1/1

Brian Eno invented the category of “ambient music” on Music for Airports, and the first piece on the record — simply titled “1/1” — is its founding document. Seventeen minutes of a piano figure looped on a tape machine, with a second looped element of slightly different length, so the two patterns drift in and out of phase with each other for the entire duration.

The generative interference between the two loops is the weather. Eno wrote that ambient music should be “as ignorable as it is interesting,” and “1/1” passes that test at both ends — it recedes into the room as background, or fills the entire room as foreground, depending on how you attend to it. Either way it functions like low pressure. Put it on. Let the barometer drop.