In 1978, Brian Eno changed our perceptions of what the purpose of popular music can be when he released "Ambient 1: Music For Airports." I use the term "popular music" arbitrarily, because while Brian Eno was indeed until then known primarily as a pop music pioneer, this new direction was something different. He released music that was almost like "program music" that would have been used throughout the classical lexicon, but he stripped it of almost all elements. With "Music for Airports" Brian Eno had made a statement that music is as much an internal part of us as an external experience, he captured our breath and our thoughts by creating pieces of music that didn't go anywhere, that served merely as a peaceful repose from our daily grind.
In 1981, Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh shattered this concept, took Eno's basic aesthetics and instruments as their own and created "Music For Listening To" as what appears to be a direct response.
Fresh off their departure from burgeoning superstars The Human League and while already supporting "Penthouse and Pavement" as Heaven 17, the duo took a detour towards experimental electronic music as the British Electronic Foundation (or B.E.F.) and showed the world just exactly what the synthesizer was capable of.
I'll say right now that this collection of songs really set the blueprint for much of electronic dance music that followed during the next 20 years. It's not as spaced out as the music Kraftwerk was making at the time, but kick drums and synth lines apparent throughout this release helped catalyze where synth-pop was heading in the immediate 80s and can be looked upon as the most direct starting point for what would become industrial music (and thus spin out many early house releases and even some of the early Warp stuff).
"Groove Thang" which was already known with additional vocals from "Penthouse and Pavement" is a classic right off the bat. With it's rapid-fire percussion, there are additional guitar and bass parts added by John Wilson that really set this track apart. It sounds like LTJ Bukem 15 years prior to his prime as the DnB master. The bass is all over the place, expertly played and providing a solid groove. Almost 30 years after it's initial release, the track doesn't sound dated like many early electronica and can still rock a party.
"Uptown Apocalypse" is dark. Synth sprinkled throughout and very deep sounding steel drum percussion. The title is the perfect fit. This sounds like the soundtrack to a pending fight scene in and 80s action film. Walking down the deserted streets, chains wrapped around your arms and looking to destroy anyone who gets in your way.
"B.E.F. Indent" is an interesting, albeit quick, take on classical music. Equally beautiful and futuristic. This is the music that Vangelis' best productions are in line with. Simple synth-based organ sounds, with an ending that comes to quick. "You wanted a break? Too bad."
The rest of the album touches on many sounds within the electronic music canon for years to come, allowing the listener to make connections as they listen. "The Old at Rest" is a direct connection the music Eno and Tangerine Dream were already making. Beautiful, ambient soundscapes that on its own can serve as aural wallpaper, but taken in the context of the rest of the album, really keep the listener engaged. You are seeking the changes in modulation, you are counting the keys as they echo through your speakers. Enlightening sure, but not boring.
The closing track, "Decline of the West" is just altogether special. Another fitting title for the music contained, the track brings images of decimation, loneliness, despair. Or maybe its just something you are going to put up with.
"Music For Listening To" is exactly that. This isn't background music, much of it is too fast-paced for that, much of it contains little shifts within the tracks that you don't catch unless you listen closely. It's almost entirely synth-based and some of it will sound dated. But it's an important release if you are at all interested in the history of electronic music. It may not have grandfathered every genre or been the only release of it's kind, but its a classic nonetheless and can surely hold your attention.
2003 was a bit of a revelatory year in music for me. It was the year in which I discovered indie music blogs, review sites, and discussion forums. I tracked Pitchfork reviews tirelessly, even going through their archives at the time. I followed Fluxblog updates everyday, downloading whatever new song that was uploaded. Like many teenagers of the time, I grew into adulthood at a time when information availability was expanding and knowledge of new and relevant music seemed entirely too vast to ever attempt to conquer.
Sometime during that year, I read a review about "The Lemon Of Pink" by The Books. Earlier, I had already lost much time during an obsession over the divisive "Ether Teeth" by Fog, a record that I found mentioned through Anticon message boards. A description of The Books sound seemed that it would fall in line with the abstract samples and acoustic instrumentation found on "Ether Teeth"...but you know, this record was actually critically acclaimed and deemed "good" by just about everyone. Therefore it should have been my favorite record ever.
"The Lemon of Pink" isn't my favorite ever, but it is very good. As the spring months have been approaching and the spring weather seems here to stay, I can think of few experimental records from this decade that fit the time so perfectly. The acoustic strings present throughout, the ethereal original vocals that float above the shimmering tones, the random vocal samples that seem to appear out of nowhere, sneaking up on your like a person yelling from across the street. This is a folk album that breaks all folk tradition.
There are few albums that that float by as quickly as "The Lemon Of Pink." From the first female voice stating the title of the record out through "That Right Ain't Shit" and even "PS", this album comes together best as a whole piece. It is rare indeed that one would put a song from this record on a mixtape, other than with the intention of breaking apart whatever the general theme of your mix was. As individual songs, this music is pretty - but doesn't make a whole lot of sense. As a 37-minute album, everything comes together, bleeding into one another, creating memories of past picnics, spring sports, setting suns over the beach.
