alex

growing adult who writes about music

[alexglower]

Tim Hecker - Virgins (2013)

puts the stab in piano stab, am i right??

Sad news! This is my last Tim Hecker write-up :( It's fitting, then, that this album feels like both the end of the Hecker Era and the beginning of something new. It takes the harshness present in his earlier works, like the tornado-ripping-apart-a-house feel of Ravedeath, 1972, and blows it up to its apex.

The pianos heavily featured on this record are played percussively and edited to cut in and out at a moment's notice, with the effect sort of being like that scene in Spider-Man where Aunt May's prayer is interrupted by her house exploding. It's all very claustrophobic (which was typical of Hecker at the time, though for this album he got an ensemble of live performers to play together in a single room, so...) yet stark (less typical for Hecker). There's chaos, sure, but those thick, warm beds of ambiance Hecker usually lays down are less present.

Virgins is definitely Hecker's most negative work to date, especially considering the Abu Ghraib connections. The cover art is a reference to a famous photograph of torture at Abu Ghraib, and then there's the song titled "Incense at Abu Ghraib," which makes things pretty obvious. One article I read pointed out that loud music was used to torture captives in the prison, which connects tangentially to Ravedeath's themes of the non-sanctity of music. The vibes peripherally orbiting Ravedeath portrayed music as a disposable commodity, whereas Virgins sees music as a tool for violence rather than a victim.

I believe the intended message is pretty Hecker-specific, though. As in, Virgins isn't a critique of America or anything. I read an interview that said Hecker was planning to come out with a video for the album featuring an "Al Qaeda hunting dog," and while I couldn't find the video, that concept points to a certain "both sides" vibey-ism. I don't think Hecker wants to make a specific statement about torture or terrorism, I just think he wants to position Virgins alongside the notions of torture and terrorism, to connect the album's harsh sonics to harsh realities.

Many articles I read about ambient albums, especially darker/harsher ones, seem to loath the word "ambient." Though the word makes people think of dreamy, peaceful drone music, that stuff only makes up a fraction of what gets called "ambient." So I can't blame people for being annoyed! From what I gather, Virgins is sort of like the ultimate push against the ambient classification, being music that is not only antagonistic towards the listener, but is about antagonism. Within Hecker's electroacoustic mode, he picked the most percussive tonal instrument he could think of (the faithful piano) and went crazy.

It's not my favorite Hecker album, but it's enough of a departure from his earlier stuff that it's definitely worth a listen!

[alexglower]

Topdown Dialectic - Topdown Dialectic (2013)

misty

This write-up is unusual. I couldn't find much information on Topdown Dialectic or their 2013 self-titled project---the artist is anonymous, and the album itself was cassette-exclusive until 2022. And this isn't a Natural Snow Buildings or Burial situation, where the mystery inspires bloggers to blog, so basically I have nothing.

Typically in these sorts of situations, I don't do a write-up at all. But this album is so good... It's like an equal and opposite reaction to Deepchord: delicious minimal techno, crafted intricately from bursts of misty noise, but bright and sheer in all the places Deepchord was dark and opaque. Where Liumin was music for people taking red-eye flights or working the graveyard shift, Topdown Dialectic is music for skylight-lit bathhouses and tucked-away indoor pools. It's quickly become one of my favorite electronic albums.

[alexglower]

Andy Stott - Luxury Problems (2012)

"it's almost like his time as an auto mechanic had some influence on his music... the tone is so... mechanical..." -every review of this album ever

A factory. A bomb. A lumbering beast. Every image assigned to Andy Stott's Luxury Problems is huge and scary. It's been compared to Sun O))) with how tracks seem sculpted from mounds of bass. My Bloody Valentine gets thrown around a bit too, what with the vocals and all. So when I finished the album, I felt betrayed!

"Numb" was a promising opener. A crunchy harmony built on the word "touch" (sung by Stott's childhood piano teacher) loops off-kilter like a spinning cog with a broken tooth. A kick drum, looming so large it's barely identifiable as such, kneads the track with piston-like efficiency. Every impossible expectation is met. The constant references in articles to Stott's auto shop day-job are justified.

