Bang On A Can: Music For Airports: Brian Eno

In 1979, Brian Eno's epochal Music For Airports introduced the phrase "ambient music" into the contemporary-music lexicon. Even if Erik Satie originally coined the term "wallpaper music," it was Eno who popularized the Zen-like texturalism of ambient music. Now, nearly 20 years later, the New York collective Bang On A Can has transcribed and arranged Eno's calm-inducing opus for live performance, playing the repetitive, hypnotic pieces in real time and recording the results. Just the thought of performing Eno's album at first seems like some sort of arch, post-modern joke, like John Cage's 4'33". The curious contradictions inherent in the task are formidable: If, as defined, ambient music is meant to fade into the background, what's the point of re-recording an ambient album But this line of reasoning gives Eno's infamous album short shrift: Though far from the most engaging piece of music ever recorded, Music For Airports is hardly as disposable as its reputation implies. That Bang On A Can could so accurately replicate each "movement"—the four tracks are titled "1/1," "1/2," "2/1," and "2/2"—reveals that there's more going on in Eno's music than might appear at first, even if the pieces don't change that much. The new rendition only differentiates itself from the original in the most mundane ways, like instrumentation and recording fidelity. But as an intellectual exercise, the effort is incomparable.