Conny Plank Studio — Wolperath, Germany

Conny Plank's studio in the village of Wolperath in the Bergisches Land region east of Cologne was one of the most important recording facilities in the development of both krautrock and experimental electronic music. Plank — a producer and engineer who worked with Kraftwerk, Neu!, Cluster, and Harmonia — built the studio on his rural property and ran it from 1974 until his death in 1987. Brian Eno worked there for sessions related to Ambient 1: Music for Airports in 1978, recording vocals from German singers and developing the tape-loop compositions that would define the ambient music genre.

The recording process for Music for Airports famously involved Eno running physical tape loops around the studio — using chairs, tubular furniture, whatever came to hand — to create the layered, slowly evolving soundscapes of the album. The technique was an extension of ideas he had been developing since his work with Roxy Music and his collaborations with Robert Fripp, but at Conny Plank's studio it found a form precise enough to become a genre. The album's liner notes included Eno's statement of intent for ambient music: designed to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one, to be as ignorable as it is interesting.

Conny Plank's studio operated until 2006 and became one of the pilgrimage destinations for fans of the German experimental music scene that Plank had been instrumental in creating. Its rural isolation — farmland, the Siebengebirge hills visible in the distance, a long drive from any city — was part of what made it work: a place removed from commercial pressures and urban distraction where musicians could work slowly and experimentally, which was exactly what Eno needed.