Abstract

Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports is a seminal album in the history of electronic music. Using Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the assemblage, I explore the album's compositional structure as well as its ambient function, by attending to specific tracks and locating the album in musical history, particularly relative to the work of John Cage, La Monte Young, and Steve Reich. In an extended discussion of its ambient function, I argue that the LP offers music for reverie that is capable of initiating processes of potential self-transformation.