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A Chill-out Room of One’s Own
    Brian Eno’s mid-1970s sick bed epiphany led, a decade and a half later, to actual sick bed music.
    As Eno described in the liner notes to his 1975
Discreet Music
album, in January of that year he was laid up in bed following an accident. He was not specific about the type of accident, but it has subsequently been described, widely, as a car crash. The anecdote stands as one of the ur-texts of ambient music. A friend dropped off a recording of eighteenth-century harp music. Eno managed to set the record playing, but he could not muster the energy to get back up from his prone position when he realized that the volume was at an unsatisfactorily low level. To add insult to his injury, one of his audio system’s speakers was not emitting any sound at all. The resulting listening experience proved revelatory rather than frustrating: “This presented,” he wrote, “what was for me a new way of hearing music—as part of the ambience of the environment just as the colour of the light and the sound of the rain were parts of that ambience.” The recordings on the resulting
Discreet Music
were an attempt to make music that, unlike the harp compositions, was intended to be listened to in such a manner: amid rather than in place of the general environmental sounds. “It is for this reason that I suggest listening to the piece,” he wrote of the compositions on
Discreet Music
, “at comparatively low levels, even to the extent that it frequently falls below the threshold of audibility.” Eno had been experimenting with quiet sounds for a long time—two years prior, in 1973, he had released with guitarist Robert Fripp the record
(No Pussyfooting)
, a droning, looping expanse of music that did not command attention so much as complement it. Yes, the album title included parentheses—what better way to denote music that is the equivalent of a subsidiary clause? While an eighteenth-century recording triggered the incident, the sick bed moment in January 1975 was as much about Eno hearing his own music in a new way.
    In the rave culture of early 1990s Britain, many cities had mid-week concerts that would run all night. Enthusiasm for the successive new strains of electronic music was not sufficient to keep the energy flowing. Drugs, notably ecstasy, aided revelers, and between the physical exertion and chemical experimentation there developed an evident need for recuperative way stations. The idea of a place for the addled to chill out had its root perhaps not so much in Eno’s 1970s self-help scenario, but in the 1960s era of casualties to bad trips, when acid tents were set up to help infirm concert attendees. That communal outreach was part of the foundation, in 1967, of San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, now called HealthRight 360, which continues to perform triage at musical events as part of its Rock Medicine program.
    Rave concerts—both in their large-scale form and in smaller clubs—pulsed with a music felt and heard, and a place to recover from overexertion became necessary. Raves were less concerts than what has become fashionable to term temporary autonomous zones, and this was especially true in the era before the predominance of the cellphone, when the autonomous aspect had as much to do with being cut off from the world as it did with being part of a self-organizing civic space built with its own internal rules. Cellphones, of course, are just part of the overall change. Back in the mid-1990s, you could not, weeks in advance of a show, stream Spotify or Rdio playlists that someone had assembled of all the musicians due to perform. Raves were dark, murkily architected, often expansive spaces in which sensory overload and disorientation was a common goal. One could as easily lose touch with one’s friends as with oneself.
    Side spots became part of the organizational infrastructure, sometimes more akin to VIP rooms, which led to yet another branch of rave