Also a huge Eno fan here. Put together, I probably have listened to Music for Airports, Another Green World, Taking Tiger Mountain and Discreet Music more than any other artist. Maybe Philip Glass comes in at a close second.
Anyways, in 2016, Tero Parviainen (@teropa) shared this really cool long-form exploration called "JavaScript Systems Music – Learning Web Audio by Recreating The Works of Steve Reich and Brian Eno" that I enjoyed tremendously (and I don't even like Javascript!)
Thanks for sharing. I've been on a path of algo music with JavaScript (I also do not enjoy JavaScript) and have mostly just guess-and-checked my way through it. I'm going to work through this as my advent of code project.
Yesterday I put up a little dictionary of synth sounds that I'm building out to help me on my journey (https://synthrecipes.org). The goal to be able to export any particular sound in a format for different live coding environments. Sounds are defined in a JSON format like https://synthrecipes.org/recipes/acid-bass.json. I'll open source it today so other can submit sounds.
>To dig deeper into this style of tape loop ambient music, check out William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops. William Basinski used a similar concept to Brian Eno, only the tapes he used rapidly deteriorated upon playback, causing the musical material to degrade over the length of the recording.
I've never "bought" the story of Disintegration Loops that Basinski tells about its creation. The idea he composed it literally during the 9/11 attacks was just a silly attempt to add gravitas to abstract music. The more you think about it, the more off-putting it becomes. Reminds me of Stockhausen's stupendous remark about 9/11 being "the biggest work of art there has ever been".
In the same vein, tape doesn't normally just deteriorate before your eyes. The gradual change in sound of the loops is more likely due to the guitar pedal chain he was running his loops into (Basinski tends to omit this part of its creation).
I went to see William Basinski 'live' in Liverpool at Yoko Ono's Tung Auditorium. William stood in front of his MacBook, waving his arms like a conductor and drinking red wine.
Halfway through, he said he was tired with travelling and left the stage.
The audience continued to sit there for another hour, staring at the lid of the MacBook that was making the music. When it finished, we applauded the MacBook and left.
Despite being categorically "non-narrative" music, the longevity of both records is almost entirely dependent on these narratives behind them. Ambient 2-4 are musically much more interesting, but the memetic quality of its origin story has given Ambient 1 (and the Basinski record) undue attention over time. Conceptually pure, yes! Sonically compelling, maybe. At least the Eno's approach was novel.
Also, Stockhausen was not entirely wrong. It was insensitive and poorly phrased, but 9/11 is undoubtedly the defining aesthetic image of our time.
One of my first ambient records I bought after I got into Music for Airports by Eno. Still one of my favorites. After those two I got into Stars for the Lid.
I often use the general algorithm for 2/1 as my "hello world" when I'm building new generative music systems. You don't need too many ingredients to set it up, and it yields some surprisingly decent sounding results.
The most recent one[0] I made was done when I was playing around with Rust, WASM, and WebAudio. (You'll need to press somewhere to start the sound)
This Sonic Pi example really blew my mind when I first heard it. Such a rich sound out of three notes.
use_synth :hollow
with_fx :reverb, mix: 0.7 do
live_loop :note1 do
play choose([:D4,:E4]), attack: 6, release: 6
sleep 8
end
live_loop :note2 do
play choose([:Fs4,:G4]), attack: 4, release: 5
sleep 10
end
live_loop :note3 do
play choose([:A4, :Cs5]), attack: 5, release: 5
sleep 11
end
end
I trained myself to take a power nap to track “2/2” on that record. After a really hard workout, getting cleaned up, having a bite to eat and drifting off for 30 minutes so many times it has a warm spot in my heart. I like that music can serve as “functional”. I also recommend Mindspring Memories if you have nostalgia of the personal computing boom for a unique ambient. To me it evokes what trying out a Phillips CD-i at my local department store felt like in 1991. YMMV
Reading this article makes me want to point out the difference between commercial music software and open source software.
What stands out here was that Eno used very simple sounds and looped them. This was not a complicated rube-goldberg machine he built to finally get to these masterpieces. It was simple recordings of voices, looped.
Reggie Watts makes incredible, and non-traditional, electronic house music, basically just his voice and looping machine (granted he does have a 4 octave range, but...). So organic and human.
This is what makes me a little sad when I play with all the amazing open source tools on Linux. Ardour is great. Hydrogen is great. Sonic-PI is incredible.
