Like many people of my generation (the awkward one that comes between the Baby Boomers and the Gen-Xers), I was introduced to the concept of “ambient music” back in the 1970s when I encountered Brian Eno’s seminal album Discreet Music, a very aptly-titled disc that consisted of four long tracks: the title track, which filled up one side of the album with unbelievably soothing but somehow never cloying loops of simple piano figures, and three variations on Pachelbel‘s “Canon in D Minor,” a baroque potboiler that is rendered barely recognizable by the extension and slowing of different parts by different instruments. This music came as a revelation to me: it was easy to listen to and utterly undemanding, but at the same time rewarded close attention. As it turns out, Eno had hit on something powerful and basic, and the ideas he developed during this period (which, it’s worth pointing out, were not entirely original) have been picked up and carried further by many other composers and sound artists, especially in the world of electronic music. Having received a number of interesting releases over the past few months that come from various neighborhoods in the ambient tradition, I offer here a rundown of some of the best of them—along with suggestions as to their possible uses in everyday life.
Erik Wøllo’s Silent Currents consists of two discs, each a 50-minute performance recorded live on the radio, one in 2002 and the other in 2007. Each contains of a blend of prerecorded and improvised material. This is beatless, floating ambient music—the kind on which it is nearly impossible to focus one’s attention for very long. Texturally it resembles Robert Fripp’s “Frippertronics” tape-loop experiments of the 1970s, but is, if anything, even more formless and harmonically static, though quite lovely in the way that a particular color of wallpaper might be lovely. Compared to this, Brian Eno’s ambient music was punk rock. Suggested uses: Putting babies to sleep; meditation; lowering (to the point of somnolence) the energy level at the end of a party. Grade: B
Where Erik Wøllo’s music floats, the music of Stormloop (a.k.a. Kevin Spence) alternately throbs and shimmers. But the overall mood of Snowbound is perfectly encapsulated by the album title: this is not so much music as sound sculpture, and what the sculpture looks like is an enormous and nearly featureless snow field, punctuated only by mile-deep, echoing chasms. Here questions of “beauty” and indeed even of “music” seem rather beside the point—this is programmatic music intended to evoke a physical environment of equally balanced beauty and terror. Suggested uses: Put this on when you feel the need to be reminded how grateful you are to a) live in a civilization b) with central heating and c) other human beings. Grade: B
On Dokument .02, the latest release from the Dadavistic Orchestra, there’s not much in the way of harmonic movement, but lots of color and many pitch variations; listening to this album is kind of like watching a bunch of slow-moving clouds change into a series of interesting shapes. Among the fogbanks and drone layers will emerge sudden glistening features: a long series of arpeggios, a series of echo-laden water drips, tiny Buddhist chimes, an occasional swell of iron-bar clangor. There is a pervasive analog warmth to the Dadavistic Orchestra’s sound which should not be confused with emotional accessibility: this is music of warm, soft surfaces laid over a core of cold metal. While much of this music is attractive, it’s ultimately rather forbidding. Suggested uses: Making unwanted guests feel vaguely uncomfortable; accompanying silent horror films. Grade: B+
Flumina consists of 24 brief pieces, each of them a partially- or fully-improvised piano composition by legendary film composer and electronica artist Ryuichi Sakamoto. On each of the two discs are twelve pieces, each of them written in one of the 12 key centers available in the Western chromatic scale. Sakamoto played one of these pieces at the beginning of each of his shows on a Japanese tour; when all 24 had been recorded, he sent them to Christian Fennesz for overdubs and other manipulation using electronics, guitars, and synthesizers. The result is strange and deeply lovely. Sakamoto’s piano pieces are aimless in the best sense: there are lots of chords, but little sense of harmonic momentum; despite this, he manages to convey a mood of deep melancholy. Fennesz, for his part, counterbalances that mood with the eerie and detached electronic sounds he brings to bear on Sakamoto’s pieces. The result is a bit like listening to Debussy and Alva Noto simultaneously. Suggested uses: To accompany reading on a rainy day with a cat on your lap; looking through old high school yearbooks. Grade: A
With Ishq’s And Awake, we start getting into slightly (very slightly) more rhythmic territory, and also, interestingly, something that starts edging closer to the easy ambience and pseudo-mysticism of New Age music. The pictures of dervishes whirling on this album’s cover and inside artwork might lead you to expect music with a Middle Eastern flavor and of an explicitly mystical cast, but neither turns out to be the case; while there are touches of exotic percussion, much more prevalent are luscious washes of synthesizer chords, water sounds, and gently rocking chord changes (note in particular “Mizu,” which explicitly evokes Brian Eno’s early experiments in ambient music). Given that Ishq is a duo consisting of guitarist Matt Hillier and vocalist Jacqueline Kersley, it’s interesting that this album contains very little sonic material that comes recognizably from either a guitar or a voice. All of it, however, is sumptuously beautiful and should be welcomed both by fans of New Age music and by those for whom the New Age is anathema, but who have a taste for ambience. Suggested uses: Snuggling with a loved one; reading Persian love poetry; taking a nap. Grade: A
– Rick Anderson
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