ABSTRACT
A term first coined by U.K. experimental pop musician and producer Brian Eno. In a 1978 essay he described a new form of music in which the listener might “swim in…float in…get lost inside.” The essay appeared on the sleeve of Music for Airports, the first ever ambient album (although Eno had refined his style on the preceding Discreet Music). The arrival of the synthesizer fuelled ambient music further most notably on recordings by Kraftwek and Jean Michel Jarre. The acid house, rave and techno scenes which ignited in the late 1980s and early 1990s developed ambient music further. ‘Ambient house’was pioneered in groundbreaking music by The Orb, Youth, The KLF and 808 State who fused ambient ideas with mellow dance beats. Now almost unrecognizable form the tones and drones found on Music for Airports, ambient became a mainstream phenomena postmillennium in the form of ‘chill out’. An updated version of ambient house for the Ibiza generation, chill out unwittingly got sucked into the mainstream via a public saturation of compilation albums. By it’s very nature ambient music will evolve further. Eno himself describes its offshoots and developments as “like Chinese Whispers – unrecognizable but intriguing.”
