Bri­an Eno may not have invent­ed ambi­ent music, but he did give it a name. What bet­ter to call an album like his 1978 Music for Air­ports, whose slow­ly shift­ing pieces forego not just melody but all then-accept­ed meth­ods of com­po­si­tion and per­for­mance? The result, as its title sug­gests, is meant not to occu­py the inten­tion of the lis­ten­er but to col­or the atmos­phere of a space. This marked one evo­lu­tion­ary step for an idea Eno first essayed in 1975’s Dis­creet Music, issued on his own label Obscure Records in an era when much of the music peo­ple lis­tened to was any­thing but dis­creet. Record­ing tech­nol­o­gy first made ambi­ent music pos­si­ble; by the mid-1980s, video tech­nol­o­gy had devel­oped to the point that it could pos­sess a visu­al dimen­sion as well.

Just as Eno’s ambi­ent music was­n’t made for lis­ten­ing, Eno’s “video paint­ings,” as he called them, weren’t made for view­ing. 1981’s Mis­tak­en Mem­o­ries of Medieval Man­hat­tan, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, cap­tures the urban land­scape out­side from Eno’s New York win­dow — iron­i­cal­ly, with a por­trait ori­en­ta­tion, so that any TV dis­play­ing it had to be turned on its side.

Thurs­day After­noon, the next in the series, looks not to the built envi­ron­ment but that oth­er tra­di­tion­al sub­ject of paint­ing, the female form: specif­i­cal­ly that of Eno’s friend, pho­tog­ra­ph­er Chris­tine Ali­ci­no. Here video mak­ing pos­si­ble some­thing tru­ly new, with no artis­tic con­nec­tion to, as Eno put it, “Sting’s new rock video” or “bor­ing, grimy ‘Video Art.’ ”

But just like a Hol­ly­wood movie, Thurs­day After­noon had an epony­mous sound­track album. Released in 1985, it cut the 80-minute video paint­ing’s ambi­ent score down to an unbro­ken track of near­ly 61 min­utes, a length made pos­si­ble by the recent­ly intro­duced Com­pact Disc. “Played” on an acoustic piano and syn­the­siz­ers, the music shifts sub­tly in tex­ture through­out the hour, cre­at­ing a son­ic envi­ron­ment that many have found high­ly con­ge­nial for work­ing, think­ing, and relax­ing. I myself have lis­tened to it hun­dreds of times over the past twen­ty years, and in the form of a Youtube video paint­ing made by fan Jonathan Jol­ly, it’s racked up more than four mil­lion views. The col­or-treat­ed time-lapse footage of pass­ing clouds fits right in with the spir­it of the music, and it cer­tain­ly seems to do the trick for the video’s com­menters, grate­ful as they are for reduced anx­i­eties, recov­ered mem­o­ries, increased focus, and even altered con­scious­ness.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Decon­struct­ing Bri­an Eno’s Music for Air­ports: Explore the Tape Loops That Make Up His Ground­break­ing Ambi­ent Music

A Six-Hour Time-Stretched Ver­sion of Bri­an Eno’s Music For Air­ports: Med­i­tate, Relax, Study

Watch Bri­an Eno’s “Video Paint­ings,” Where 1980s TV Tech­nol­o­gy Meets Visu­al Art

Bri­an Eno Explains the Loss of Human­i­ty in Mod­ern Music

Bri­an Eno on Cre­at­ing Music and Art As Imag­i­nary Land­scapes (1989)

The “True” Sto­ry Of How Bri­an Eno Invent­ed Ambi­ent Music

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

There is no rock and roll with­out the blues, as we know, but the rela­tion­ship between the two is not so straight­for­ward as a one-to-one influ­ence. Blues forms, scales, and melodies are inter­wo­ven and inter­laced through­out rock in a com­plex way well rep­re­sent­ed by the com­plex­i­ty of a cir­cuit board, such as one pow­er­ing an ear­ly gui­tar ampli­fi­er that dou­bled as a blues harp amp. To under­stand the rela­tion­ship, we must under­stand the blues as a mul­ti­fac­eted phe­nom­e­non; at var­i­ous times in rock his­to­ry, artists have grav­i­tat­ed more toward acoustic Delta blues, or Mem­phis blues, or Chica­go elec­tric blues, or R&B, all of which them­selves have con­tin­ued to evolve and change.

