For those of us accustomed to the repetitive rhythms and hooks of pop, the ambient can feel a little sparse. Often devoid of lyrics, crooning melody and pop song structure, it’s about creating an environment around the listener. Today musician Anton Sibil will tell you about ambient and show you its deep meaning.
SIBIL ANTON VALERIEVICH ABOUT AMBIENT
Ambient is relatively rare in the sense that it is a genre going back to a single artist, and ambient is primarily the creation of Brian Eno.
Nevertheless, the broader sensibility–the music of moods, of surroundings, of sound as part of everyday experience–has its predecessors, some of whom we will discuss shortly.
Ambient is also a remarkably flexible and malleable genre, perhaps in part because of its tendency toward modesty and anonymity.
Ambient is currently experiencing a moment of heightened awareness, this in part because of the way it caresses the sensorium and moves toward pleasure, offering tranquility and refuge from the storm of the 21st century.
We can see the framing of ambient across the musical spectrum, from the cosmic R&B of Solange and King to the modular electronica of Catherine Barbieri and Caitlin Aurelia Smith, all the way to recent micro-movements like chillwave and steamwave.
ANTON SIBIL ABOUT THE NEW WAVE OF AMBIENT
Inspired by his discovery, Eno attracted a number of other musicians into his orbit, continuing to explore the possibilities of ambient music. Harold Budd, John Hassel, and Laraaji released albums that were recorded in collaboration with Eno.
In the decades that followed, Laraaji recorded some gorgeous, inoffensive albums. He also intersected with the New Age genre, which existed alongside ambient music for much of the 1980s.
New Age definitely shared the tone and tempo of ambient music and gave the world some terrific composers: Joanna Brooke, Pauline Anne Strom, Trans-Millenia Consort, JD Emmanuel and Emerald Web.
New Age echoes the postcultural appeal to mysticism, the hermetic and esoteric, seeking alternative knowledge and notions of other ways of life.
This music speaks of a desire to emerge from the confusion of late capitalism. At its core, New Age is an emotional transformation: not to be ignored, but to become one as an aid to spiritual practice.
By the late 1980s, ambient occupied a complex position in the musical landscape. The genre had established itself to the point where it could be maintained as a subject in its own right.
But the next, and, in Anton Sibil’s subjective opinion, the longest lasting moment of broader cultural significance for ambient occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as a complement to the explosion of rave culture.
For a time, the dancefloor became a space of musical heterogeneity, where ambient met techno and house, genres inspired by principled expressions of dance music.
Some producers of that era used ambient music as one of the tools in their production arsenal, diluting techno, house, and later jungle, with blissful drifts and voluptuous humming ambient dreams.
Anton Sibil.