Discreet Music by Brian Eno
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| 1975 |
I remember exactly how this record came into my life. Unlike other important records, it did not come during some late-night study session, algorithmic recommendation or YouTube sidebar hopping spree. I don't return to this often, but when I do I'm reminded why this hour-long gem has lodged itself into my psyche. Brian Eno was the first ambient composer that I discovered, and I was immediately pulled into the strange and beautiful worlds that seemed baked into the music. I was, up until this point, interested in finding music that discarded genre and form as I knew it (just pop music, basically). I was drawn to bands like A Place to Bury Strangers with their supernova-like, ear-crushing loudness that wouldn't sound too out of place on an airport tarmac, experimental artists like Dreamcrusher who are about as abrasive as one can get and Lightning Bolt, who sound like pushing a marching band down a flight of stairs. My idea of experimentation was volume, and the louder the better.
Late one night in January of 2016, the tattered sleeve of Brian Eno's Discreet Music poked its head out from a bin in my colleges vinyl library. I was alone. I took a minute to flip it around in my hands before pulling out the record and placing it onto the turntable. Whatever I expected, it wasn't what I heard. After a few silent moments, the soft pastoral flute began as if playing at a great distance. Three or four softly repeated notes slowly joined by a choir of equally gentle tones, increasing in scale and brightness. I imagined myself to be sitting in the middle of a field at dawn, letting the plants and animals slowly pull themselves out of a deep sleep. The electronic pangs of the synthesizer feel less artificial as they do natural, ebbing and flowing in and out of existence like the waves on a flowing river. This is how Discreeet Music begins.
I let the title track play out, waiting patiently on the floor for whatever the rest of the album had for me. As the title track gave way to 'Fullness of the Wind,' I found the joyous licks of a thousand violins floating gleefully around the empty room in a way that felt like a million tiny little puffs of wind. Played as a variation of Pachelbel's 'The Canon in D Major', 'Fullness of the Wind' is at once familiar and fresh. You can glean moments of familiarity, but it presents itself in a way that feels like something new. As the record played itself out, I couldn't help but feel stunned at how beautiful it all felt. I let it all wash over me for the next hour.
It's not a particularly long album at one hour. By the time I finished it was somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 or 2 in the morning, but I just couldn't bring myself to go home. So I got up, locked the door and sat back down to play it again.
'Discreet Music' gave me space to breathe in a way that I hadn't experienced with music before. I could feel my mind taking a moment to itself, stretching its limbs out onto the floor with me in a much-needed reprieve. I was only a few weeks into a new school with new people. I was grieving the loss of a grandparent that I couldn't save. I was clinging to a sense of self that so desperately wanted to let go and start anew. I just couldn't let my walls crumble. Discreet Music, for its pastoral beauty and peacefulness, gave me the room I needed to imagine a better future for myself.
Read Brian Eno's liner notes here.
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