Unlike so many other albums, I can’t really speak here to individual songs or tracks. Brian Eno’s first real foray into ambient music is made up of four songs, each of which are around a quarter of an hour long. Rather than being lyrically or sonically rich, the ambience found in this album pushes against the sounds of everyday life. It allows you to dissolve into your own mind, and it makes thinking easy.

In this way, we can think of Music for Airports as a forerunner to Lo-Fi music, used by students and professionals everywhere. At the same time, there is a clear line that might be drawn between Brian Eno’s here and the post-rock of the early 2000s.

At the time that Eno released this album, which stands in remarkable contrast to Here Come the Warm Jets or Another Green World, the music scene still leaned heavily into subversive sounds, although it was beginning to mellow out as the weight of the counterculture collapsed upon itself. Brian Eno might be read as a casualty of the rightward turn in Anglo-American culture spaces, but he maintained his experimental approach to creating interesting music.

I haven’t heard any of his more recent work, and I’m really curious about where he went after this.