So sometime in the late 70s a couple of things happened to me that made a big difference to the way I thought about music. One of them was in Germany, I was sitting in an airport, and listening to the music that they play in airports the message of which is “don’t worry you’re not going to die” — music that is deliberately very lightweight, with no threat, where everything’s got a nice smile and usually the most disconcerting thing about it is that the tape player doesn’t work properly and you think “if they can’t get that to work…”
But anyway I was listening to this music and I thought this was exactly the wrong kind of music to play in an airport, because it makes you really nervous, it makes you think “all they’re saying to you is ‘Death?’ Don’t mention it! Don’t even think about it.” So I started thinking “What would make you not think about death so much?” and I started to think that what you really needed in airports was the kind of music that would make you care less about your own life, that would make you not be so concerned about the prospect of dying.
So I wanted to make a kind of music that would actually reduce your focus on this particular moment in time that you happened to be in and make you settle into time a little bit better; and I came up with the record Music for Airports — a record that was very deliberately aimed at changing one’s sense of time. This was the point where I realised that a lot of what I was thinking about musically was to do with the experience of time. [Eno]
Eno, Brian. “The Long Now.” Enoshop. 14 November 2003. <www.enoshop.co.uk/enolog.php?logid=10> (21 June 2004).