Perhaps I romanticize this record too much. I don't adore or obsess over this record and rarely listen to it 7 years after it's initial release. However, when I do take the time to listen to it, to remember why I enjoyed it so much all those years ago and the positive impact it had on broadening my listening tastes in the years that came after, I am overjoyed with what The Books have accomplished with this album. It's not a perfect recording and in 2010 there are records that are similar that might do part of this sound better, but it is one of those records that can be conditionally perfect. Sometimes you just have to wait to find that condition. Download Here
I first decided I wanted to delve into the world of electronic music somewhere around the year 2000. This was the beginning of my teenage years, the time in our lives where we are finding out our likes and dislikes, why we like the things we do and more importantly - we are getting bored of things we have always assumed to be "good."
High school became the place for me to become the music snob of my friends. Not so much in a formal setting, but within my own mind I was discovering new things daily. Electronic music was one of these things. Like many people my age, I was inspired by Radiohead's "Kid A" album and the bleeps and bloops that were found consistently through that record. I fell in love with "Idioteque", learning the words and wanting to devour more music like it. I didn't know where to start, so I asked around the internet.
The first album someone told me to get was "Music Has The Right To Children". I loved it instantly and still consider it one of my very favorite albums of all time. Through my own narrow investigation I was discovering that my preferences heavily leaned on the side of abstract, experimental dance music. Somewhere I ran into the term "IDM" which I hung above my peers as a beacon of how I was better than them, because I listened to INTELLIGENT dance music, none of this trance shit. I soon found my way to "Tri Repetae++" a collection that is about as out there as IDM got and perhaps the genre's finest offering. I liked the album a lot, but never fell in love with it. The years have carried on and while I've recognized that Autechre fans are some of the most dedicated that I talk with, I've never quite understood the hype. Until very recently.
Over the past few months, I've begun to delve into the early days of Warp Records. I mainly credit people like Flying Lotus and the other Brainfeeder artists for this, but the Warp20 compilation is an amazing collection of music and I wanted to go back and revisit all the things I wasn't around for during the "Artificial Intelligence" days.
"Incunabula" didn't do a whole lot for me the first time I heard it. But I listened to it while commuting around for work the following day and it made sense. You've heard it before: you're driving in the rain, the traffic is start and stop, you get a few stretches of open road and the music that is playing through your car stereo is just the most perfect thing you could be listening to at that point. I've been hooked on this record a bit for the last few weeks, pulling it out about every other day during work or at night to listen to.
It may be the most "accessible" of Autechre's work, it may also be the best. It can sound a bit dated compared to today's standards and it's hard to recognize the duo that created this record in 1993 is still putting out cutting edge electronic music in 2010 that is completely different.
I'm going to fill the gaps in my Autechre collection in, but for now - "Incunabula" will strike me as the high point in what many consider to be the most forward thinking act in electronic music.
We tend to give ambient music two distinct purposes:
1. To serve as inoffensive background noise for activities like studying, sleeping or perhaps barely waking up. 2. To serve as a special soundtrack to a unique situation we may find ourselves in: weaving through travelers at an airport, riding on a morning train, watching the snow fall outside.
I know of few people who choose to listen to ambient or drone music as a means of sparking lively conversation or who elect to share their new favorite microtonal artists with their peers. It is not an entertaining music, nor is it a significantly artistic music. Yet somehow these sound sculptures can manage to be the most quiescent or the most absorptive music we listen to.
We have heard over the last 30 years of the brilliance found within the minimal compositions of masters like Brian Eno and Harold Budd. In half the time, we have been able to add artists like Wolfgang Voight, William Basinski, Christian Fennesz and Stars of The Lid to that list. What was once a genre that few tread within, dominated by tape loops, hazy guitar pedals and the tinkling of keys on a synth or piano, soon blossomed during the laptop age of the early 2000's. Anyone could be a sound musician. I tried, you tried, we failed.
And though the genre of microtonal ambient music is far from dead - it is altogether saturated by carbon copy artists, all clawing (softly) for that one standout review handed out by a major publication every year.
I love ambient music, and while I'm in no way someone who follows the actual scene (and there is a true art-based minimal scene in every corner of the western world), nor am I even learned enough to be able to write for mapsadaisical, I delve into many new releases every year that happen to catch my attention during the hyperbolic ramblings of their press releases or Boomkat reviews. Every year many of them are nothing but boring, soulless electro-acoustic meanderings that start nowhere and go nowhere. "A guy, a laptop and a guitar walk into a bedroom..."
It is funny that we can consider a music with no specific form to adhere to but whatever one hears in their own head as "soulless", yet many releases within this genre are exactly that. Dan Abrams aka Shuttle358 is anything but soulless.
All positive reviews of ambient music make reference that a particular release is good because of the "warmth" and "humanity" that the music brings up for the listener. Specific memories in time are recaptured, current moments in the present are captured for the first time. Chessa is warm, Chessa is human.
Recorded and released during the apex of the click-and-beep madhouse of 2004, Shuttle358's third album on 12k has spoken to me for 5 years now. The fuzz, the chimes, the buzzing sounds, the looped guitar - these are all elements that can be found on releases by any ambient composer - and yet, this release sticks out from the others. I listened to this album four times this afternoon as I watched the rain come and go out my window. As night set in, earlier than it should have, the music continued to soundtrack my evening. Every track seems to find itself matching my breaths as it clicks along, every track placed perfectly in context with the exact emotion I encounter upon this experience.
It is a quiet album, a beautiful album - one that has many situational uses. It just turns out that its beauty has not allowed me to tie it to one situation in particular, but many. And few albums can do that.
I guess I should try this album again. Did not like it at all when it came out (I doubt I still will), but FUSE has been on constant rotation over the last couple days. Epic song.
