This week in class we looked at ambient music.
We watched Imaginary Landscapes – A documentary about Brian Eno. Eno is one of the pioneers of mainstream ambient music and helped to define the genre.
Eno chooses to avoid vocal elements in a lot of his music (despite enjoying singing and having sung on his more rock/pop compositions such as on his album “Taking Tiger Mountain (by strategy)”) as he believes that it allows the listener to take in their own surroundings and find their own meaning in the music. He says that he enjoys listening to film music as its unique identity is compositionally different to other types of music due to the fact that the main part is missing. This is because the music exists to support an action but the action is missing when you just listen to it on a record. He finds it very interesting to make music that is context and not action. (Brian Eno, 1989, 15 minutes) It leaves you to create your own picture that goes with the music.
Eno suggests that despite the artist having a clear vision or meaning in mind for a piece of music, it is not important that the listener understands or is knowledgeable about this as the music will allow for a unique perspective based on the listener.
I have spoken before about location being a large part of the creative progress when creating music (especially ambient). When writing about KMRU -an ambient artist studying in Berlin. He states that “I bought a field recorder to use as a soundcard but eventually started using it as a mic to record sounds on-site. I realised that there were sounds in my environment that I wasn’t aware of, and discovering that prompted me to engage more and use that discourse as a compositional tool” (Future Music, 2021, Para 4) Eno also suggests this. “For me the river was always a way of going somewhere, I spend a lot of time around the river because of all the mysterious things that live down the river that don’t live elsewhere because you can go swimming there and catching eels and all those things. water in general, there’s an idea about water that I like in that it’s constant but not solid. the river is always going somewhere. a lot of the songs I wrote were about rivers or water in some way.” (Brian Eno, 1989, 33 minutes)
‘the convenient picture of New York at that time was a city where you kept your vision down. what I did on that spring day and what I did on mistaken memories was I looked up and I saw this beautiful city against a huge sky. that is a different picture altogether, once you let the sky into the picture the city is not so overwhelming, there is space in there as well.’ (Brian Eno, 1989, 24 minutes)
When Brian Eno applied the term “ambient music” to his activities he switched the emphasis away from making music, focusing instead on the act of listening. (Toop, 1995, Page 40)
The idea of music being without narrative, music as a function comes up a lot when looking into dance and rave culture. “The aim of dancing your ass off, sacred or profane, was inspired by disco’s flow motion. The seamless mix that transpired three-minute pop songs (Phil Spector’s little symphonies for the kids) into long form epics” (Toop, 1995, Page 41). Music in this context has a different purpose than songs that you would listen to at home or on the radio. These songs are made with the purpose of enhancing an experience; supporting an action or event; to control a crowd. When we talk about ambient music it’s easy to imagine calm and peaceful soundscapes, slowly evolving over time but the genre is much more expansive than that and this is only one side of it. The term ambient music is subordinate to ‘music which taps into the disturbing, chaotic undertow of the environment’ (Toop, 1995, Page 36)
In this chapter, Toop looks into the origins of acid music and the tropes within the term. In an interview with Marshall Jefferson, It is said that “when you get an acid machine you don’t pre-program anything. You just hit some notes on a machine man. “it’s supposed to get you in a mood, you know. For one thing, the tune is 11 minutes long of the same thing. Slight changes, but not that noticeable. Like when you hear a really long solo in the old days it’s the same bass line going and everybody’s doing something different over it. That’s supposed to capture a mood.” (Toop, 1995, Page 38) This comes back to the idea of music being made for function; music made with the specific intention of capturing a mood or enhancing an experience. While musically, acid is very simplistic in arrangement and structure, it is that way for a reason. There is a purpose behind the simplicity. It is music to dance to, music for clubs.
Jefferson played a major role in acid’s start, producing and mixing two of the style’s foundational cuts, Sleezy D’s ‘I’ve Lost Control’ and Phuture’s ‘Acid Tracks’, from 1986 and ’87, respectively. (Tantum, 2020, Para 5)
Future Music. (2021) KMRU: ‘I stopped buying sample packs and spent all my time outside recording sounds and taking them back to the studio’, MusicRadar. Available at: https://www.musicradar.com/news/kmru-interview.
Imaginary Landscapes (1989). Available at: https://vimeo.com/84186635?signup=true#.
Tantum, B. (2020) Marshall Jefferson: Master of the House, DJMag.com. Available at: https://djmag.com/longreads/marshall-jefferson-master-house.
Toop, D. (1995) Ocean of sound. 4 Blackstock Mews, London: Serpent’s Tail.