You leave just an echo, like trains forever leaving stations.

This is a loose set of ambient tracks I play at home; both as their original albums and out of context on iTunes shuffle.

It starts with the most beautiful sound, like a home recording on tape in the ‘Matthew Herbert Remix’ of Nils Petter Molvser’s ‘Merciful’. A mix of popular bands and people some might not know, some people would know it backwards.

Said to be the first track of ambient music, Eric Saties’s ‘Musique d’ameublement’ was music he composed to be played in the background and not to be observed on the stage, he coined the term, ‘furniture music’. Brian Eno then used the term ‘Ambient Music’ when he came up with ‘Music for Airports’ in 1978. “Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and a space to think”.

Tracks like ‘Doit’ by Mouse on Mars and Radiohead’s ‘Kinetic’ are the ghosts of the ideas of ambience, so familiar to us that we take it all in our daily listening. In the middle of the mixset is Air’s fantastic remix of David Bowie’s ‘A Better Future’, it’s cold and mechanical, lonely and loving. It is one of the best remixes I have come across for changing the definition of a song, it becomes a utopian soundtrack, the type of song would hear if a film was made of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s ‘We’.

Ref: Music for Airports Sleeve Notes. Brian Eno – Music For Airports 1978