Welcome to Edition 20 of Laughing Stock. Get a hot drink and a biscuit on the go as this week Rich Walker appreciates what’s not there as much as what is, as he bathes in an ambient glow for the changing of the seasons.
Brian Dillon, in his exceptional book of essays Suppose a Sentence, describes how ‘Cabinet’, a magazine he is a contributing editor for, sets writers a task of responding to an artefact of the the magazine’s choosing, be that a colour or a found object, without context or instruction from the editors. Dillon writes:
“The exercise or constraint encourages, or so one hopes, an intensified attention, though the extreme of concentration may also take the writer far away from the thing itself.”
Earlier in the evening I’d been reading a fascinating interview with the wonderful Tirzah in Loud & Quiet magazine, where, in response to an exhibition her and the writer had been to, she said:
“I have to say, it didn’t really grab me…maybe I’m a bit too traditional, but I found all the extras a bit too distracting. I’d rather see something stripped back rather than being forced to be in a world or something. Don’t get me wrong, it was very skilful and I could see what they were going for, but there was just too much going on. There’s something about being forced to shut out everything that’s going on around you and just allowing the space to penetrate your thoughts.”
The two seem to me to be one and the same, how stripping back everything to a few, or even just one base element, can force a person to pay much more attention to a piece than if it comes surrounded by noise, by unnecessary context, by preconceived ideas. As I was reading the Tirzah piece, I was listening to Claire Rousay’s early year ambient delight A Softer Focus, and as the seemingly simple field recordings filled my ears, I stopped reading and just let ‘Diluted Dreams’ fill my living room and my consciousness. There are sounds within the track that can just wash over you in the background – there but almost not. Yet when you pay attention, when you really listen, you start to hear them. You start to concentrate on the quietness, you discover more and more beauty in the simplicity of the piano line, the cars going past, the wind caressing the microphone. It is exquisite in it’s minor detail, it is stripped back to the important small sounds, composed of found things and colours, and it’s all the better for it.
A lot of music that does this is often parked under the banner of ‘ambient’ a genre that still provokes eye rolls amongst many people. For some, ambient means boring, it signifies background music, indeed it shouts (or whispers) Music for Airports, incidental, inoffensive. Yet I would argue the opposite; that it is where some of the most innovative, blissful, engaging music is being made currently, at the cutting edge of sound, using seemingly few key elements to create an intoxicating, unclassifiable genre. In Pitchfork’s informative (if male heavy) 2016 ‘50 best ambient albums’ list, they describe ambient music in the introduction in a way I think befits its sprawling boundaries:
‘…that “ambient” meant, in part, music that creates an environment, something like a cloud of sound, be it soothing, sad, haunting, or ominous.’
‘Music that creates an environment’ is perfect to me, that’s exactly what ambient music should do. That mood can be relaxing, music to read to, to take a bath with, walk in the countryside, or it can be harsh and noisy, creating a darker environment, one almost of anxiety (I’d class artists like Ben Frost, Tim Hecker and Headlock as ambient artists in this sense). In his essay ‘Approaching the ambient; creative practice and the ambient mode of being’, Luke Jaaniste states that the ‘ambient mode ‘involves a way of engaging with our surroundings that eschews the typical logic of foreground and background that grounds our daily and aesthetic lives. Instead, the ambient mode is an altered state in which we attune to the all-around-everywhere materiality of the surroundings.’ Accessing the ambient mode via music, where for instance a walk in the countryside is accompanied by Elori Saxl’s The Blue of Distance to make a different, all-around experience whereby the music and nature are one, complementing and enhancing each other, grounding you in the present and allowing you to embrace all the senses. Ambient mode feels like an upgrade, a cheat code to better, more mindful experiences.
As discussed previously on Laughing Stock, artists like Abul Mogard make great ambient music out of what they have experienced in real life, in Mogard’s case working in factories, and it’s using those sounds, those experiences to create music that makes listening to ambient such a rewarding experience. Take Mogard’s ‘Sand’ from his recent album In Immobile Air. It’s deceptively simple, a repeated piano motif over drony background synths. But then there is a clatter of cymbal sounds that are twisted into distorted electronic noise, almost imperceptible unless you pay attention, that somehow make the pretty piano chords even prettier as they try to see off the noise created in the background; eventually they fail as the drone wins out, the piano relegated, defeated. It’s a 6 minute journey from beauty to a sense of sadness, stripped back to pretty much three elements, all of which you can track throughout as the drone consumes the piano. It rewards paying attention, listening to the detail in the simplicity. It needs nothing else than what it already has. It's both soothing and disconcerting, and the results are stunning.
Richard D James is a master of disconcerting ambient, his two Selected Ambient Works collections as Aphex Twin are up there with the very best of the genre. Volume II is particularly affecting, tracks like ’#5’ and ‘#6’ using so little but to such an unsettling effect, stripped back to uncomfortably spooky sounds. Simon Reynolds described it perfectly as ‘the effect of this music feels exactly like being inside a dream: not necessarily idyllic, with a strangeness that haunts you long into your waking day’’. He forces you to feel uncomfortable and somewhat claustrophobic by presenting very few elements up close and personal, so you can’t escape that synth sound, that twisted noise that you can’t put your finger on. This is ambient music that is impossible to ignore, far from the fading-into-the-background music that Eno perhaps first envisaged.
Of course, the majority of ambient music isn’t made to unsettle or haunt, it’s made for simple beauty. Stars of the Lid sustain notes for days that sound like heaven opening (rather than Aphex’s hell descending), Grouper can do things with static and a piano that few others can, Pauline Oliveros opens up portals to other worlds through creating music in abandoned wells, and Hammock make music that is just sublimely, shimmeringly gorgeous. Some ambient music can perform both at once, being sublime and deeply unsettling, as with The Caretaker, who’s Everywhere at the End of Time is impossibly beautiful and impossibly devastating. Tracking a long journey into dementia, it’s recurring motives disintegrate into half remembered snatches, confusion, and horror as the condition worsens. It might be the single most impressive collection of ‘ambient’ music ever assembled, running at 6 hours plus (and one that made him an unlikely YouTube and TikTok star…), invoking every emotion possible across its length.
It can be hard to find the time to appreciate slow music, to be able to lose yourself in the simple detail of a slightly transforming sound over 10 plus minutes, but the rewards for putting away the distractions of the modern world and letting these stripped back sounds penetrate your very being are multitudinous. Autumn, as the dark and cold sets in, is the perfect time to embrace the slow. Enhance your life with ambient.
Each week we will share some tracks that the contributors to Laughing Stock currently have on heavy rotation. You can follow the rolling playlist on Apple or Spotify.
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Edition 15 - Connah Roberts on fashion and music and butter
Edition 14 - Sam Hartford on anachronistic music in films
Edition 13 - Our Half Year Review 2021
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Edition 11 - Rich Walker on boring anniversary pieces
Edition 10 - Connah Roberts on culture wars, and Kes