Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music is one of the loudest albums ever released, just over an hour of electronic feedback.
Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports is one of the quietest albums ever released, just over three-quarters of an hour of electronic music meant to fade into the background.*
While one affronts, the other relaxes, but both employed the electronic manipulation of sound to fill their environments.
I never would have imagined the two could work so well together to fill the same environment:
* In their hilarious comic strip satire of the history of rock and roll, Great Pop Things, Colin B. Morton and Chuck Death describe Brian Emo’s invention as “Ambivalent Music, which you can’t quite tell if you are listening to or not.”
ps — Thanks to DJ Food (who credits WFMU’s twitter feed for his finding it). This is just one of many, many great things his blog has introduced me to.
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