Some music is for sitting still and some is for motion, and the difference isn’t tempo. Plenty of slow music walks beautifully; plenty of fast music demands a chair.
My theory: walking music has to be indifferent to you. It can’t build toward a climax that asks for your attention, because your attention is spoken for — it belongs to curbs, dogs, weather. Steve Reich works. Eno’s ambient records work almost too well. Most pop doesn’t; it keeps tapping you on the shoulder.
The perfect walking album behaves like landscape. It’s there, it’s structured, it repays attention when you offer it, and it forgives you completely when you don’t.
Current rotation: Music for 18 Musicians, the quieter half of the Boards of Canada catalog, and a field recording of a train station in Kyoto that I have listened to, at this point, more than any actual song I own.