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I grew up in a house with lots of wallpaper.
My parents had bought the place in the mid-1970s, when the popularity of wallpaper was at its absolute peak, and although I wasn’t yet alive to see it, I imagine they went on a veritable bonanza of wallpaper shopping as a way to stamp their own style on their first house.
No two rooms were the same. One room had strong vertical lines. The kids’ playroom had a repeating pattern of construction workers doing their thing. One room had a starburst pattern that managed to be simultaneously Victorian and straight out of Saturday Night Fever. The house was a kaleidoscope.
But as the 1980s gave way to the 90s, and as home décor trends changed, my parents began to realize that perhaps dressing the place up to look like a pre-migraine hallucination was maybe not a fabulous idea.
They didn’t turn anti-wallpaper, they just decided to re-decorate with a more understated style of wallpaper. Patterns that stayed in the background rather than hogging your attention the moment you walked into the room. As a bonus, my brother and I were invited to help take down the old wallpaper before the new stuff was put up. I was the type of kid who loved picking at things – peeling paint, sunburns on my arm – and so I was very much into this task.
And here’s the wild part: because taking down the old wallpaper required being right up close to it, there were details in the patterns that I only noticed as I was tearing it off. Despite having grown up there, some subtleties of texture or line still required purposeful attention to notice.
Once we had taken it all down and were moved out of the way so that a professional (my dad) could undertake the more dextrous task of putting up the new stuff, we were allowed one last indulgence: in anticipation of some future person taking redecorating long after we moved out, my brother and I took markers and wrote clever messages like, “How DARE you take down this wallpaper!” I wonder to this day how those messages were received.
Harold Budd and Brian Eno are perhaps the godfathers of ambient music. One criticism they have faced since their early days is that their music is bland. Upon the re-release of their collaborative album “Ambient 2” in 2004, one reviewer ranted:
“Ambient 2” is almost entirely featureless. It is not designed to engage the listener on anything but a subconscious level. Trying to pay the music your full attention will result in nothing but frustration: nothing’s really there.
Ouch. In the next paragraph, he goes on to deliver the biggest insult of all, calling Budd and Eno’s music “sonic wallpaper.”
Only, I’m not sure Budd and Eno would take that as an insult. And as you might guess from the first part of this post, neither would I. Yes, some music is purpose-made to be ignored. But just like the best wallpaper, the best ambient music holds up to closer inspection.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. The Budd-Eno collaboration usually involved Eno supplying synth backgrounds and Budd improvising piano over top. In this track, Eno’s solid yet quiet synth provides the vertical lines, while Budd’s wandering piano provides the flourishes.
2. It spends much of its time on the first and fourth degrees of the scale; standard fare for music aimed to relax and soothe. But it also throws in the surprising minor seventh, a detail that gives the wallpaper a bit of texture.
3. Even before I knew the title, I imagined distant birds in flight. Or at least, wallpaper depicting distant birds in flight.
Recommended listening activity:
Planning an accent wall.