#40: French catalogues

This week’s new music:
Spotify
Apple Music

Fifty years today, Brian Eno recorded “Discreet Music” using a synthesizer that had on-board memory, along with a graphic equalizer, an echo unit, and two tape recorders, and 50 years later you have an ambient music button on your iPhone.

It’s correct to say Eno didn’t singularly invent ambient music as we know it—that credit needs to be shared with Judy Nylon, who introduced Eno to the idea by playing a record of harp music at a barely audible volume while he recuperated from a car accident. Nor did either of them invent the concept of ambient music, which goes back to at least Erik Satie, who coined the term “furniture music” in 1917. But it is entirely fair to say he popularized it like no one else, and that started in earnest with the 31-minute long “Discreet Music.”

The recording process itself is fascinating in its simplicity and its self-generating nature, where Eno set the parts in motion, and from there it was a highly automatic process. For the full rundown on all that, there is no better resource than this in-depth piece at Reverb Machine. It's the greatest, really.

The full album wouldn’t be released until December, by which point Eno had collaborated with Gavin Bryars and a string section to record a trio of lush deconstructions of Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major, which would fill the second side of the record and that I love so thoroughly and completely that my wife and I got married while it played in the background. It is no small thing to have your wedding music part of your regular rotation; even on their own, Eno’s Pachelbel pieces are wonderful, but for me, exponential waves of meaning erupt whenever those songs blast from the speakers.

(As a side note, I’ve only lately realized the effect those Pachelbel reworks may have had on a Discreet Music-obsessed tween Max Richter, whose own Vivaldi reinterpretations owe something to the second side of Discreet Music.)

The album led to Eno’s work the following year on Low, his first collaboration with David Bowie, who told Eno that Discreet Music “was the only thing he could listen to for a long time” during what was a “very problematic period in his life,” which seems to be a gentle way of referring to Bowie’s raging cocaine addiction. And while it would be possible to continue connecting the dots of where Eno took ambient music from there—Music for Airports was only a couple of years away by then—I want to end on this anecdote Eno related in a 1977 Melody Maker interview on the release of Low:

[Bowie] said when he first heard Discreet Music, he could imagine in the future that you would go into supermarkets and there would be a rack of ‘ambience’ records, all in very similar covers.

And—this is my addition—they would just have titles like Sparkling, or Nostalgic, or Melancholy or Sombre. They would all be mood titles, and so cheap to buy you could chuck them away when you didn't want them any more.

Brian Eno didn’t invent ambient music, but he may have invented the ambient playlist.

Now for this week's new music.

Albums

BAKUDI SCREAM, Alarm Will Sound, Prey

Album of the week: Leaving no musical stone unturned, Rohan Chander’s (aka BAKUDI SCREAM) collaboration with members of the chamber orchestra Alarm Will Sound glitches from the abrasive to the ambient and every possible stop in between. It’s like Oneohtrix Point Never fronting a doom metal band, but it’s also really not quite like anything else. (Related: Alarm Will Sound’s acoustic Aphex Twin covers are 20 years old and haven’t lost a beat.) / Bandcamp, Apple Music, Spotify

Loscil, Lake Fire

There is ambient, and then there is this: deeply un-ignorable soundscapes built up with so many textures that I don't imagine I’ll ever fully comprehend how much is really happening here. Every listen reveals some new, carefully buried structure, and every discovery is a pure treat. / Bandcamp, Apple Music, Spotify

Milkweed, Remscéla

Finally, a new album from the masters of deranged, warped—yet bizarrely catchy—renaissance folk. Seems like I’ve been waiting since last harvest for this to come out. / Bandcamp, Apple Music, Spotify

Blank Hellscape, Hell 2

Dank noise-pop that softens your brain until it eventually nestles in and finds a little home in there. Punishing stuff for sure, but unnervingly fun. / Bandcamp, Apple Music, Spotify

Anysia Kym, Loraine James, Clandestine

Scattershot experimental breakbeat reveries that ride the line between relaxing and enthralling. / Bandcamp, Apple Music, Spotify

Wolfgang Pérez, Memorias Fantasmas

A hazy gaze into a beautiful, remixed world of distorted memories, leading off with a 1982 recording of Pérez’s family playing music in a church in Spain, “captured by his grandfather Fernando using a shitty tape recorder.” The result is a moving and highly evocative way of hearing the ways we remember. / Bandcamp, Apple Music, Spotify

Tracks

Lyra Pramuk, “Meridian”

Seemingly cut-up-but-not strings and vocals combine for a powerful, plaintive piece, made all the more astounding by the way the arrangements continually shift directions, twisting and turning throughout the song. An interesting side note on “Meridian” from Pramuk’s Instagram are the “slime ritual experiments” on Nadia Marcus’s poetry, where the mold guides the connection of the words, mirroring the song’s random, organic nature. / Bandcamp, SoundCloud, Apple Music, Spotify

gyrofield, “Akin”

Driving, atmospheric drum-and-bass-adjacent bounce. Kiana Li may be a µ-Ziq descendent, but they’re quickly charting their own course and defining the future of whatever this whole genre will one day become. / Bandcamp, SoundCloud, Apple Music, Spotify

Charlie Ryder, Birds of Passage, “Solstice”

The aural equivalent of a warm blanket, this song manages to soothe at a cellular level. Every sharp edge, completely rounded out, what a feeling. / Deezer, Spotify

Croatian Amor, Scandinavian Star, Lalla Skir, “You Belong”

This is what it must be like to finally make your way inside the club deep within a Burial song, otherwise shrouded by the low roar of the city rain and grime. A dark, shining dance track for an alternate reality. / SoundCloud, Apple Music, Spotify

An absolutely humid dub techno mix

I've been field-testing this blissful dub techno mix from Carrier since February, and can confirm this is a world worth spending the next hour in. / SoundCloud