Bruce Brubaker has announced his upcoming album, Eno Piano, coming out November 10, where he explores the complex genre of ambient music with the goal of creating an album full of songs that make airport music desirable, with inspiration from Brian Eno’s Music for Airports.
Brubaker’s album, Eno Piano, started in 2017 with the question: “With all those sustained notes in the music– can Brian Eno’s Music for Airports be played on a piano?” Brubaker heard jazz pianist Evan Allen experiment with an EBow inside a piano (an EBow is an electromagnetic device used to make long notes by vibrating a string on an electric guitar). Then, Bruce met Florent Colautti, the French inventor who was developing electro-magnetic devices suspended over the strings inside a piano to make long musical tones.
Bruce Brubaker makes connections to music old and new through his explorations of minimalism. In his album Codex, there was a dialogue between open-form music by Terry Riley and very early keyboard pieces written by anonymous scribes in the 15th century. Brubaker’s performances of music by Philip Glass glorified by his album Glass Piano on InFiné, caused critic Roland Duclos to write: “Brubaker is to Glass what Glenn Gould is to Bach.”
Brian Eno’s “Ambient 1: Music for Airports” is known as the greatest ambient composition of all time. Within the guidelines of Bruce Brubaker’s Eno Piano, the album’s definitive track “Airport 2.1” is recontextualized as a piece created for a single instrument.
Brian Eno’s music is a significant part of the repetition-based musical minimalism practiced by Philip Glass, Terry Riley, and others in the 20th century. In 1971, Philip Glass performed at the Royal College of Art in London. In the audience were two 23-year-olds: David Bowie and Brian Eno. Glass’s music was a formative influence on Eno. Later, Philip Glass wrote three symphonies based on the three albums of Eno and Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy. Eno Piano, from which the new track is taken, acknowledges a deep artistic bond.
Brian Eno defined the new genre of ‘ambient music.’ Spending hours waiting for a flight at the Cologne-Bonn Airport, Eno became frustrated with the airport’s uninspiring atmosphere. At that moment, Eno conceived an album of music “designed for airports.”
Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities. And whereas their intention is to ‘brighten’ the environment by adding stimulus to it (thus supposedly alleviating the tedium of routine tasks and leveling out the natural ups and downs of the body rhythms) Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and a space to think. Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.
Brian Eno, in his original 1978 liner notes
Eno Piano is the music of Eno, with the contributions of Rhett Davies, Robert Wyatt, Dieter Moebius, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Harold Budd, Jon Hopkins, and Leo Abrahams.
Eno Piano will be released on November 10, 2023. Pre-order the album here.