But, the UI's are not the best. Getting started requires a ton of reading and researching. It is a long way to just "play" (I mean playing like a child, not playing piano).
For example, I wish Sonic-PI had a better way of writing music than JUST writing out ruby. I like ruby as a language, and I'm surprised there is not a way to easily extend the Sonic-PI tool so I can plugin my Novation drum pad and easily trigger samples and notes. I can absolutely watch for MIDI notes from Novation, and take actions in ruby code, but it kills my creativity to do it that way. I wish I could build a tiny set of buttons that shows me that which is not a stream of logs. I never feel like Sonic-PI puts me into a creative mode. It feels like trying to jam the beauty of a harp into emacs. And, I love emacs.
Open source music software could have bespoke custom UIs for any user. I'm a command line guy so I'm part of the problem. But, these tools should be customizable to make our own bespoke UIs which match the beginner level, or the advance level, or anything in between.
Try jumping into any DAW without "a ton of reading and researching".
Granted, there are hardware drum machines and sequencers that you can "play" with as a completely fresh user, but these tend to be the exception rather than the rule. The newer generation of hardware sequencers (say the Elektron series) are quite impenetrable without spending a significant amount of time learning about what they can do and how to do it.
> Open source music software could have bespoke custom UIs for any user.
from the voice of experience, I'll tell you that this makes user support almost impossible, or at least, extremely difficult and frustrating.
You think open source has a UX problem? Try learning to play a guitar. It’s so bad it makes some people’s fingers bleed. People spend years learning how to play and they still say they have a long way to go!
You should check out Andrew and Ben's work, Extempore.
There is definitely a learning curve, but after reading the basics and poking through the examples, you realize you can do anything.
Lots of C libraries have wrappers already written and you can also write your own. I wrote a curl wrapper and pulled live data from sources such as weather APIs, assigned different facets of the data to different instruments and dynamics. You can write GL shaders and generally create your own interfaces.
It's also fully networked with sample-accurate synchronization, so that it's very easy to construct distributed computation and physical interaction. This is where the cyberphysical programming aspect comes into play.
Extempore has support for MIDI devices, and I've really pushed my gear to the limit with it. It is also very low level; you even write your own DSP. But you create libraries over time so that spontaneous jams don't require twenty minutes of fiddling first.
It took a lot of time to feel comfortable in the environment when I first got into it years ago, but with modern agentic IDRs such as Cursor, you should have a much, much easier time. It's great for writing algorithmic music and really great for freeform jam sessions. Lots of built in goodies that will really inspire you.
I've never really understood the appeal honestly. I feel it's more of a "masterpiece" in a historical sense, because it was an early electronic / ambient work which no one had really heard before and that gave it a huge cult following. Which is understandable, but outside of that, I don't see how it's any more interesting than basically any other ambient work of which I would say there is much much much better. Robin Guthrie comes to mind...
I don't see it a masterpiece in the same way I see Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" is. The reason? Because I don't think there is a better Jazz album, ever, where as with Eno's early Ambient work, I think it was surpassed very quickly.
That said I'll give it another listen today and see if I can hear the magic.
Eno has been an inspiration for my entire music listening life. U2's Achtung Baby and Zooropa - both of which Eno was a partner in making - came out in my preteens. It's tough for a kid in the rural midwest to find Brian Eno, but as soon as I got to a place with cultural access I was all over his work. And once Pandora and internet radio came out I was able to go deeper and in to contemporary composition and other related genres.
But even with almost 30 years of listening to this stuff, sometimes a really obvious one slips through the cracks.
I hadn't heard of or listened to Tim Hecker until just this year. And oh man, I haven't felt this way about finding a "new" artist in a long time. If you want a good entry point start with his mid-career Ravedeath, 1972 [0] and its companion Dropped Pianos (both of which feature the MIT Piano Drop on the cover) and work forward and backward from there.
Weird - I also listened to ambient music for almost a decade before hearing about Tim Hecker. I have to second the recommendation, although I started in a different place - when I first heard Harmony in Ultraviolet, it was like something clicked into place. Ambient music had been missing something and I hadn't even known it.
I had a similar experience with Abul Mogard. Whoever they really are is a genius of immense soundscapes.
