Uploaded January 2019 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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Justin Morey presents a case study of perhaps The Orb’s best-known release, ‘Little Fluffy Clouds’ at Ambient@40, a two-day conference to appraise ambient music in relation to Eno’s milestone release

"Music Beyond Airports", edited by Monty Adkins and Simon Cummings, available now in hardcopy and free PDF download via Huddersfield University Press: unipress.hud.ac.uk/plugins/books/19

leedsbeckett.ac.uk/staff/dr-justin-morey
ambientat40.wordpress.com
archives.electricspring.co.uk/Seasons/2017-2018/Electric-Spring-2018

This presentation took place as part of the Ambient@40 conference, conveyed by Monty Adkins, Simon Cummings, Rupert Till, and Kristina Wolfe.

In the forty years since the release of Brian Eno’s Music for Airports the concept and aesthetics of ambient music have proliferated, influencing artists as diverse as Taylor Deupree, Steven Wilson, David Lynch and The Orb, infusing drone, microsound, minimalism and experimental electronic music as well as aspects of contemporary instrumental music. The aim of this two-day conference was to appraise ambient music in relation to Eno’s milestone release.

The conference took place at the University of Huddersfield from Friday 23 to Saturday 24 February 2018, running alongside the Electric Spring Festival (www.electricspring.co.uk).

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Video camera operator: Andie Brown, Pablo Galaz Salamanca, Sam Gillies
Edited by Sam Gillies

Title music: Music for Airports (1/1), Brian Eno. Performed by Decibel New Music Ensemble. decibelnewmusic.com

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The Orb - Little Fluffy Clouds (1994) youtube.com/watch?v=FHixChYgGRI

/// ABSTRACT

In his liner notes for Music For Airports, Eno states that “Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting” (Eno, 1978). He also argues that while “conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities” (ibid.). Ambient house is a term coined by the former E.G. Records A&R man, DJ and founder member of the Orb, Alex Paterson, initially to describe the low dynamic “chill-out” DJ sets combining records, tape recordings, sound effects and pre-prepared loops, performed in the VIP room at the Land of Oz nights held at London’s Heaven nightclub in 1990, and later to represent the Orb’s own records.

This paper presents a case study of perhaps The Orb’s best-known release, ‘Little Fluffy Clouds’ (Big Life, 1990). Building on Holm-Hudson’s study (1997) with additional primary research and analysis drawn from the author’s PhD thesis, it is argued that the use of multiple copyrighted samples from a range of sources, times and locations, while being an aspect of production absent from Eno’s ambient compositions, allows the record to function at different levels of listener attention, and, moreover, allows the listener to construct different narratives and connections depending on their personal socio-cultural and musicological knowledge and perceptions. With reference to the work of Nattiez (1990) and Tagg (2000) on musical communication it will be argued that Eno’s original intention for ambient music of creating a “sense of doubt and uncertainty” is maintained in ‘Little Fluffy Clouds’ through the use of the sampler as a time machine that presents multiple realities simultaneously, and therefore allows multiple levels of symbolic meaning to be created.

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Justin Morey has a background in sound engineering and music production, having run his own recording studio in London from 1995–2003. As a co-writer and producer of dance music, he has had records released through labels including Acid Jazz, Sony and Ministry of Sound. He has been teaching in higher education since 2001, and has been a member of academic staff at Leeds Beckett University (formerly Leeds Metropolitan University) since 2004, where his teaching specialism are music production, production analysis and music business. His main research interest is in sampling as a creative practice within British dance music, which was the subject of the thesis of his PhD, awarded in 2017. Prior publications include articles for Dancecult, the IASPM Journal, and the Journal on the Art of Record Production, and book chapters for IIPC and Palgrave Macmillan.