In his diary A Year with Swollen Appendices, Brian Eno describes an evening spent in Islington's now defunct Club Disobey. He sees "Lots of people in various shades of black: mostly men, mostly short-haired - in fact much like me, but somewhat younger.... One had the sense that everyone was waiting for something - not just for that moment and in that place, but that this waiting was symptomatic of a long cultural waiting."
It is as if Eno - famous for coining the term "Ambient" music back in 1978 - suddenly discovers the whole world has gone ambient. A Year with Swollen Appendices may in fact be the world's first "ambient diary" - the voice of an ambient man in ambient times. Eno's life is structured like one of his records, a vast flat space over which one can move in any direction at whim. With his wife and two assistants to take care of the boring details of existence, Eno is left with a great deal of freedom. So he produces records for Bowie and U2, goes on trips to Egypt, samples the joys of fatherhood, has email exchanges with Stewart Brand, morphs women's bottoms in Photoshop, goes on about how great screensavers are and muses at length about the world .
Eno lives without an overview. This is not a criticism; the life of Brian is something of a paradigm for the age. We have forsaken the transcendental for the immediate; our culture is like a giant storeroom, crammed with unimaginably large amounts of material. Our artists no longer try to put us in touch with God and the eternal, but with the infinity of our own archives. Eno's life is spent drifting through these archives, watching, wondering, waiting.
In his book Ocean of Sound, David Toop traces the origin of Ambient to Debussy's obsession with Java-nese gamalan music, whose practitioners imitate natural sounds like running water. But for those who took up the Ambient torch - from Erik Satie and Edgard Varèse to La Monte Young and Kraftwerk - the background sounds of 20th-century Europe were the repetitive grindings and crashings of the technological society which grew out of the industrial revolution, sounds which became entwined with death after the Nazis' genocidal use of industrial techniques during the Second World War.
So there is a powerful resonance in Eno's words when he describes how in 1977 he sat in Cologne airport - in a waiting room, of course - dreaming up a kind of music that would be like "flying, floating and, secretly, flirting with death". "I want to make a kind of music that prepares you for dying," he writes, "that doesn't get all bright and cheerful and pretend you're not a little apprehensive, but makes you say to yourself, 'Actually it's not a big deal if I die.' " Like Zen Buddhism, Ambient finds the death inherent in the noise of life, and puts it to positive use. Ambient should, according to Eno, induce "calm and a space to think". It takes the repetitive grindings and crashings of machines and produces serenity.
Unlike our traditional idea of the artist, alone in his garret stamping unformed matter with the mark of his genius, the Enoesque Ambient artist is content to step back and let the connections come together on their own. The audience's ability to think in the spaces opened up by Ambient is now central. With his latest release, Generative Music 1, Eno takes this process to a new level, by using a piece of software called Koan that lets a computer take over the actual development of the music. Koan creates music from a kind of sound seed, made by setting up various sonic channels (each of which is defined by some 160 parameters) and then "growing" this seed into a piece of music. GM1 consists of eight seeds programmed by Eno, and every time you play them they grow in a different way. Now the artist merely sets the work in motion, instead of controlling each step of its development.
As the figure of the artist becomes ever fainter, it might seem weird that Eno should publish a diary, the ultimate statement of selfhood. Yet this is not as contradictory as it might seem. Ever since Saint Augustine's Confessions, people have written diaries and biographies in an attempt to show that their lives were coherent, that they came from somewhere and were going somewhere. But Eno's life and music are very similar: his life grows, his new record grows, he can record a piece of either (in the form of a sample, or of a diary), but neither can ever be repeated and neither reaches a logical conclusion. If they were played again, they might just as easily grow in different ways. What better media for an ambient age?
James Flint is a section editor at Wired.