The Sleeve Notes for Quiet001 - Four Ambient Pieces
Brian Eno coined the term ‘Ambient’ for the 1975 piece ‘Discreet Music’. In the sleevenotes to ‘Discreet Music’ Eno described his eureka moment when he discovered the idea of ambient music. The story goes that a bed-ridden Eno struggled to put on a record that a friend had brought him. After getting back to bed he was unable to adjust the volume, which was left very low:
“…the record played on almost inaudibly. This presented me with a whole new way of hearing music - as part of the ambience of the environment just as the colour of the light and the sound of the rain were parts of the ambience...” The idea behind ambient, Eno stated, was to “create music that can be both ignored and listened to”. The term ambient captures the idea that this is music that blends into the background becoming part of the ambience of the room subtly influencing the environment it is played in. For this reason, Eno suggested his music be listened to at a very low level. Ambient can be understated at a low level, as Eno conceived it. It can also be intense and arresting when listened to at a louder volume or on headphones.
The system used on the original ambient piece ’Discreet Music’ is inspired by the Steve Reich piece ‘It’s Gonna Rain’, which uses two tape loops. To create ‘Discreet Music’ Eno programmed two mutual melodies into a synth and looped them via modified tape machines for half an hour. The result is a piece that slowly evolves into a majestic, lush soundscape.
This method is a simple system for creating music that produces startling results. The two looping melodies are ‘mutual’ in terms of key but they are of different lengths. For example if Melody A is 3 seconds long and Melody B is 10 seconds long, for every time Melody B loops Melody A loops 3.3 times. The two melodies are constantly offset throughout the piece’s duration. This offset creates a variety of concords and discords as the relationship between the melodies constantly changes. Music created in this manner has no real beginning or end, theoretically the listener could enter at any point, and in theory the music would go on creating itself forever.
“Two Horns” and “Piano” follow Eno’s original recipe. In each case four short melody loops, varying from about 5 to 20 seconds, are set playing in a continuous loop. The melody loops for “Two Horns” are played on trumpet and french horn and treated with delay. For “Piano” the loops are sampled from a Jazz record. “Violin and Guitar” uses the same principle again but instead of mutual melodies the loops are made up of one note only. “Chord Organ”, is slightly different. There is only one loop, the source material being one of my finished pieces of around 4 minutes. The piece features a heavily delayed ‘Rosedale chord organ’, a type of electronic harmonium. Three copies of the piece play in a looping round.
Ian Baxter, Sheffield, Dec 2003