Ambient 1: Music for Airports

After hours waiting at Cologne Bonn Airport, Eno conceived music "designed for airports". The vocals are by Christa Fast, Christine Gomez and Inge Zeininger, and Robert Wyatt plays acoustic piano. The pieces were made from tape loops of different lengths. "2/2" was performed on an ARP 2600 and recorded at Conny Plank's studio in Cologne. Eno called it music "to resign you to the possibility of death".

His liner note says ambient music must be as ignorable as it is interesting. Rolling Stone's Michael Bloom found it self-indulgent in 1979, while Christgau wrote that it had "real charms as general-purpose calmatives". Pitchfork named it the best ambient album of all time in September 2016. It has sold over 200,000 copies, and Bang on a Can performed it live in 1998.