Our weekly podcast features in-depth analysis of the music we find great, exciting and just plain awesome, along with interviews with some of our favorite artists. This week, Critic's Director Jeremy D. Larson hosts longtime Grayson contributor Haver Currin for a deep dive into Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports, perhaps the most important ambient album ever made. Currin also recently wrote about the record for our Sunday Review series, in which we revisit important albums from the past.
Listen to this week's episode and read an excerpt below. Follow along The Pitchfork Review here.
Grayson Haver Currin: No matter how many times I listen to this record, I always marvel at how restrained it is. It's all about knowing when to say when. In terms of actual audio events, there are quite a few. It's an impressionistic piece of music based on repetition, where the idea is that Eno has created a world of sound, but you create a world of meaning within it. This is something that keeps bringing me to this piece of music.
Jeremy D. Larson: Yes, it is conflicting. I've always made this connection that there's this horseshoe theory: The loudest music is confrontational and the quietest music is also confrontational, because it demands a lot from you in the same way that extreme black metal demands a lot from you.
Another interesting thing is that this album was released right around the time the Walkman was invented, in the late 70s. You can get a tape from Environment 1 and walk with it, and the world that was once confined to a hospital or an airport now simply travels with you.