I am always vastly impressed by the beauty of instrumental albums, and just how memorable and easy listening they are. Eno is of course so high up the list, but as I have got older I have explored instrumental music, from classical to jazz far more and there is true beauty and artistry in conveying your message and making people feel with just instruments and no words.
Brian Eno has this great line from the liner notes for this album:
"Ambient Music must be able to accomodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting."
I've always found ambient to be perfect for listening while working. Now I understand why!
Thanks for the quote. It shows why Eno was so successful - I find all my favorites work either as entirely background sound or as a total listening experience on their own.
Conny Plank was a catalyst or genius (or both). He keeps showing up when I look into some of my favorite produced music. Besides Kraftwerk, I think the Ultravox! album, "Systems of a Romance", was the next time I saw his name. And then, more and more…
I was often confused by Brian Eno and Brian Green, who made one of my favorite albums Music for Home. The later has been a musician and producer for Rufus Wainwright, Michael Bublé, John Legend and others.
[+] [-] interleave|3 months ago|reply
Anyways, in 2016, Tero Parviainen (@teropa) shared this really cool long-form exploration called "JavaScript Systems Music – Learning Web Audio by Recreating The Works of Steve Reich and Brian Eno" that I enjoyed tremendously (and I don't even like Javascript!)
Check it out at: https://teropa.info/blog/2016/07/28/javascript-systems-music...
[+] [-] bradly|3 months ago|reply
Yesterday I put up a little dictionary of synth sounds that I'm building out to help me on my journey (https://synthrecipes.org). The goal to be able to export any particular sound in a format for different live coding environments. Sounds are defined in a JSON format like https://synthrecipes.org/recipes/acid-bass.json. I'll open source it today so other can submit sounds.
--
Edit: I've open sourced the repo so others can improve existing sounds and add new ones. https://github.com/bradly/synth-recipes/tree/main
[+] [-] jacquesm|3 months ago|reply
Both are - in my opinion, of course - awesome. Though the Jon Hassel collaboration may take a while to grow on you.
[+] [-] inference-god|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] pstuart|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Kreutzer|3 months ago|reply
I've never "bought" the story of Disintegration Loops that Basinski tells about its creation. The idea he composed it literally during the 9/11 attacks was just a silly attempt to add gravitas to abstract music. The more you think about it, the more off-putting it becomes. Reminds me of Stockhausen's stupendous remark about 9/11 being "the biggest work of art there has ever been".
In the same vein, tape doesn't normally just deteriorate before your eyes. The gradual change in sound of the loops is more likely due to the guitar pedal chain he was running his loops into (Basinski tends to omit this part of its creation).
[+] [-] jdee|3 months ago|reply
Halfway through, he said he was tired with travelling and left the stage.
The audience continued to sit there for another hour, staring at the lid of the MacBook that was making the music. When it finished, we applauded the MacBook and left.
Quite surreal. Very enjoyable though.
[+] [-] asdhtjkujh|3 months ago|reply
Also, Stockhausen was not entirely wrong. It was insensitive and poorly phrased, but 9/11 is undoubtedly the defining aesthetic image of our time.
[+] [-] uslic001|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] pram|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] zebproj|3 months ago|reply
The most recent one[0] I made was done when I was playing around with Rust, WASM, and WebAudio. (You'll need to press somewhere to start the sound)
0: https://pbat.ch/isorhythms/
[+] [-] bradly|3 months ago|reply
This Sonic Pi example really blew my mind when I first heard it. Such a rich sound out of three notes.
[+] [-] jacquesm|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] CompoundEyes|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] xrd|3 months ago|reply
What stands out here was that Eno used very simple sounds and looped them. This was not a complicated rube-goldberg machine he built to finally get to these masterpieces. It was simple recordings of voices, looped.
Reggie Watts makes incredible, and non-traditional, electronic house music, basically just his voice and looping machine (granted he does have a 4 octave range, but...). So organic and human.
Same for Matthew Herbert, see his manifesto: https://prruk.org/personal-contract-for-the-composition-of-m.... It is all organic.
This is what makes me a little sad when I play with all the amazing open source tools on Linux. Ardour is great. Hydrogen is great. Sonic-PI is incredible.
But, the UI's are not the best. Getting started requires a ton of reading and researching. It is a long way to just "play" (I mean playing like a child, not playing piano).
