Soft, soothing, and understated as a rule, ambient music may seem the least weird of all musical genres. Not so, say JF and Phil, who devote this episode to Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports, the 1978 album in whose liner notes the term "ambient music" first appeared. In this conversation, your hosts explore the aesthetic, metaphysical, and political implications of a kind of music designed to interact with the listener -- and the listener's environment -- below the threshold of ordinary, directed awareness. Eno and Peter Schmidt's famous Oblique Strategies, a deck of cards designed to heighten and deepen creativity, lends divinatory support to the endeavor.
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REFERENCES
Brian Eno, Ambient 1: Music for Airports
Gabriella Cardazzo, Duncan Ward, and Brian Eno, Imaginary Landscapes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUvf6giAAk)
[Oblique Strategies Deck](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ObliqueStrategies)_
Theodore Adorno, [Introduction to the Sociology of Music](https://books.google.com/books/about/IntroductiontotheSociologyofMusic.html?id=300YAQAAIAAJ)_
Marc Auge, Non-Places (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9781844673117)
Anahid Kassabian, “Ubiquitous Music” (http://asounder.org/resources/kassabian_ubiquitous.pdf)
Sigmund Freud, “On Transience” (https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Freud_Transience.pdf)
Weird Studies, Episode 104 on Sgt. Pepper (https://www.weirdstudies.com/104)
Joris Karl Huysmans, A Rebours (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9781613824641)
Roger Moseley, Keys to Play (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780520291249)