Essential LPs
AMBIENT 1: MUSIC FOR AIRPORTS (1978)
“Ambient music is intended,” Brian Eno wrote in the liner notes to his sixth solo album, “to induce calm and a space to think. It must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular.”
Eno’s interest in what he would later term ‘ambient’ started in the mid-70s when he found himself laid up in hospital after a car accident. A visiting friend, artist Judy Nylon, gave him an album of 18th century harp music to listen to. According to the liner notes of his fourth LP Discreet Music, Eno played the harp album almost inaudibly, which “presented what was for me a new way of hearing music – as part of the ambience of the environment.” Though 1975’s Discreet Music would be his opening foray into ambient, Music For Airports is considered his first great work in the genre, devised as music that would, as he told Glenn O’Brien in 1978, “work in an airport”.
THE KLF CHILL OUT (1990)
Ever the contrarians, The KLF followed up their raucous Who Killed The JAMs? long-player with this ambient concept album depicting a mythical journey throughout the Gulf Coast of America, beginning in Texas and ending in Louisiana. Compiled using field recordings and with snippets of songs from artists such as Elvis, Acker Bilk and Fleetwood Mac, it’s an impressionistic road trip that the band claim was recorded in a 44-minute live take. In an interview for Record Collector, Jimmy Cauty stated that: “There’s no edits on it. Quite a few times we’d get near the end and make a mistake so we’d have to go all the way back to the beginning and set it all up again.” Predictably, it perplexed critics at the time, which presumably is exactly what Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty wanted, with Sounds complaining that it was “too arbitrary and formless.”
APHEX TWIN SELECTED AMBIENT WORKS VOLUME II (1994)
Richard James’ second LP after 1992’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92. Whereas James’ first record was made up of ambient-techno doodles from the DJ’s teenage years, this second volume is a much more traditional – i.e. beatless – ambient effort, inspired, its composer explained, by lucid dreaming, after which he would attempt to recreate the sounds in his home studio. James described the album as being “like standing in a power station on acid,” telling The Face: “If you just stand in the middle of a really massive one, you get a really weird presence and you’ve got that hum. You just feel electricity around you. That’s totally dreamlike for me.” Consisting of 24 titleless tracks, Selected Ambient Works Volume II is more avant-garde sound installation than a traditional album.