Amorphous, open-ended, unstructured time, with undercurrents of foreboding, pockets of boredom and fleeting interludes of peace or reassessment. That’s what Covid-19 has brought to many people — and it’s a mental state that Brian Eno’s vast recorded catalog has been prepared for since he first popularized the term “ambient music” in the 1970s. The long days and featureless nights of self-quarantine offer an opportune moment to revisit — or get acquainted with — Eno’s time-warping music.He does have other skills. On four solo albums from the 1970s, after he left Roxy Music, Eno thoroughly mastered rock-song structure, with slyly cerebral lyrics and skewed instrumental sounds; all four albums are gems, particularly “Before and After Science” from 1977. He has intermittently made song albums in the decades since. And his 1981 collaboration with David Byrne on “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” — shaping found-sound sampled vocals from international sources into rhythm-driven, club-ready tracks — opened new doors in dance music.But for the most part, Eno has channeled his pop impulses into production and collaborations — with U2, David Bowie, Talking Heads, John Cale and lately Karl Hyde of Underworld. Yet the bulk of his own recordings, and all of those selected here, are instrumentals that, old or new, are particularly suited to orchestrate this uneasy historical moment.Eno was not the first to make music designed to maintain a subliminal, atmospheric presence while evading the foreground. By his account, medical circumstance led him to thinking about music as just one element in a larger environment. When he was immobilized after an automobile accident, a friend left music playing on a record player he couldn’t reach, at such low volume that it melded with all the other sounds in the room; Eno being Eno, he ended up listening with John Cage-like attentiveness. That gave him the idea for his quiet, ambient (although he hadn’t yet settled on the term) 1975 album, “Discreet Music.” Soon, Eno would stake out an ambient music genre that has since been populated by countless composers alongside him.Yet Eno himself has continued to rework what ambient music might mean with continual flexibility, shifting his approaches and adapting constantly to new technology and circumstances. He has released multiple albums per year throughout a four-decade solo career — including, this year, “Mixing Colours,” a collaboration with his brother Roger Eno. There are clearly sounds he is drawn to repeatedly: glimmering reverberant timbres, uncannily sustained chords and clusters, melodic phrases that shy away from turning into melodies. But his catalog holds ample exceptions to any generalization about his music.Eno has improvised in the studio, alone or with collaborators, using real time recordings or making surreal edits. He has composed extremely short ambient works — like the six-second Windows 95 start-up sound — and potentially endless ones. He has made music that seems cyclical and music that hints at narrative. For decades, he has created generative music: systems that are set in motion, like loops of irregular length or permutations of computer-generated tones, and chosen particular results like a favorite bolt of a textile. He edits, manipulates and recombines his recordings, or he allows his generative music to flow freely, as he has done with installations in galleries, museums, hospitals and public spaces. He has worked by concept, by instinct, by collaboration and by every conceivable combination of them all.Here are some of Eno’s best ambient works — long tracks, often, that might provide half-heard diversion through a sleepless night. (Listen to the full playlist on Spotify, too.)‘The Heavenly Music Corporation 1’ (Fripp & Eno, 1973)Eno and Robert Fripp (King Crimson’s guitarist) experimented in the early 1970s with looping — which, back in the analog era, involved routing a tape through two tape recorders, to layer the recording from the first one with the playback from the second. The loop sets up a pulsating drone in “The Heavenly Music Corporation 1,” topped by lead-guitar solos from Fripp that claw and flail, then braid themselves back into the drone: aggression patiently reframed. (Note: Although streaming services break the piece up into tracks, it’s worth hearing as an uninterrupted whole.)‘Discreet Music’ (1975)The title track of Eno’s first solo ambient breakthrough loops and undulates for just over half an hour, with endlessly recurring, somehow optimistic two-note and four-note motifs that float in an amniotic bath of consonances. The reedy electronic tones suggest woodwinds played by musicians who never have to pause for breath. More
