Discreet Music

Brian Eno's concept of ambient music builds upon a concept composer Erik Satie called "furniture music". This means music that is intended to blend into the ambient atmosphere of the room rather than be directly focused upon. Like Satie's notion of music that could "mingle with the sound of the knives and forks at dinner", Discreet Music was created to play in, and blend with, the subtle background audio of various, or any given, situation. After she left, according to the Discreet Music liner notes, Eno inadvertently played the harp album almost inaudibly, which "presented what was for me a new way of hearing music – as part of the ambience of the environment". Eno related another version in a 2011 interview: "[Nylon] put a record on and then left. The record was much too quiet but I couldn't reach to turn it up and it was raining outside ... I suddenly thought of this idea of making music that didn't impose itself on your space ... but created a sort of landscape you could belong to". This album is also an experiment in generative composition. His intention was to explore multiple ways to create music with limited planning or intervention. Nicole V. Gagné described the album as "a minimalist work using tape-delay and synthesizer" that would lead to Eno's further experiments in ambient music. In a 1979 interview with Lester Bangs, Eno called Discreet Music the most successful of his recordings, explaining that it "was done very, very easily, very quickly, very cheaply, with no pain or anguish over anything, and I still like it." ==Recording and release==

The title track is a thirty-minute piece originally intended as a background drone for guitarist Robert Fripp to play over in a series of concerts. Eno set up a synthesizer with built-in memory along with a tape delay system, but was immediately interrupted: "people started knocking on the door, and I was answering the phone and adjusting all this stuff as it ran. I almost made that without listening to it. It was really automatic music." It begins with two melodic phrases of different lengths played back from a synthesizer's digital recall system. The equipment used in this case was an EMS Synthi AKS, which had a then-exotic, built-in digital sequencer. This signal is then run through a graphic equaliser to occasionally change its timbre. Eno described the music as the result of a self-generating, self-regulating system, with the input to the system taking the form of two- or four-measure fragments of Pachelbel's canon, and the system being the performers with a set of instructions. Each variation involves a different way of manipulating and overlaying the musical fragments. In the first piece, "Fullness of Wind", the players' tempos are decreased, with the rate of decrease being related to the relative pitch of the instruments, so that lower instruments are slowest. In the second piece, "French Catalogues", groups of notes are associated with time-related directions from different parts of the score. The third piece, "Brutal Ardour", presents the players with sequences of notes that are related but of different lengths. The titles of these pieces were derived from inaccurate French-to-English translations of the liner notes of a version of Pachelbel's Canon performed by the orchestra of Jean-François Paillard. Discreet Music was the third (of four) simultaneous releases on Eno's new Obscure Records label. It was re-released on the Virgin label in 2004. On CD reissues, a full minute of silence separates the two halves. ==Reception and legacy==

Reviewing for The Village Voice in June 1977, Robert Christgau stated that the album "encourages a meditative but secular mood (good for hard bits of writing) more effectively than any of the other rock-identified avant-garde music that's come our way". AllMusic's Sean Westergaard said it is Eno's "first full foray into what has become known as ambient music," and added that "[the album's] reputation as a groundbreaking and influential work is surpassed only by its placid beauty." The "operational diagram" printed on the rear sleeve of Discreet Music would serve as inspiration for other musicians to experiment with tape delay, such as Thomas Leer and Robert Rental on their 1979 album The Bridge. For the 40th anniversary (2015) of the release of the album, the Canadian music ensemble Contact recorded "Discreet Music" with classical instruments as a seven-part one hour work. ==Track listing==

; Side A • "Discreet Music" (Eno) – 30:35 ; Side B Three Variations on the Canon in D Major by Johann Pachelbel (Eno) • "Fullness of Wind" – 9:57 • "French Catalogues" – 5:18 • "Brutal Ardour" – 8:17 == Personnel ==

• Brian Eno – synthesizer, keyboards • Gavin Bryars – co-arranger and conductor on Side B • The Cockpit Ensemble – performer on Side B ;Technical • Brian Eno – producer, photography • Peter Kelsey – engineer • Simon Heyworth – mastering • John Bonis – cover design • Andrew Day – redesign ==See also==