And I do mean “listen.” Biosphere makes electronic music of a type usually answering to the name “ambient,” but I don’t really know what that means. When Brian Eno invented the genre with his 1978 Music for Airports, he said something about wanting to make “environmental music suited to a wide variety of moods and atmospheres,” and that the music he had in mind “must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular...it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.” Nobody apart from the chin-stroking hordes of Roxy Music fans really paid him much heed (the chin-stroking hordes, naturally, were suitably impressed: and I am not mocking them: I count myself among their numbers), and by 1983 you could find his lovely Editions EG volumes in cutout bins here and there, headed for the Blind Silence that will eventually greet us all. All movements being from their inceptions quite doomed, it came as no surprise to see that Ambient Music (Eno’s capitals, not mine) hadn’t come to much. |
