Track Listing

1. 1/1
2. 2/1
3. 1/2
4. 2/2

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #175488 in Music
• Brand: Philips
• Released on: 1998-02-24
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .23 pounds

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.

Entertainment Weekly
[F]our cuts of translucently soothing bleeps and ahhs--with a small orchestra and chorus of New York alterna-music stalwarts. For the most part, it works; the unpredictability of the one-take "live" recording warms up Eno's swatches of sound, making for a futuristic soundscape that's oddly nostalgic.

Customer Reviews

An interesting and successful rendition
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.

Eno Revisited
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!

...
I'm not sure why anyone would fault Bang on a Can for reinterpreting Music for Airports. First of all Eno wrote the music over twenty years ago... More importantly, I read an interview on Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson regarding the fact that they had recently attended a live concert of Music for Airports performed by BOAC. During the concert they were both moved to tears. Eno was later surprised to hear this, commenting that he had written the music to be without emotion, but that he was pleasantly surprised that people had been affected by the music many years after he had written it. That's all the justification needed.
The album is great.