In the liner notes of Neon’s 1978 Music for Airports / Ambient 1, he explains his use of the term ambient music to describe the music he was creating at the time. “Over the past three years, I have become interested in the use of music as ambiance, and have come to believe that it is possible to produce material that can be used thus without being in any way compromised. To create a distinction between my own experiments in this area and the products of the various purveyors of canned music, I have begun using the term Ambient Music.
An ambiance is defined as an atmosphere, or a surrounding influence… My intention s to produce original pieces ostensibly (but not exclusively) for particular times and situations with a view to building up a small but versatile catalogue of environmental music suited to a wide variety of moods and atmospheres. Whereas the extant canned music companies proceed from the basis of regulating environments by blanketing their acoustic and atmospheric idiosyncrasies, Ambient Music is intended to enhance these.
Whereas conventional background music is produced by striping 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. (One, B. (1978) Ambient 1: Music for Airports. [Liner Notes. ]) Aside from One, other musician’s and bands that have had an important influence on he advent of Ambient music are people such as, Wendy Carols (formerly Walter Carols) who produced the original score for A Clockwork Orange, Mike Oldie (Tubular Bells), Evangelism (Chariots of Fire soundtrack). Along with the above-mentioned composers, Progressive Rock bands Pink Floyd (with albums such as Managua, Meddle and Obscured by Clouds) and Yes with the album Tales From Topographic Oceans have had a major influence on Ambient “Rock’ style bands.
Electronic bands such as Jerkwater, Pool Vhf, and Tangerine Dream have made a great impact on electronic based ambient music. Similarly, the Yellow Magic Orchestra has been cited as pioneers of Ambient house music (Alembic. Com (n. D) Derivative Forms Ambient House Ambient House emerged in the late sass’s out of a combination of Ambient Music and Acid House, Paul Gentlefolk ran an Acid House night at Heaven, and it was at this Acid House Night’s that Alex Paterson ran a chill-out room, where he played Pink Floyd, Brian One and loc songs at low volume.
