Brian Eno with Daniel Lanois & Roger Eno - Apollo - Atmospheres & Soundtracks (1983)

Ambient weightlessness at its most divinely spacious and melodic.  Recorded for Al Reinert's documentary on the Apollo missions, which wouldn't be finalised until 1989, this 1983 LP collected all the original music.  Sampled heavily by subsequent artists, and reappropriated for other film soundtracks, Apollo - Atmospheres & Soundtracks is still a standout in the careers of Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois and Roger Eno.

Making extensive use of the then-new DX7, Eno further processed the sounds of the synthesizer to create a spacey, floating atmosphere.  Mixed in with this at intervals is the sound of pedal steel guitar, played by Daniel Lanois, more associated with country music.  On Eno's part, this was a deliberate stylistic choice, finding country imbued with a sense of weightlessness when he heard it as a child, and also drawing the link between country as music of the American frontier with the space missions.  All of it is magnificent in its desolation - no highlights necessary to list.  Just play the whole thing, and drift in space.

link
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Previously posted at SGTG:
Another Green World
The Plateaux Of Mirror
The Pearl

Various Artists - A Brief History Of Ambient, Volume 1 (1993 compilation)

First charity shop rummage of the new year turned up this double-CD mix released by Virgin Records, which as the title suggests ran to a short series.  I vaguely remember these coming out, but despite my curiosity they'd have been too heavy an investment for me at the time: this one that I've just paid two quid for still has its Tower Records price sticker of £15.49, and that's pretty reasonable for a double set of 70+ minute discs back then, IIRC!

Everything here is naturally from artists licensed to Virgin, which gives a handy reminder of what canny risk-takers Branson & co were back in the 70s through to mid-80s.  Even into the 90s to an extent - oddly, Hillage/System 7 are conspicuous by their absence for whatever reason (of course, the Point 3 albums hadn't been released yet in '93).  Just take a look at the artist list in the labels below - and I couldn't fit them all in, ran out of space.

Good track choices too (can never say no to a good chunk of Tangerine Dream's Phaedra); full tracklist is here, along with info on an early mispress that led to the mastering cues for Disc 1 being inadvertently used again for Disc 2, the latter ending up with its track divisions all over the shop.  The copy I've just bought is actually one of those - I've re-sequenced Disc 2 now.  So here's a brief history of (Virgin) ambient, with some inevitable classics, and a few (for me) new surprises: loved the remix of early Killing Joke that sounds like an update of the first two Neu! albums, to name just one.

links:
Disc 1
Disc 2
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extra Phaedra...

As a postscript, for anyone who doesn't have Tangerine Dream's 1974 debut for Virgin that catapulted them to stardom with an interstellar, gaseous mix of Moog, Mellotron and flute - grab the full album below.  Was nice to see it featured in the recent Black Mirror episode, along with a faithful recreation of the WH Smith shopfronts that I remember from my childhood.

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