Deconstructing

Brian Eno's Music

for Airports

In 1978, Brian Eno released

Ambient 1: Music for Airports, a
landmark album in ambient and
electronic music. Although it
wasn’t the first ambient album by
any means, it was the first album
explicitly released as an ‘ambient
music album’. The album was
essentially a continuation of Eno’s
experimentation with the tape
machine as a compositional tool,
as well as his exploration of
generative music, music created
by systems. In this article I’ll
discuss how Music for Airports
was created, I’ll break down and
recreate the tracks 2/1 and 1/2,
and hopefully give you some ideas
about how to adopt this approach
yourself.

Eno’s experiments with tape loops

go as far back as 1973’s (No
Pussyfooting), a collaboration
with King Crimson’s Robert Fripp
that employed an early
experiment in sound-on-sound
tape looping. For the recordings,
Fripps’s guitar was run into two
tape machines feeding into each
other. The musical material runs
back and forth between the
machines, creating longs delays
akin to modern loop pedals. The
length of the delay was set by the
physical distance between the
two machines.

Frippertronics Dual Tape Machines

Eno’s tape experimentations

continued with Discreet Music in
1975. The album’s 30 minute long
title track is composed of Eno’s
EMS Synthi AKS run into a similar
dual tape machine system, with
simple musical phrases repeating
over a long period of time. This
system utilised an EQ and delay
e!ect before the tape machines,
allowing Eno to add variations to
the sounds in real time.

Diagram from the ‘Discreet Music’ liner

notes

For the recording sessions of

Music for Airports, Eno’s approach
involved using several small pre-
recorded snippets of music; single
notes or 3-4 note phrases, mostly
piano, choir and synth. The
phrases are all set to loop at
di!erent rates, determined by the
length of tape they are recorded
on. The di!ering tape lengths
played simultaneously cause the
relationship between the musical
phrases to constantly shift. On
each round, phrases will intersect
di!erently, sometimes appearing
to coalesce into new phrases and
variations on existing themes. Eno
himself puts it best:

“The particular piece I’m

referring to was done by using
a whole series of very long
tape loops, like fifty, sixty,
seventy feet long. There were
twenty-two loops. One loop
had just one piano note on it.
Another one would have two
piano notes. Another one
would have a group of girls
singing one note, sustaining it
for ten seconds. There are
eight loops of girls’ voices and
about fourteen loops of piano.
I just set all of these loops
running and let them configure
in whichever way they wanted
to, and in fact the result is
very, very nice. The interesting
thing is that it doesn’t sound
at all mechanical or
mathematical as you would
imagine. It sounds like some
guy is sitting there playing the
piano with quite intense
feeling. The spacing and
dynamics of “his” playing
sound very well organized.
That was an example of hardly
interfering at all.“

Music for Airports liner notes

contains a graphic score designed
by Eno himself. Not a trained
musician, and unable to read or
write sheet music, Eno instead
used graphic symbols to denote
each musical phrase, or loop. Look
closely and you can see individual
symbols on each row, each
spaced apart di!erently, reflecting
the recording technique used to
craft the album.

2/1

Music for Airports second track,

2/1 consists of a choir singing
shapeless harmonies. There are
no real melodies present, and the
voices occasionally form chords,
but there is no discernible
structure. This song is composed
of seven loops, all of di!erent
lengths, with each loop playing
back a single, sung note. In the
graphic score, you can see Eno’s
use of rectangles to represent
looped tracks, with the spaces
between them varying.

These loops have been recreated

below, along with the approximate
times that each loop repeats.
Note that these times aren’t
perfect, and the timings actually
fluctuate throughout the piece,
likely due to the way they were
looped (the tapes were apparently
wrapped around chair legs). Some
things to note here are that:

• The C and high F loops are

very close together to each
other in duration (20.1
seconds and 19.6 seconds,
respectively). They start out
with the notes playing
separately, and over time the
notes gradually get closer
together until they play back
at the same time, almost as a
chord.

• The Db loop has the longest

length by a significant
margin, and Db is also the
 most dissonant of all the
notes in the piece, as it
creates a semi-tone clash
with C every time the two
play together. The longer
loop length for this note may
have been a conscious
decision by Eno, or the
composition may have just
come out this way through
experimentation.

Click on the play icons below to

start each individual loop.

High Ab, 17.7 second loop High F, 19.6 second loop

! !

C, 20.1 second loop Eb, 16.2 second loop

! !

