Discreet Music is an album by Brian Eno, released in December 1975 on Obscure Records. Its title piece, just over thirty minutes long, was produced by a system rather than performed: two short melodic phrases from an EMS Synthi AKS synthesiser were fed into a tape-delay set-up and a graphic equaliser, so that echoes overlapped and slowly reshaped themselves with almost no intervention. It was first conceived as a backing drone for Robert Fripp to play over in concert.
The liner notes tell how Eno, confined to bed after an accident, listened to a record of eighteenth-century harp music playing almost inaudibly and began to hear music as part of the atmosphere of a room, the germ of what he would soon call ambient. Judy Nylon, the friend who brought the record, later disputed that the discovery happened by chance. Side two offers three variations on Pachelbel’s Canon, arranged and conducted with Gavin Bryars.