Day 4 out of 47 of writing and publishing something every day.

Today is a travel day, and I’m lacking any concrete inspiration. Energy is diffuse. I am a cloud of static electricity.

I’m on the new NextGen Acela train from NYC to Boston to visit my brother. This new train is perfectly modern in all of the wrong ways. That’d be a fun post, but I don’t have the cognitive power to make that interesting today.

Instead, I will take a brief departure from the regularly scheduled programming (technical writing) to write briefly about a conversation, ambient music, and space.

Post-Writing: I’d like to go way deeper on this. I have a duty to give ambient music a full writeup.

Josh

Josh is perhaps the only true creative I’ve met. More on that some other time.

At the moment, he is building a brand around his work creating jewelry by dismantling watches and painting the space where the face used to be which manifests a completely non-functional, but beautiful, piece of wearable art.

As part of the brand development, he’s been making loads of techno music to supplement the promotional videos he’s creating.

Conversation

I went over to Josh’s apartment on Sunday night to make some tunes with him and decompress a bit. We got to chatting about all the things he was learning about what it takes to create great techno music, and what the genre is all about.

From what I can remember, our conversation ended up circulating around a tripartite attractor. Techno music is about subtlety, articulating space, and emotional triggers.

It occurred to me as we were speaking that you could say many of the same things about ambient music that we were saying about techno, and I think it’s part of the reason that people undervalue it so much in modern music discourse.

Subtlety, Space, Emotion

Subtlety

A critical requirement for both techno music and ambient music is that you need to be patient. There is no traditional structure in either genre, and track development is often extremely subtle.

The typical experience is that you play a track, get lost in whatever you are doing, and then realize sometime later that the track has taken on a completely different form without ever asking you to notice.

This is the power of subtlety in action. Barely perceptible changes aggregate over the course of the experience that have the effect of taking you somewhere new.

Space

Techno music and ambient music are space modulators. Sound is a physical force. Music is therefore a physical medium, so it would be easy to say this about any audio-based media, but these two genres are the two that most overtly articulate space and require it to understand them as complete experiences.

Techno plays with the environment, most often a club or rave environment, to allow you to drop into the body. It acts as a muscle relaxant, if you let it, and energy becomes much more mobile through your physical form.

Ambient music articulates space in it’s sound design primarily, but also in it’s transportation effect. Most people have heard of the “first” record of modern ambient music: Brian Eno’s “Ambient 1: Music for Airports”.

The banality of airports turns most people away from it, but this is precisely my favorite thing about the genre. Ambient music takes you somewhere, but doesn’t tell you how to feel when you get there.

Another great example of this is my current favorite ambient track: “Ferrum” by Chihei Hatakeyama. It brings me immediately to a lake between two mountains for a reflective moment. I can bring whatever I want. Joy, sorrow, grief, excitement, inspiration are all allowed, and each of them is transformed simply by way of being processed in the space that Chihei paints.

Emotion

This idea that “ambient music takes you somewhere, but doesn’t tell you how to feel when you get there” is worth spending an extra moment on. Techno music shares this. The same song in different spaces and with different contexts can be catalyze a myriad of emotional states.

Josh remarked that one can feel anger, joy, dance, and arousal all within the space of a single record.

Most modern music tells you how to feel. “This is a sad song”, a record will say emphatically. “You are supposed to dance at this part”, another might quip.

Both ambient and techno music offer you nothing, so you must create yourself. I believe myself to have a relatively higher dynamic range of emotional access, so these genres are a haven. It’s far easier for me to bring the full nuance of my varying states into an ambient music experience than it is for me to find the perfect record that maps 1-to-1. It’s often the case that I don’t even know what I’m feeling, and I use ambient music to offer me refuge where I can explore it.

Concluding…

I think ambient music is incredibly undervalued. People use to study or to relax in a spa-like setting, and for good reason, but I think this is limiting. I often exercise with ambient music, or play it while I’m cooking dinner, for example.

It demands patience, and I think it works best if you already have good access to your inner life generally, but it can also help develop those qualities. There is a feedback loop and I wish it was more a common genre that had the respect it deserves.

If you’re curious to get more into ambient music, here are some of my favorite artists right now (I’m pressed for time, so I’ll add links later):

  1. Chihei Hatakeyama
  2. Brian Eno
  3. William Basinski
  4. Rafael Toral
  5. Alaskan Tapes
  6. Billow Observatory

These are the artists I’ve been listening to most recently, but I have a trove of them that I should probably categorize soon.

Notes to Self:

I’d like more time to develop the following ideas:

  1. Different artist and the spaces they paint (where do they take you?)
  2. Space in art more generally (how much should the artist give you, think Lily Allen’s recent record)
  3. Techno music in NYC
    1. Josh’s take on the economics and why clubs suck here
  4. Ambient Music Methods
  5. Oblique Strategies and Koans