Db, 32.8 second loop Low Ab, 21.3 second loop

! !

Low F, 24.6 second loop

 !

P L AY A L L PAU S E A L L

1/2

For the second track on Music for

Aiports, 1/2, Eno uses eight short
piano phrases recorded to tape to
create the sense of a bigger
composition, one that is again
shapeless and without structure,
but one that continually evolves
as the piece progresses. Some of
the loops are just single notes,
and others consist of simple 3 or
4 note snippets, with one loop
being an arpeggiated chord.
These loops overlap in di!erent
places upon each repeat, creating
the illusion of new phrases and
melodies, which are simply
di!erent combinations of the
eight snippets. Looped for long
 periods, like the tracks 11:36
running time, allows for many
variations and themes to emerge.

17 second loop 20 second loop

! !

23.1 second loop 28 second loop

! !

29.5 second loop 30 second loop

! !

31.1 second loop 38.04 second loop

! !

P L AY A L L PAU S E A L L
 Ambient
Approach
• The best way to get into this
style of composition is to
start using tape. If you can’t
commit to getting big reel-
to-reel machines, you can
always start with cheaper
cassette players. Some great
online resources for this
cassette tape loops are
Amulets, Hainbach, and
Gemini Horror.

• If you want to work with this

style in your DAW, turn o!
the grid and start creating
loops in
seconds/milliseconds
instead of bars/beats. In
Ableton Live you can press ⌘
+ 4 (Ctrl-4 on Windows) to
turn o! the grid, allowing you
to create unquantized loops
that work in a similar way to
the tape technique. Create
several clips of di!erent
lengths, set them all to loop
simultaneously, and record
the results.

• To dig deeper into this style

 of tape loop ambient music,
check out William Basinski’s
The Disintegration Loops.
Basinski used the same
concept as Eno, only the
tapes he used rapidly
deteriorated upon playback,
causing the musical material
to degrade over the
recordings length.

Download
Thanks for reading! In the
download button below you can
find the WAV files of all the loops
created for use in this article to
play with at your own leisure.
Experiment and enjoy!

DOWNLOAD

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Comments (7)
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Preview P OST C O MM E N T…

Eric T 35 minutes ago · 0 Likes

Eno's Oblique Strategies cards have been

digitized and posted here:
http://stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html

Toby 10 hours ago · 0 Likes

Thanks for this! Excellent analysis and beautiful

samples!

Michael Peters
23 hours ago · 0 Likes

Great article and wonderful to have the loop

players to experiment!! Eno continued to use
this generative approach I think, his gallery
installations during the 1990s, for example,
used several minidisc players with di!erent
loop lengths, and even his more recent ambient
albums (such as Reflection) are still "systems
music" based. It would be interesting to
analyze in what ways his approach evolved
over the years

Zacklur 2 days ago · 0 Likes

This is great, and got me to become a

supporter on Patreon! Thanks so much for
putting this together. Like your previous
commenter, some of this I knew, but not set
out so clearly like this in a way that could be
easily replicated, So I was messing around with
this and tried putting the loops you provided
onto di!erent tracks of an Octatrack MkI,
setting them to loop and not timestretch,
triggered each sample, and I think it worked! Is
that really all there is to it? Samples of varying
lengths, looping continuously mixed together?
Still not entirely sure about the "echo unit" part
of Eno's diagram. Is that just to say the original
piano samples had a delay e!ect applied before
they were looped? Or was the echo unit set up
so that it re-e!ected the loop every time it
looped, with the echo unit being "played" by
Eno, manipulating settings slightly over time?

reverbmachine
A day ago · 1 Like

Yes, as long as your Octatrack isn't

quantising anything, that's all there is too
it! I only have the Digitone, which doesn't
do sampling, but it seems the Elektron
 sequencers are really good for this kind of
music. I think the echo unit in the
Discreet Music diagram is more of a
reverb e!ect, to create that big, spacious
sound.

illlumen 3 days ago · 0 Likes

For me, Eno is one of the most important

producer alive. You explained very well how he
was working, some things I knew, others were
completely new to me. Its great that you
dive into the ambient pool. There is
so much to discover. What I love
about Enos albums from that time is the
special sound they have, which probably owns
a lot to the tape machines which where
involved. Thanks alot, sir.

reverbmachine
A day ago · 0 Likes

Glad you liked the article, Eno is definitely

one of my favourite artists!

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