Brian Eno

condition (record/cover): NM / VG+ (light creasing)

With origianl innersleeve.

The album that started everything. Discreet Music was recorded across two sessions in May and September 1975, the first at Brian Eno's home studio and the second at Trident Studios, and originally issued on his own Obscure Records as OBS 3, the same series that documented Gavin Bryars, Michael Nyman, Christopher Hobbs, John Adams and Tom Phillips. The title-track on side A is the piece. Side B contains three orchestral variations on Pachelbel's Canon performed by the Cockpit Ensemble under Gavin Bryars's direction.

The thirty-one minutes of "Discreet Music" itself were generated by a self-running tape-loop system Eno had assembled out of two Revox machines, a graphic equaliser and a long delay loop. He set up two simple melodic phrases playing on synthesizer, fed them into the loop, walked away. The result is an early document of ambient music: not music to listen to, Eno wrote in the liner notes, but music to live alongside, "as ignorable as it is interesting". The sleeve essay would shortly be reprinted across the entire field; the technique would shortly be imitated everywhere.

The pressing on offer is the 1987 Editions EG reissue (EGED 23), distributed by Virgin, with the Editions EG Spring Catalogue 1987 inner sleeve. Not the original 1975 Obscure pressing, but the version on which the album became internationally available in the EG era. An early record, both as artefact and as document of Eno's first complete statement of his ambient hypothesis.