Sonic Wonder
Brian Eno on Designing Spaces and Including Ambiguity
Two insights from the ambient visionary
An ambient composition is a musical experience. It is designing a space to enter. Use sound to create a space you want to be in.
And I thought, “What do I do with music?” Well, I use it to make the space that I want to live in. What I generally wanted was an atmosphere… Ambient really was a way of saying, “I’m now designing musical experiences.” The emphasis was on saying, “Here is a space, an atmosphere, that you can enter and leave as you wish.”
Avoid painting the whole picture, what you leave out is key.
Music that goes with a film is a different kind of music. It can’t be overspecific. It can’t paint the whole picture. Because it has to make room for the picture! So, it can’t fill in every detail, and film music that tries to do that, that tries to be sort of orchestral music, never works very well for me. Listening to “Juliet of the Spirits,” I thought, this is a new way that music can be.
After that, I was working in studios and starting to paint my own pictures with music, and finding that leaving stuff out was actually the key. Not filling in everything, but leaving certain things ambiguous and vague. That took me into a kind of music that I wanted to make.
