#30: Everything is ambient
New music from Slowfoam, William Basinski, Nala Sinephro, and more
This week’s new music:
Spotify
Apple Music
I’m unsure why, but this week’s playlist quickly filled up with ambient tracks, or at least music that seems to be variously described as one or another fusion that includes a generous dose of ambient, a genre far too large to be a genre.
Because what, exactly, is ambient even? It’s not without beats nor is it without vocals. It may be without words, but that’s just an instrumental, not a genre. Generally speaking, with ambient you know it when you hear it, because it’s atmospheric—which also covers anything you play that adds to an atmosphere, which is everything unless you’re in space, except space is the most ambient thing there is.
And since the subject here is how to define ambient, it’s worth going back to Brian Eno, who certainly didn’t invent the form, but he’s made a lot of ambient music, he for sure popularized it, and he gets credit for naming it in 1978 when he released Ambient 1: Music for Airports, in the liner notes of which he’s pretty clear that it’s his brand name for a thing that is and isn’t Muzak: “To create a distinction between my own experiments in this area and the products of the various purveyors of canned music, I have begun using the term Ambient Music.”
It’s not ambient music. It’s Ambient Music. It’s Kleenex, it’s Velcro, it’s ChapStick. It’s a brand name and likewise, the liner notes—inspired though they may be—are marketing copy: “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.”
Whatever that is, it sounds amazing! Because that’s not a definition, that’s a description open to interpretation, which is just what musicians have been doing for the past (nearly) 50 years. It’s why—in this week’s playlist—ambient jazz and ambient rock and classical ambient can coexist, peacefully (but not always pleasantly) floating within earshot of each other, inside a vast sphere of ambient music, a term that intentionally means nothing and everything.
(To be clear, Music for Airports is one of my favorite albums ever. I got married to Discreet Music. My fandom of all things Brian Eno—except for some of his production credits; some of them yes! others, oh wow no—is excessive and embarrassing.)