For example, I wish Sonic-PI had a better way of writing music than JUST writing out ruby. I like ruby as a language, and I'm surprised there is not a way to easily extend the Sonic-PI tool so I can plugin my Novation drum pad and easily trigger samples and notes. I can absolutely watch for MIDI notes from Novation, and take actions in ruby code, but it kills my creativity to do it that way. I wish I could build a tiny set of buttons that shows me that which is not a stream of logs. I never feel like Sonic-PI puts me into a creative mode. It feels like trying to jam the beauty of a harp into emacs. And, I love emacs.
Open source music software could have bespoke custom UIs for any user. I'm a command line guy so I'm part of the problem. But, these tools should be customizable to make our own bespoke UIs which match the beginner level, or the advance level, or anything in between.
[+] [-] PaulDavisThe1st|3 months ago|reply
Try jumping into any DAW without "a ton of reading and researching".
Granted, there are hardware drum machines and sequencers that you can "play" with as a completely fresh user, but these tend to be the exception rather than the rule. The newer generation of hardware sequencers (say the Elektron series) are quite impenetrable without spending a significant amount of time learning about what they can do and how to do it.
> Open source music software could have bespoke custom UIs for any user.
from the voice of experience, I'll tell you that this makes user support almost impossible, or at least, extremely difficult and frustrating.
[+] [-] barfoure|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] soulofmischief|3 months ago|reply
There is definitely a learning curve, but after reading the basics and poking through the examples, you realize you can do anything.
Lots of C libraries have wrappers already written and you can also write your own. I wrote a curl wrapper and pulled live data from sources such as weather APIs, assigned different facets of the data to different instruments and dynamics. You can write GL shaders and generally create your own interfaces.
It's also fully networked with sample-accurate synchronization, so that it's very easy to construct distributed computation and physical interaction. This is where the cyberphysical programming aspect comes into play.
Extempore has support for MIDI devices, and I've really pushed my gear to the limit with it. It is also very low level; you even write your own DSP. But you create libraries over time so that spontaneous jams don't require twenty minutes of fiddling first.
It took a lot of time to feel comfortable in the environment when I first got into it years ago, but with modern agentic IDRs such as Cursor, you should have a much, much easier time. It's great for writing algorithmic music and really great for freeform jam sessions. Lots of built in goodies that will really inspire you.
Also it's LISP.
https://extemporelang.github.io/
[+] [-] krylon|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] andyjohnson0|3 months ago|reply
Me too. Its been a coding zone favourite of mine for many years.
The classical/instrumental version by Bang on a Can [1] is good too.
[1] https://www.discogs.com/release/1140705-Bang-On-A-Can-Brian-...
[+] [-] ktallett|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] soulofmischief|3 months ago|reply
Another favorite is Eno's Discreet Music. Gives me chills every time. One of my favorite records to fly to.
[+] [-] gonzalohm|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bamboozled|3 months ago|reply
I don't see it a masterpiece in the same way I see Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" is. The reason? Because I don't think there is a better Jazz album, ever, where as with Eno's early Ambient work, I think it was surpassed very quickly.
That said I'll give it another listen today and see if I can hear the magic.
Am I missing something?
[+] [-] pickledoyster|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Duanemclemore|3 months ago|reply
But even with almost 30 years of listening to this stuff, sometimes a really obvious one slips through the cracks.
I hadn't heard of or listened to Tim Hecker until just this year. And oh man, I haven't felt this way about finding a "new" artist in a long time. If you want a good entry point start with his mid-career Ravedeath, 1972 [0] and its companion Dropped Pianos (both of which feature the MIT Piano Drop on the cover) and work forward and backward from there.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravedeath,_1972
[+] [-] soiltype|3 months ago|reply
I had a similar experience with Abul Mogard. Whoever they really are is a genius of immense soundscapes.
[+] [-] ktallett|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] xoxxala|3 months ago|reply
"Ambient Music must be able to accomodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting."
I've always found ambient to be perfect for listening while working. Now I understand why!
[+] [-] soiltype|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jmclnx|3 months ago|reply
http://www.echoesofbluemars.org/
I think their bluemars stream is great.
[+] [-] welcome_dragon|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] MultifokalHirn|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] tomhow|3 months ago|reply
How Brian Eno Created Ambient 1: Music for Airports (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33172448 - Oct 2022 (127 comments)
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[+] [-] soulofmischief|3 months ago|reply
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