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Discreet Music by  ReleasedDecember 1975RecordedSide A: 9 May 1975
Side B: 12 September 1975StudioSide A: Brian Eno's studio
Side B: , London       Length54:07Brian Eno chronology
(1975)Discreet Music
(1975)
(1977)Alternative cover Re-release cover, featuring a still from Eno's 1981 video Mistaken Memories of Medieval Manhattan.

Discreet Music is the fourth studio album by the British musician , and the first released under his full name (as opposed to simply "Eno"). The album is a  work, with the A-side consisting of one 30-minute piece featuring  and . The B-side features three variations on  by , performed by the Cockpit Ensemble and conducted by .

While his earlier collaborations with  and several selections from  (1975) feature similar ideas, Discreet Music marked a clear step toward the  aesthetic Eno would later codify with 1978's .

Background

Brian Eno's concept of  builds upon a concept composer  called "". This means music that is intended to blend into the ambient atmosphere of the room rather than be directly focused upon. Like Satie's notion of music that could "mingle with the sound of the knives and forks at dinner", Discreet Music was created to play in, and blend with, the subtle background audio of various, or any given, situation.

The inspiration for this album began when Eno was left bed-ridden by an automobile accident and was given an album of eighteenth-century  music by a visiting friend, . After she left, according to the Discreet Music liner notes, Eno inadvertently played the harp album almost inaudibly, which "presented what was for me a new way of hearing music — as part of the ambience of the environment". Nylon recalled the event differently: "I put the harp music on and balanced it as best as I could from where I stood; [Eno] caught on immediately to what I was doing and helped me balance the softness of the rain patter with the faint string sound for where he lay in the room. There was no 'ambience by mistake'." Eno related another version in a 2011 interview: "[Nylon] put a record on and then left. The record was much too quiet but I couldn't reach to turn it up and it was raining outside ... I suddenly thought of this idea of making music that didn't impose itself on your space ... but created a sort of landscape you could belong to".

This album is also an experiment in . His intention was to explore multiple ways to create music with limited planning or intervention. Nicole V. Gagné described the album as "a  work using tape-delay and synthesizer" that would lead to Eno's further experiments in ambient music.

In a 1979 interview with , Eno called Discreet Music the most successful of his recordings, explaining that it "was done very, very easily, very quickly, very cheaply, with no pain or anguish over anything, and I still like it."

Recording

The A-side of the album is a thirty-minute piece originally intended as a background  for guitarist  to play over in a series of concerts. Eno set up a  with built-in memory along with a  system, but was immediately interrupted: "people started knocking on the door, and I was answering the phone and adjusting all this stuff as it ran. I almost made that without listening to it. It was really automatic music." The  contain a diagram of how this piece was created. It begins with two melodic phrases of different lengths played back from a 's . (The equipment used in this case was an , which had a then-exotic, built-in digital sequencer.) This signal is then run through a  to occasionally change its timbre. It is then run through an echo unit before being recorded onto a tape machine. The tape runs to the take-up reel of a second machine, and the output of that machine is fed back into the first tape machine which records the overlapped signals. The next day, Fripp visited and Eno accidentally played the piece back at half-speed, thinking that "it was probably one of the best things I’d ever done and I didn’t even realize I was doing it at the time."

The second half of the album consists of three related pieces, collectively titled "Three Variations on the  by ", performed by the Cockpit Ensemble, and conducted and co-arranged by . Eno described the music as the result of a self-generating, self-regulating system, with the input to the system taking the form of two- or four-measure fragments of Pachelbel's canon, and the system being the performers with a set of instructions. Each variation involves a different way of manipulating and overlaying the musical fragments. In the first piece, "Fullness of Wind", the players' tempos are decreased, with the rate of decrease being related to the relative pitch of the instruments, so that lower instruments are slowest. In the second piece, "French Catalogues", groups of notes are associated with time-related directions from different parts of the score. The third piece, "Brutal Ardour", presents the players with sequences of notes that are related but of different lengths. The titles of these pieces were derived from inaccurate French-to-English translations of the liner notes of a version of Pachelbel's Canon performed by the orchestra of .

Release

Discreet Music was the third (of four) simultaneous releases on Eno's new  label.

This album was re-released on the  label in 2004. On CD reissues, a full minute of silence separates Discreet Music's title track from the Pachelbel piece.

Reception and legacy Professional ratingsReview scoresSourceRating8.8/107/10B+9/10A−

Reviewing for  in June 1977,  stated that the album "encourages a meditative but secular mood (good for hard bits of writing) more effectively than any of the other rock-identified  that's come our way". In 1979,  described it as "either the definitive unobtrusively lustrous statement on ambient musics or a wispy treacly bore that defies you to actually pay attention to it [...] depending on your point of view."

 described the album as "striking and haunting, filled with beauty and apprehension, paralleling the  music being made by  and ." 's Sean Westergaard said it is Eno's "first full foray into what has become known as ambient music," and added that "[the album's] reputation as a groundbreaking and influential work is surpassed only by its placid beauty."

This album was a favourite of 's, and led to his collaboration with Eno on Bowie's late '70s .

For the 40th anniversary (2015) of the release of the album, the Canadian music ensemble Contact recorded "Discreet Music" with classical instruments as a seven-part one hour work.

Track listing Side A "Discreet Music" (Brian Eno) – 30:35 Side B

Three Variations on the  by  (Brian Eno)

"Fullness of Wind" – 9:57 "French Catalogues" – 5:18 "Brutal Ardour" – 8:17