rather than mere extensions of an increasingly amorphous, intangible circulation of capital. This, in turn, may explain Eno's tendency to construe his music as a scientific, rather than artistic phenomenon, replacing conventional musical terminology with discussion of loop tapes, synthesisers and the bizarre spectrograph-like notations that appear on the back of the album, as well as the increasingly site-specific qualities of his work, which, from this point, starts to move towards some new fusion of music and installation art, anticipating later "sound sculpture".