It’s always a pleasure when I chat with an artist about blog post ideas and they run with it, returning something unique to their own ideas and creative talents. I've known Ray Robinson for sometime, from back when he released an eRecord on Whitelabrecs under his solo alias Wodwo. Not long after he collaborated with Simon McCorry and I discovered that he is a writer by trade. So in this blog post, Ray shares an essay of sorts which focuses on the work of Brian Eno and how his album 'Music For Airports' has become a vital cultural reference point for many an Ambient music fan. They're still selling this album in record shops today, to an intrigued gen Z.

Rather than a straight history of the album Ray dives into why it still resonates with so many; how something so minimal could redefine listening, influence generations of artists and offer calm in chaotic times. Eno talked about Ambient music being 'as ignorable as it is interesting'; however, if you've ever wondered what makes Ambient music more than just background sound, this one is for you.

This is all very timely as between the 19th and 21st of September, Brian Eno's hometown Woodbridge will be hosting the fourth annual Woodbridge Ambient Music Festival! Who knows, maybe Brian might make an appearance as he did in 2023! To learn more about this wonderful festival, click HERE.

Aside from writing, you may be interested in checking out some of Ray's music. His latest record is a collab with Jon Attwood (Yellow6) under their long-standing JARR project. There's a player where you can take a listen to 'Sun Swift Swoon' at the bottom of the page...

THE AMBIENT CONDITION – ENO, AIRPORTS, AND INDUSTRIAL MALAISE
Ray Robinson/Wodwo

The first time I heard Music for Airports, I was in my bedroom at university and it was raining outside. Not dramatically; just that indecisive, English sort of rain. I had it on low, background volume, almost inaudible over the light tap of keys as I worked on a short story. But something in the music reached past the threshold of attention. A smear of piano. A vowel of a voice. I looked up from what I was doing and realised the music had been playing for twenty minutes and I hadn't listened to it once. And yet the room had changed. My thoughts had changed. I had changed.

Ambient music does that. It doesn’t demand to be heard—it conditions you. You don’t remember it starting, and it doesn’t really end. It insinuates itself into the texture of your space, your mood, your time. You can listen with one ear or none. And yet, once you’ve tuned into it, you start to hear it everywhere—in machinery, in rain, in the hum of a fluorescent light. It becomes a form of colouring agent for experience.

Eno coined the term “ambient music” in the 1970s. But more than a genre, it was—and remains—a sensibility. A way of listening. A strategy for survival. It’s no accident that its earliest articulations emerged from Eno’s own moment of stillness, of enforced listening. In 1975, after being struck by a taxi in Notting Hill Gate, Eno lay in hospital, bedridden and immobile. A friend visited, bringing a 19th-century harp record, which she placed on the turntable before leaving. The volume was too low. One speaker had failed. Rain pattered on the windowpane. What filtered into Eno’s body was not a performance, but a diffusion: harp, rainfall, hiss, distance. The accident became aesthetic. This was music, too—unfixed, peripheral, co-authored by the room, the weather outside, the listener’s passivity. [1]

Out of this came Discreet Music in 1975, then three years later, Ambient 1: Music for Airports. A title that even now sounds like both a provocation and a spell. Music, yes—but for airports? Airports, at that time, were temples of anxiety, movement, system error. They were transitional and transactional. Everyone was going somewhere else. But Eno imagined the airport as a place where you pause, where you listen. He wanted music that ‘would induce calm and a space to think.’ [2]

It was 1978. Britain was unraveling in slow motion. The Winter of Discontent was on the horizon. The cities were rusting. The unions were striking. Shops shuttered early and everywhere smelled faintly of soot. The nation, long past its imperial peak, was drifting in a state of low, bureaucratic panic. People talked about leaving—Australia, Canada, mainland Europe. Airports, in that context, were exit wounds. Thresholds between identities.

Eno’s Music for Airports doesn’t contain traditional compositions. It is made of loops—of piano tones, synthesised chords, wordless voices—that are fed into tape systems and left to interact indeterminately. No two listens are the same. There’s no progression, only recurrence. Notes appear, repeat, fail to resolve. It’s music without story. A looped ecology of sound. Listening to it is like watching condensation gather on glass. You are made aware of time not as momentum but as atmosphere.

That atmosphere mirrored Britain’s own: a society stuck in recursive feedback, systems no longer producing outcomes, only more system. Music for Airports wasn’t escapist; it was diagnostic. It didn’t protest the condition—it embodied it.

What Eno was exploring wasn’t just a style, but a way of letting go of authorship. He was less a composer than a kind of gardener, seeding systems that would evolve beyond his control. Influenced by cybernetics, by John Cage, by minimalism and Musique Concrète, Eno saw music not as a narrative but as a field, a process, a generative condition. His music didn’t insist; it suggested. It allowed for failure, drift, silence. It made the listener part of the composition, drawing them into a mood rather than delivering a message.

The fact that such music should find a home in airports is telling. These were the new cathedrals of late modernity—places of surveillance, control, limbo. Post-industrial landscapes where the self was scanned, scanned again, and shuttled toward destinations abstracted of meaning. And yet Music for Airports didn’t dramatise this condition. It softened it. It hovered above it. It offered a new kind of beauty: detached, cyclical, undemanding. Music that didn’t explode, but dissolved.

To this day, Music for Airports remains ambient music’s ur-text. Its innovations were formal, but also philosophical. Eno understood that music could be spatial, environmental, architectural. That it could exist in the margins. That it could heal, even if quietly, even if obliquely. He understood that in a world of perpetual motion, of economic collapse and cultural exhaustion, people needed room to breathe. And so he created sound that was less about being heard than about being there.

Eno’s influence would stretch far beyond that 1978 release. His ambient vision seeped into everything: into new age, into chill-out rooms, into film scores, art installations, into the seams of techno and the silences of drone. But his real legacy was conceptual. He gave us a new idea of what music could do. That it could be useful, not in the functionalist sense, but in the existential one. That it could hold a space open. That it could refuse resolution.

Music for Airports didn’t just soundtrack a place—it soundtracked a condition: the ambient condition. One of aftermath, of slow erosion, of beauty glimpsed through fatigue. In this way, Eno wasn’t merely a composer; he was an environmentalist of mood, a designer of temporal ecology. And ambient music—his invention, his inheritance—is still with us. Still looping. Still waiting in the background, doing its quiet work. As you pass through gates and corridors, terminals and delays, it’s still there. Soft as breath, vast as fog.

The sound of what we leave behind. And of what we carry with us.

[1] Eno, B. (2004) ‘Generating and Organizing Variety in the Arts’, in Cox, C. and Warner, D. (eds.) Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, Revised Edition. New York: Continuum. pp. 127–130.

[2] Eno, B. (1978) Ambient 1: Music for Airports [liner notes]. London: Editions EG.

'Sun Swift Swoon' is available in a limited repress of 100 marble vinyl-effect CDrs housed in record wallet sleeves, as well as a digital option in a range of high quality format options. You can take a listen to the album in full or buy a copy HERE!

And if you've enjoyed reading Ray's article, you can explore more of his work HERE.