While I've been writing intensively over the last two or three month, I've been listening to a lot of ambient music on Last.fm. It creates a mood without the interfering with sentence composition in the way that vocal music often does. Among my current favourites are Stars of the Lid, Alio Die, and Growing (I know: where do they get those names?).
And so when I put this CD on, it sounded very familiar; the same dark, drifting textures. Not that all ambient music sounds the same (you may think it does, but…). This is quite different from Music for Airports. If that album was music for non-places, spaces that exist for transit, this one is much more rooted in real places where you stop and dwell awhile. The tracks are named after places in Suffolk near where Eno grew up, though he says his memory of them may be an imaginary, constructed one. I've never been to the Suffolk coast, but when I listen to this album I imagine it a little like the marshes round Dungeness, partly shrouded in fog, with the bell of a buoy clanging across the water.
 MusicBrainz entry for this album
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