Music for Airports cont'd

From the will, the ‘I am’ of rock n roll heroism:

which was cruelly and wonderfully sent-up in punk

to the apparent absence of will; the tranquil, eastern resignation of Music for Airports, with its tentatively struck piano notes and ethereal female ‘ahh-ing’. It is music of the West’s late mysticism as yet unborn, in Spengler’s schema of history a feature of the wintertime of civilisation, but with a strictly Western spin – this is not music of the nothing, but music of the something. In Music for Airports, the Western ear hears not the formless Self of the Upanishads, nor the extinguished nirvana of the Dhammapada, but shapes and sounds and landscapes the eye has never seen! This music, this ambient soundscape is not an escape from the world but – a doorway to new worlds, worlds in which heroes are not shaped like rock stars (1978) or footballers (2012) and humanity is not ground down by a daily routine of manual labour (1978) or customer service (2012), but worlds which the word can barely grasp. The tracks are ‘called’ 1/1, 1/2, 2/1 and 2/2 for Christssake! Later ambients (including Eno’s sequels) would later succumb to the synaesthetic urge to coax the listener down a particular doorway with track titles like ‘An Arc of Doves’ and ‘Among Fields of Crystal.’ The pure form of (Western) ambient is boundless, seeking its way through a multiverse on the crest of barely-formed matter!

The macro-genesis of Ambient 1 in brief is therefore: the shrinking of the world (McLuhan, David Harvey) brought about by technological innovation (the Wrights) and by the entrepreneur’s pay-out for pursuing his own good (Adam Smith, etc ad nauseum) or actually rampant militarism with an incidental commercial implication leads to the discovery that it actually takes a lot of time to get people to board a plane in an orderly and administratively correct fashion (PanAm?), a time which required a new musak (Brian Eno), a musak for these strange hubs:

It is not the sound of airports - there are no sleepy montages of planes taking off and landing - but for airports, for the people who are in them, waiting, in the midst of slightly less real moments before actual real moments (which take place on arrival). Music of the interstices of modern life.