The music that has always followed me most in life has been those songs and albums that can blend right into the world without interrupting it. Music which looks first and foremost to pleasantness and serenity.
Six years ago as a Sophomore in High School, I had found some songs and ideas which captured this. Songs like “Porcelain” by Moby and “Dawn Chorus” by Boards of Canada had become my idea of beauty in music. But it was this year I finally found a name for the kind of music I’d been searching for: Ambient. And it turned out the first ambient album ever was named just that, “Ambient 1: Music for Airports” by Brian Eno. So I downloaded it onto my iPod and headed out for a walk.
When I stepped out onto the ground and the first notes of “Ambient 1” slipped into my being I knew my life was changed. It felt the sparse and distant piano noise that comes in right as the album starts, jumped out of me and caused a stillness in the street I lived on. I walked to the Auburn Middle school, flush with a sense of peace I’d never found in music until then. I laid down in the large open field behind the school, under a tree, and watched the sun dropping out of the sky. I remember finding the word “serene” to describe my world then. It felt as if the many anxieties of a family that at the time was breaking apart and scattering had melted away and just for a moment that the trees, the grass, the sun and I were in sync. That I was one and the same as them. With each dropping note from the piano I was thrust deeper into trance and I closed my eyes, feeling each pulse of sound reverberate inside of me. I laid there until the album was over and for 20 minutes after, in total peace, changed forever.
The first song of “Ambient 1,” is mostly just a few piano notes but they had the effect of melting away into the wind and sound of life around me. To me this is one of the greatest possibilities of music, to cohabitate with the listener and breathe life back into their world. I’ll forever be thankful to Mr. Brian Eno for understanding this serenity like no one else can.
My name is Ben Davis, student of English at USM and Childcare Worker at the YMCA. This is music that moves me.