condition (record/cover): NM / VG+ (light ring wear)

The record that named the genre. Brian Eno had been working with treated tape loops since Discreet Music (1975), but it was Ambient 1: Music For Airports (1978) that crystallised what he meant by "ambient": music designed to inflect an environment rather than command attention, as he put it in the sleeve essay, "able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular". The album was meant, only half ironically, as music for actual airport terminals. Cologne-Bonn Airport would later install it, briefly. It has since become impossible to dislodge from the cultural ear.

Four pieces. "1/1" is sixteen minutes of acoustic and electric piano figures (the piano played by Robert Wyatt) laid over slowly shifting synthesizer beds. "2/1" loops a wordless choir (Christa Fast, Christine Gomez, Inge Zeininger) of three women singing different notes at different tape-loop lengths, so that the relationships between their voices never quite repeat. "1/2" and "2/2" follow the same processes in inverted arrangements. There are no chord changes in the conventional sense. Each piece moves only as its loop ratios drift.

The original vintage European EG / Polydor pressing of 2310 647. Followed by The Plateaux Of Mirror (1980), Day Of Radiance (1980) and On Land (1982) in the Ambient series proper. A pivotal record of the late twentieth century, the document that opened a path nearly every subsequent ambient, post-rock and modern classical artist has walked.