Less is more: Ambient Music

Edited by Alice Kundalini - She Spread Sorrow

The definition of ambient music was clearly set out by one of its founding fathers and most prominent exponents, Brian Eno, who also coined the name. In 1978, when the celebrated Ambient 1 - Music for airports was released, he described his intention: to use the name ambient for music that could serve as an almost unnoticed background, but could equally be listened to actively, with no compromise on quality, yet with the specific characteristic of being able to be ignored in some way because it is part of the situation itself, in terms of both sound and emotion. Music capable of blending into a context, into an environment, precisely.

It is vitally important to distinguish, in terms of quality, background music from ambient music. This is why Brian Eno coined a specific term for it and always stressed this profound difference, in order to distance himself from so-called elevator music or muzak: music for public spaces, very often easy-listening pop, jazz, shopping-centre fare. Well, ambient is not that. "Whereas the extant canned music companies proceed from the basis of regularising environments by blanketing their acoustic and atmospheric idiosyncrasies, Ambient Music is intended to enhance these. Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities. And whereas their intention is to “brighten” the environment by adding stimulus to it (thus supposedly alleviating the tedium of routine tasks and levelling out the natural ups and downs of the body rhythms), Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and a space to think. Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting." (Brian Eno, 1978)

The influences of Brian Eno can be found in what was contemporary classical music and minimalist music, styles that emerged between the 1950s and 1960s and deconstructed the conventional sound of classical music, often reducing it to microsounds and arriving at silence. In this regard we remember in particular John Cage, who in 1952 composed 4'33'': a piece that consisted of NOT playing anything for that duration, with the idea of being able to listen to silence until something interrupts it, taking away the centrality of the human being who acts and produces sound, and leading to the realisation that silence in itself does not exist. Everything produces sound within an environment, everything produces a particular vibration and, even if we do not listen, we always hear. Silence does not exist, everything sounds even if no musician is playing. And if sound in itself does not exist when no one can hear it, when no eardrum vibrates, then returning to the centrality of the human being for the existence of music, and focusing on silence, everything is turned upside down.

Over the decades, the ambient scene has gained new facets, subgenres and different sonorities. Given this sort of mimetic quality, it is not hard to imagine that, depending on the environment we go looking for, completely different sounds develop. From reassuring musical environments we move into more unsettling ones, from music perfect for meditating or relaxing to music that creates freezing, funereal scenarios. From music for airports to music for cemeteries, let's say.

We find, for example, ambient techno (a term later changed to IDM, Intelligent Dance Music), music that uses the typical rhythms of techno, blending them with the melodies and rhythm-free atmospheres of ambient, with artists such as Aphex Twin, B12, Black Dog and labels such as Warp or Beyond.

We can find drone music, that is, music in which the extremely stretched-out sonic carpet practically never changes, except with extreme slowness, becoming the very protagonist of the composition. And we discover that these drones, hugely extended, vast, very long sounds, which are sometimes present in tracks of other genres without us even noticing, can have incredible vibrations when listened to on their own. We can feel them vibrate in different parts of the body, and we can identify their frequencies, recognising the ones that feel most our own. Countless artists have created pieces in this vein, and here too we find incredibly different sonorities, from the contemporary classical and minimalist music of La Monte Young to metal bands such as Sunn O))), by way of the japanoise of Merzbow.

If we look for darker, more mysterious, decadent, obsessive and disturbing environments, we will move towards dark ambient, a more recently born genre, created to describe the wave produced by the Scandinavian record label Cold Meat Industry. From Lustmord, one of the absolute protagonists of the genre, to Raison D'Etre, from the Italian Alio Die to the American Robert Rich.

And beyond genre labels, there are many artists of incredible calibre, able to create sonic environments in which to get lost, find yourself, be moved, live. I will mention a few of my favourites, leaving it to each person's curiosity to explore such a vast world, full of differences. William Basinski, famous among other things for his 4 albums The Disintegration Loops, old tapes of his material transferred to CD while preserving the deterioration of the tape over time, with all its distortions and gaps. Alva Noto, one of the best-known sound artists in the world, with sound installations at the Gugennhheim Museum in New York, the Venice Biennale and the Tate Modern in London, and collaborations with other essential artists from Blixa Bargeld to Ryuichy Sakamoto and Ryojii Ikeda. The minimalist music of Philip Glass, a contemporary classical composer who has collaborated with many artists, including Brian Eno and David Bowie, with albums almost always composed solely for piano, through to a great many soundtracks (The Illusionist, The Hours, Koyaanisqatsi, etc.).

This is truly just a small pill for an immense genre, but that is exactly what it is meant to be: a spark to search for your own environment, your own music, your own sound. I have always held the slightly romantic conviction that each person has their own sonic vibrations, a distinctive sound of their own, and very often the ambient music one prefers is the simplest way to recognise it: which music is most in tune with your environment, which is first and foremost an inner one? And if it is sometimes hard to recognise your own inner environment, ambient music can help us with that. For those who perhaps do not know their own sound, it can be fun to discover it this way, searching for the music that best of all is in tune with the environment of your own soul.

Black Pills is a column that does not set out to teach anything. There are books, articles and manuals that deal with the biographies of artists, films and works of art in a detailed and exhaustive way. This is not one of those cases. The black pills are small glimpses of cultural and artistic landscapes, at times very broad, which offer the chance to explore themes that do not entirely belong to mass culture, but move along other channels and other circuits. In a world where the choice is often limited to what is defined, in the broadest sense, as pop, I highly recommend taking a few pills of a different colour and perhaps discovering something new, which in some cases, as in mine, can stay with you for the rest of your life.