Brian Eno – Ambient 1 (Music For Airports) album art
Front cover
Ambient 1 (Music For Airports) is considered a pillar album of ambient music. The sixth album by Brian Eno, it was his first one of ambient music. Before he was rather known for his career in glam rock.
Brian Eno’s ambient is very orchestrated and quiet with a lot of piano and synthesizer. This idea of calm and peaceful music inspired the name Music For Airports. Add to that Brian Eno’s own experience of waiting at airports in Germany, a wait that he found not conducive to reflection due to a place and atmosphere lacking synergy. Eno was one of the first artists to want to make ambient music consciously. This approach would imply a definition of several musical and aesthetic codes.
Eno designed the cover for the album himself. Just like the melodies, the visual of Ambient 1 (Music For Airports) is quite abstract: we recognize a kind of topology of a map. One of the comments made on this album is the ability of Brian Eno to give a real texture to the music. This game of sound texture is repeated on the cover; with an unusual visual and image treatment creating a particular texture.
He also set up a code which would be very often reused in the design of ambient covers: visual and minimalist typography. Eno exclusively uses Helvetica, with several layers. The back cover is also very clean and repeats this minimalism in the visuals that accompany the tracklist with shapes and patterns that are repeated to represent his music.
The influence of this album on ambient music is enormous. We can feel the influence of its visuals, too, see Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85–92, with similar typography and a minimalist and abstract design.
In the written notes to the album, Eno describes his approach to ambient music in a very conceptual way:
Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities. And whereas their intention is to `brighten’ the environment by adding stimulus to it (thus supposedly alleviating the tedium of routine tasks and levelling out the natural ups and downs of the body rhythms) Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and a space to think. Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.
Back cover
Vinyl record
