“It was great, great fun,” Lou Reed once told The Quietus, after being asked about his most divisive album, Metal Machine Music. “I was trying to do the ultimate guitar solo. And I didn’t want to be locked into a particular drum beat, or pattern or a particular key or beat that was the idea. Just guitars, guitars, guitars… I thought of it as energy music and a continuation of my work with the Velvet Underground.”
The nearly 40-year-old record was also a reflection of Reed’s influence in drone music and experimental composers like Iannis Xenakis, a connection he’d come back to on 2007’s downright calming Hudson Wind Meditations LP. All of the above comes full circle on Metal Machine Music For Airports, a don’t-call-it-a-mash-up of Metal Machine Music and Brian Eno’s definitive ambient statement, Music For Airports. Listen to it below, via Dangerous Minds…
