Music For Airports

Robert Black (Performer), Gregory Hesselink (Performer), Mark Stewart (Performer), Matt Goeke (Performer), Maya Beiser (Performer), Evan Ziporyn (Performer), Brian Eno (Composer), Bang On A Can (Performer), David Fedele (Performer), Liz Mann (Performer), Chris Komer (Performer), Steve Schick (Performer), Lisa Moore (Performer), Christopher Washburne (Performer), Julie Josephson (Performer), Tom Hoyt (Performer), Wayne J. du Maine (Performer), Todd Reynolds (Performer), Alexandra Montano (Performer), Katie Geissinger (Performer)

Product Details

• Performer: Robert Black, Gregory Hesselink, Mark Stewart, Matt Goeke, Maya Beiser, et al.
• Composer: Brian Eno
• Audio CD (February 24, 1998)
• SPARS Code: ADD
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Philips
• ASIN: B0000069CI
• Also Available in: Unknown Binding
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #113,365 in Music (See Bestsellers in Music)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com
An avant-garde ensemble playing the 1978 Brian Eno piece which put ambient music on the map. Eno's idea was to make a series of tape loops into tightly composed Muzak. He wanted a sonic backdrop for bland public spaces that would reward close listening. Bang on a Can, playing acoustic and electric instruments, breathe life into it, making the music's neutrality seem coldly beautiful. The piece is divided into four parts, each consisting of a few gentle, minimal figures, calmly repeated and shifted. Rhythm is eliminated and time seems to stretch. What is revealed is the sensuousness possible in a single note. Music has never been the same. This is the best place to hear where it changed. --Steve Tignor

Option
[Brian] Eno's work is a finished studio product readily available in shops, exactly as the composer meant it to be heard. So Micheal Gordon's faithfully spare arrangement of "1/1" seems particularly pointless. (Ask any art forger--the original may be worth a fortune, but a good copy is just a fake.) And while Bank on a Can is smart enough to know that Music for Airports spawned whole genres of music (from the elegance of ambient to the evil incarnation of new age), they get hung up on whether their own variation is the equivalent of a pop cover version or a classical canonization.... This album in no way adds to or improves upon Eno's own creation.

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Takes the recording out of the studio, September 26, 2003

By	Manny Hernandez "Author of Ning For Dummies" (Bay Area, CA) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)

By taking Brian Eno's legendary ambient cornerstone album "Music for Airports" out of the studio, i.e. by recording it with live musicians in real time, avant-garnd ensemble Bang on a Can present us with quite a masterpiece, considering the original work was conceived as a piece solely with synthesizers and tape loops in mind (and at hand) when the music was first put together over two decades ago.

After interpreting works of the great minimalists Steve Reich and Terry Riley it would only seem appropriate for them to be the most appropriate pick to give new life to Eno's seminal ambient work, and they do an extraordinary job at it, in my opinion. The result is an album (an exec. production by Philip Glass, by the way) that is true to the source while adding new instruments to it in a process that counted with Eno's blessing all along the way.

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Eno Revisited, May 31, 1998

By	Juan Mobili (Valley Cottage, NY USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Brian Eno, in many ways, is one of those composers responsible for a lot of what you hear today without having gotten his due recognition. Since the days of Roxy Music to his production of U2's music, Eno has forged new paths for contemporary music without fanfarre nor self-congratulatory intentions. "music for Airports" is a classic of what has become quite an important genre: Ambient music. As far as I'm concerned, Eno, at least partially, has fathered New Age, Trip Hop and Ambient music. Bang in the Can has accomplished the simplest and hardest task of performing other people's music: they offred their own voice without bastardizing the original composition. Whether in music or any other "walk of life," this group of musicians decided to honor a composer and found enough room to sound themselves, in the process. What you have here is an acoustic version of the original "loops & tapes" classic. Played impeccably and arrnged with love. I enjoy it, in its own right, as I do with Eno's own version. Buy it without reservations, and, if you don't own Eno's own, get them both!

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An interesting and successful rendition, March 3, 1999

By A Customer

In re-recording this classic, Bang on a Can have, consciously or unconsciously, helped to bring ambient music to new level. Not only is the instrumentation here different from the original, but the pieces are played live in the studio. The original recording was 'produced' by Eno in his truest ambient form: by setting up tape loops of different durations and allowing the permutations formed by stepping back to play themselves out. In this sense, Eno's 'production' style was formed out of his intelligence and musical genius and a kind of 'don't touch' approach; you set up a realm of possibilities where any outcome is desirable, and then you leave it alone. However, while he has gone down the road of Generative Music, using computers to do what he had previously done with tape (or, endorsed this avenue I should say), Bang on a Can take his ideas in a vastly separate direction by playing these pieces live. Thus, in the Eno tradition, the ideas which served to generate the music are at least as interesting as the music itself. Even if I would recommend skipping this release and going straight for the original, I would still say that what this piece accomplishes is much like what Cage's 4'33" did for sound: it is great to know that someone had the idea, even if the outcome is not as beautiful.