First Impressions 048: Inquiry, instinct, awe and respect.

Initial vibes on new music

Hello,

“In 10 years, if we keep going on the path we are on, there’s going to be a stage at Coachella for ambient. Can you imagine how great that would be?”

I can see it now: Co-chilla. This is a quote ending an article that came out this week on the future of ambient music. The article is in the longstanding trade publication Billboard, and it centers not on the creative future of ambient music, but on the perceived threats to its entrepreneurial rise. It’s called a ‘genre report.’ What strikes me about the article is how the author classifies ambient music, citing its range as being ‘anything from Max Richter, Jon Hopkins, and Aphex Twin but also wellness soundscapes and binaural beats.’ It also says it can be jazz-inflected, mentioning a particular Nala Sinephro track. Then comes the main thrust of the article—ambient music has become a serious cash cow these days, delivered by sleep playlists and other corporate ‘zen’ offerings. How will it survive AI? I can’t see Aphex Twin bothered by AI, but the very existence of the article shows that no music is immune to industry upscaling.

The quote is from Azad Naficy, co-founder of the label Peace of Mind Studio, dedicated to ‘mood music.’ The label is noted in the article for partnering with yoga studios to build a community around ambient artists. Naficy talks about ‘putting care’ into mood music “because what was happening wasn’t very inspiring.” Nothing says ‘inspiring’ like a branding partnership with a wellness staple. Peace of Mind Studio releases albums with inspiring titles like INNER-SENSE, INNER-MISSION, and First Light. These artists are described as already having a foundation in wellness and meditation, so of course they naturally acceded to ambient music and creating it.

When any music is rendered functional, it is immediately reduced to the retail space, stripped of any sense of expression or emotion. Yes, your Pilates workout may be soundtracked by AI, and yes, that does affect people making music. But the real threat is not AI, it’s the catch-all term of ambient liberally applied to so much music where it really just isn’t that. The media is somewhat complicit, in that while there are pockets of support for exploratory, atmospheric, instrumental music, all of it gets lassoed into ‘ambient’ to capitalise on streaming platforms’ numbing down. Plenty of reviewers confuse ‘ambience’ with ‘ambient,’ inadvertently stepping into this convenient reductivity.

This, along with powerful people in the music industry like Lucien Grange declaring ‘ambient’ music should not be afforded the same recompense as other music, shows another tentacle of how the business of music co-opts its creativity to suit its own ends. There are those who do not want your business, or if you’re Spotify, do not want to give you any slice of their business with their fake artist ploys. Traditional artistry, new compositional approaches, and music evolution are ultimately devalued, no matter the achievement. We are a far cry from the possibilities inherent in Terry Riley and Laurie Anderson releasing work on major labels. And we are a far cry from Co-chilla.

Andrew
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OK, let’s go:

Aunes – Judith Hamann: Deeply invested in the connection between sound and space, Judith Hamann was not deterred by lockdowns in creating her piece for Longform Editions. Hinterhof saw Hamann hanging mics outside her apartment window to capture street noise and reflect her own isolation while playing her cello and humming along. She called it an ‘imagined shared space.’ Aunes sees her out in the wild, searching for connections in contradictions across various locations far and wide. Hamann excels at documenting the motion of things around us and how we absorb that into the way we move through the world. Employing cello, synthesizers, organ, voice, and field recordings as gestural responses with tenderness, Hamann’s music is not only a work of inquiry and instinct, but also one of awe and respect.

Whatever The Weather II – Whatever The Weather: Loraine James’ second turn taking her uncanny IDM club constructions towards an abstract inverse makes for a bright return. James’ signature lies in the elastic flow of her style, where precisely cut contrasts ignite unexpected sparks of life from well-worn formulas. James recently cited Fennesz as a jumping point for this album. You can hear that James’ glitch textures dotting across rafts of sensuous melody, and how both artists make spaces where the dream is very much real. James maps sound here like a day in the life of any city, with field recordings of random chats and excited kids rendered into the bounce of her rhythmic arc. Elsewhere, decaying loops are cast with the joy of renewal, rising in spirals like they've been made to kick off a rave, not your headspace. Whatever’s in play, James treats it all like a lucky charm. All sound is good fortune, and James acts like a weathervane, going whichever way it blows with a free spirit.

Infiltrating Roku City – Shinetiac: The title gives it away – this trio of Shiner, Pontiac Streator & Ben Bondy have climbed into the interface to crystallise a fizzing odyssey of their online rabbit holes. Turning the wild west of the internet into new frontiers, Shinetiac mulch the pace of doomscrolling and the randomness it has on a continuous spill with the bustle of Latin pop, EDM, and reggaeton to recast their beautifully-warped glitch-pop. With previous form for making fantasy fusions a virtual reality, Infiltrating Roku City is a bolder feat than their debut, Not All Who Wander Are Lost, texturing these elastic pieces with Dali-like assemblage: fluid, no buffering.

Keep Smoking Swamp - Dania and Rosso Polare: An intriguing and winning pairing here, with both parties finding common ground in works of surreal expanse that could very well be endless. Barcelona-based Dania’s music revolves around her voice, creating suspended states that swirl in a delicately slow ascent, while Rosso Polare’s work often hangs at the point of collapse – each sound moving in grim defiance, in concert with the natural burble they frequently mine. The central inspiration for Keep Smoking Swamp is a poem by anti-colonialist Martiniquais poet Aimé Césaire, N'ayez point pitié de moi (Have No Mercy On Me). Dark keys, muted strings, voice, and creaky guitar rise up and linger across these clattering pieces, bending into murmuring realms with a compelling tension that evokes a reclamation of space. Nothing ever feels settled in this set, and for that, it’s all the more potent.

Every Life Is A Light - Joni Void: Montréal-based French-British producer Jean Néant is just as interested in collapse as he is in craft on his latest, a lo-fi charmer where the only thing fixed is a slowly paced sense of the random. Every Life Is A Light is junkyard trip-hop with a 90s bedroom 4-track pop vibe - all clammy, but cosy, and happily loose. At times, it fels like The Caretaker turning a soft focus onto 80s balladry, or unanchored takes on De La Soul’s Three Feet High and Rising’s playpen beat whimsy. Collaborations with Japanese singers Haco and Ytamo as well as verses from Pink Navel, stand as more gleaming concoctions by comparison, though Néant continually detours, leaving a trail of dream logic for us to make sense of.

Travesías - Oksana Linde: A new collection of works recorded between 1986 and 1994 from the Peruvian Buh label, dedicated to serialising synth works from this Venezuelan-Ukrainian artist. The title of the previous collection, Aquatic and Other Worlds, was a great sign of Linde’s compositional cornerstone in contemplating portals on Earth and beyond, though those pieces leaned less into sci-fi tropes and more into ideas of hyperreality. Travesías feels like a logical progression, building a heightened, melodramatic presence that wouldn’t feel out of place in several Twin Peaks scenes. Linde plays for opulent settings that display a fondness for sweeping sides of classical music, and while her flow can be subsumed by a tendency to go goopy, her grand paths splinter into some coolly peculiar detours.

Thanks for reading.

I’m thinking it may be better (for me) to have First Impressions arrive on Friday mornings (Sydney time) instead of 24 hours earlier. Thoughts welcome!
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Andrew Khedoori is the curator of Longform Editions.
First Impressions visual by Mark Gowing.