Music to encourage flow: Ambient 1 / Music for Airports (Brian Eno)

Interruptions kill my flow states, so I try to minimize them as much as possible. Music is a great way to do this, especially in a busy office: plug an iPod into your brain via in-ear headphones (Sennheiser CX300 — highly recommended) and you can forget about the world outside to focus on the task at hand. Some music works better in this role than others…

*Ambient 1 / Music for Airports*, recorded by Brian Eno in 1978, is the ideal “working” album. The music is soft, ethereal, homogeneous, repetitive, and mostly instrumental — the perfect ingredients to help establish and sustain flow. However, it isn’t elevator music: there is an alien, melancholy feeling to MfA that gives it depth.

Concept / background

Inspired by the beauty of Cologne airport, Eno set about to design a music that would be fitting for a public space of that type. He started with the following conditions:

It mustn’t interfere with human communication, so it has to be either higher or lower than voice sounds. It should last a very long time, because you don’t want changes all the time. It should be possible to be interrupted by announcements, and so on, without suffering…

In opposition to the muzak commonly used at that time, it made no effort to trivialize the fear of dying that many people feel in airports:

I wanted to create a different feeling: that you were sort of suspended in the universe, and your life or death wasn’t so important.

Perhaps this is why it’s so perfect for long sessions of focused thinking: it’s designed from scratch to be background music, and to take both the musician’s and the listener’s egos out of the equation.

What it sounds like

Eno recorded the four tracks on the album using tape loops of himself and a few other musicians playing a variety of instruments and singing (no words — only “oohs” and “aahs”.) The loops are individually recognizable, yet intentionally de-synchronized. The result is a tapestry of sound patterns, a sonic kaleidoscope.

Highlights

1/1 is haunting and weightless. It features a drifting piano loop played by Robert Wyatt, and alone is worth the price of the album. (This track sees heavy rotation in my iTunes.)
2/1 has piano and vocal loops. For some reason it makes me think of a still black pond covered with leaves.

Where to get it

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