The influ­ence is per­sis­tent and ongo­ing even in peri­ods after the 70s when radio became large­ly seg­re­gat­ed, and artists moved away from strict­ly blues forms and explored the seem­ing­ly non-blues tex­tures of soft rock, prog, and synth-pop—all gen­res that have still incor­po­rat­ed the blues in one way or anoth­er. As rock and roll expand­ed, spread out in new, non-blues direc­tions, rock con­ven­tions them­selves became a drag on the for­ward move­ment of the form. But the blues always returns.

Radio­head ditched rock alto­geth­er and sit com­fort­ably next to post-rock bands like Talk Talk, Bark Psy­chosis, and God­speed You! Black Emper­or. At the same time, the garage rock revival­ism of The Strokes and The White Stripes made sure gui­tars and 12 bars stayed rel­e­vant, as they have, decade after decade, in the raw forms of punk and hard­core or in spaced-out psy­che­delia. The nois­i­est noise rock or the harsh­est and most extreme met­al may nev­er be that far away from Bessie Smith, Sis­ter Roset­ta Tharpe, Robert John­son, or Lead Bel­ly.

You’ll find this rock and roll cir­cuit board in design house Dorothy’s Rock and Roll Love Blue­print, a his­to­ry of rock in gui­tar amp schemat­ic form (osten­si­bly), show­cas­ing “1400 musi­cians, artists, song­writ­ers and pro­duc­ers who have been piv­otal to the evo­lu­tion of the sprawl­ing genre that is rock music.”

Like Dorothy’s oth­er schemat­ic pop music his­to­ries—alter­na­tive music on a tran­sis­tor radio cir­cuit and hip hop mapped on a turntable dia­gram—this one orga­nizes its gen­res, artists, and peri­ods around a series of tran­sis­tors, capac­i­tors, and valves with big names inside them like Bob Dylan and The Bea­t­les, radi­at­ing influ­ence, like elec­tric­i­ty, out­ward.

In many cas­es, it’s hard to say why some bands and artists get more empha­sis than oth­ers. Are The Byrds real­ly more influ­en­tial than The Beach Boys or David Bowie? While it might be pos­si­ble to quan­ti­fy such things—and any good tech­ni­cian would insist on get­ting the val­ues right (or our amp might explode), the Rock and Roll Love Blue­print is a fun visu­al metaphor that should encour­age inter­est in cul­tur­al fig­ures old and new rather than scorch­ing debates about whose name should be a few mil­lime­ters larg­er and to the left.

We begin with W.H. Handy, the father of the blues, and end, on the right side, with the gui­tar rock of Wolf Alice and The 1975. In-between, the blue­print seems to hit on just about every major or minor-but-influ­en­tial fig­ure you might name. See the full blue­print, in zoomable high-res­o­lu­tion, and order prints for your­self at Dorothy.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

A His­to­ry of Alter­na­tive Music Bril­liant­ly Mapped Out on a Tran­sis­tor Radio Cir­cuit Dia­gram: 300 Punk, Alt & Indie Artists

The His­to­ry of Hip Hop Music Visu­al­ized on a Turntable Cir­cuit Dia­gram: Fea­tures 700 Artists, from DJ Kool Herc to Kanye West

His­to­ry of Rock: New MOOC Presents the Music of Elvis, Dylan, Bea­t­les, Stones, Hen­drix & More

The Women of Rock: Dis­cov­er an Oral His­to­ry Project That Fea­tures Pio­neer­ing Women in Rock Music

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.