Szabo — Turn On, Tune In, Drift Off

Author: Victor Szabo
Title: Turn On, Tune In, Drift Off: Ambient Music’s Psychedelic Past
Year: 2022
Type: Academic book (Oxford University Press; paperback 2023)

Turn On, Tune In, Drift Off: Ambient Music’s Psychedelic Past is a history by the musicologist Victor Szabo, published by Oxford University Press in 2022. Its argument is that the history of ambient music is a history of popular records and their buyers: from the psychedelic sixties on it was a commercial product, records sold to listeners who wanted to change their mood or state of mind, and Brian Eno’s albums, with the avant-garde forebears he named for them, gave that product cultural prestige. Its evidence is the records themselves, read alongside what was written about them, in four chapters: on a series of nature-sound records, a Bay Area radio show, Eno’s ambient albums, and ambient in the dance music of the late 1980s to the mid-1990s. The Wire reviewed it, and a Montreal music blog gave it a mixed notice. The book won the Association for Recorded Sound Collections’ 2024 award for best historical research in popular music.

Oxford University Press published the book in November 2022, when Szabo was Elliott Assistant Professor of Music at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, and reissued it in paperback in 2023.^{1, 2} Its abstract calls it a rethinking of ambient music as a popular genre “with roots in the psychedelic countercultures” of the late twentieth century. From the mid-1960s on, the book argues, a trade grew up in what Szabo calls ambient audio, “slow, spare, spacious audio sold as artful personal media.” It reads landmark records alongside “marketing rhetoric, artist manifestos and interviews, and music criticism,” and it goes on to recast ambient music as “a hip highbrow framing and stylization” of something older, the making of sound to change how listeners feel and think.¹ In 2025 Szabo described the book’s case as “placing popular audio production at the center of ambient music’s history,” set against histories that center “avant-garde composition, sound art, or background music.”³

After an introduction, each of four chapters takes one subject. “Inside Environments’s Psychedelic ‘Psychological Sound’” is about the Environments LPs that Irv Teibel produced from 1969 to 1979, most of them recordings of nature, and its main example is the 1970 bell record Tintinnabulation (Contemplative Sound). “Pacifica Radio’s Music from the Hearts of Space and the Spacious Sound of California’s New Age” covers that Bay Area show’s first ten years on the air, 1973 to 1982, before it went national on NPR. “Brian Eno’s Ambivalent Ambiences” turns to Discreet Music, Ambient 1: Music for Airports and the other Ambient albums, including Eno’s work with Harold Budd and with Laraaji. “Ambient EDM, or Dance Music That Isn’t Dance Music!” follows ambient into the dance music of the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, and a coda looks at ambient in the twenty-first century.⁴

Each chapter makes its own argument. The Environments records, in Szabo’s account, “embodied the ideals of the psychedelic counterculture.” Eno’s albums, and the case he made for them by invoking Erik Satie and the avant-garde, “provided the expressive and conceptual latticework for future musicians, listeners, and critics to reconceive ambient audio as hip and highbrow art.” And in the dance-music years, writers set ambient apart from the rest of the club scene “as a highbrow white male domain.”⁴

The Wire reviewed the book in January 2023, and that December Snows Ov Gethen, a Montreal music blog, gave it a mixed notice.^{5, 6} The blog found the book “mostly lucidly written” though at times “semi-dense ‘academese’,” thought its premise “somewhat obvious,” praised the chapters on Environments and Hearts of Space as “well-articulated” and called the conclusions “somewhat formulaic.”⁶ The book won the Association for Recorded Sound Collections’ 2024 award for Best Historical Research in Popular Music.⁷ Szabo, by then Elliott Associate Professor of Fine Arts at Hampden-Sydney, said it felt “highly validating” to be honored by “the primary scholarly association dedicated to audio,” given “audio’s role in my book’s central argument.”³

Key contributions

• The history of ambient music told as a history of popular records and their buyers, from the psychedelic sixties on.
• Ambient music read as “a hip highbrow framing” of a commercial practice that was already under way.
• Histories of the Environments records and of Music from the Hearts of Space.
• An account of how ambient was coded by race, gender and class in the dance-music years.

See also

• Ocean of Sound — David Toop’s 1995 history of ambient and listening music
• On Some Faraway Beach — David Sheppard’s 2008 biography of Eno