Discreet Music is the fourth studio album by the British musician Brian Eno, and the first released under his full name (as opposed to simply "Eno"). The album is a minimalist work, with the A-side consisting of one 30-minute piece featuring synthesizer and tape delay. The B-side features three variations on Canon in D Major by Johann Pachelbel, performed by the Cockpit Ensemble and conducted by Gavin Bryars. While his earlier collaborations with Robert Fripp and several selections from Another Green World (1975) feature similar ideas, Discreet Music marked a clear step toward the ambient aesthetic Eno would later codify with 1978's Ambient 1: Music for Airports. Background Brian Eno's concept of ambient music builds upon a concept composer Erik Satie called "furniture music". This means music that is intended to blend into the ambient atmosphere of the room rather than be directly focused upon. Like Satie's notion of music that could "mingle with the sound of the knives and forks at dinner", Discreet Music was created to play in, and blend with, the subtle background audio of various, or any given, situation. The inspiration for this album began when Eno was left bed-ridden by an automobile accident and was given an album of eighteenth-century harp music by a visiting friend, Judy Nylon. After she left, according to the Discreet Music liner notes, Eno inadvertently played the harp album almost inaudibly, which "presented what was for me a new way of hearing music — as part of the ambience of the environment". Nylon recalled the event differently: "I put the harp music on and balanced it as best as I could from where I stood; [Eno] caught on immediately to what I was doing and helped me balance the softness of the rain patter with the faint string sound for where he lay in the room. There was no 'ambience by mistake'." Eno related another version in a 2011 interview: "[Nylon] put a record on and then left. The record was much too quiet but I couldn't reach to turn it up and it was raining outside ... I suddenly thought of this idea of making music that didn't impose itself on your space ... but created a sort of landscape you could belong to". This album is also an experiment in generative composition. His intention was to explore multiple ways to create music with limited planning or intervention. Nicole