I would have preferred the album to continue on like this. "Numb" feels post-rave, like a sneering mockery of dance music (in this case, "sneering mockery" is good because it's cool as fuck). And yet it also feels pre-rave, like it's built from the unrefined materials that will one day, eons in the future, become the kick and high-hat we know. It's the kind of thing that inspires me to write about machinery instead of performing actual musical analysis.

The rest of the album, though, is just techno with reverby singing on top. It's still muddy and experimental, but suddenly every track has sampled drum breaks, those electric clap sounds, the works. I feel like I was promised a sonic realignment on the level of Burial, but instead I got a slightly wonky techno record.

The moment I start recognizing sounds, Luxury Problems ceases to be an alien mix of human and metal, and instead becomes one of those mashups people post to Twitter where two pre-existing songs play simultaneously. The kick on "Lost and Found" is obviously not of the same world as the kick on "Numb" because the former is like a brother to me and the latter is something I have no words to describe.

The reason any of this matters is because Luxury Problems is a hugely atmospheric record. I mean, listen to that reverb! If the atmosphere isn't consistent---if a range of images are hinted at, rather than a singular one being conjured---then what's the point?

[athenaterminal]

Autechre on Generative Music Techniques

In 2013 Sean and Rob of Autechre did a massive AMA on the We Are The Music Makers forum. Their answers have also been collected into a Google Spreadsheet.

Here are some highlights particularly about what they had to say about generative practices and software/programming matters.

phling:

when you say you make sequencers/synths, what’s your preferred way of development? do you prefer clicking boxes in max or juggling your RAM in C?

Sean:

i was getting quite into c a couple of years ago and then gen came out so i dropped it i way prefer using max to coding

futureimage:

Whilst being prolific in terms of bespoke software design for your own music (i.e. Max/MSP patches for Confield, Oversteps, etc. etc.), have you considered designing a manufactured hardware product? It’s been interesting to see what The Black Dog have done with the CS X51.

Sean:

tbh it’s tricky cos part of the reason we make software is so that we can hack it easily, and save tons of versions.  and the way everything integrates is bespoke as well, the protocols etc; that’s such a big part of it that it’s hard to make a one box solution or something that integrates with midi (or other equally lame or ancient protocols) that well.  

we do bounce ideas a lot tho.  we’d probably use fpaa and fpga pretty heavily if we did anything, so it could be part modular analogue but still have decent patch storage.

Zeffolia:

How much influence does randomness have on your music if any? Aleatoric is the word I think

Sean:

given that neither of us had any say in our genetic code, i would say quite a lot

modey:

Can you shed some light on the composition process for Oversteps? It almost seems as though the main melodies/chord progressions were composed traditionally with a generative process used to add flourishes to the existing melodic content—is there any truth behind this? It’s also quite a strange album in your discography since it doesn’t seem to share a similarity to anything before or after (besides Move of Ten, but I consider that and Oversteps to be a package deal); are there any plans to re-visit this sound or build upon it?

Sean

most of it’s markov chain stuff done in max, with conditionals forcing scales and harmonies

we still have those sequencers but we developed them a fair amount since, they’re not as trad as they were then

Root5:

Oversteps really jumped out at me as having to do with counterpoint, the interplay between multiple voices talking to each other. I noticed this particularly in O=0 and redfall. Is this something that you intended? Is this something you noticed?

Sean:

yeah oversteps was programmed that way 

Root5:

What do you mean by ‘programmed that way’? Were the voices programmed to directly influence each other in a generative type of way? Were they programmed independently, but in such a way to compliment each other? 

Sean:

yeah the voices were independent but communicating it’s just conditionals really nothing too fancy 

Boxus:

I was listening to Oversteps today and I was wondering - did you have specific patches for those tracks that would generate them in an ongoing way, so you could leave them open as long as you wanted and have the melodies keep varying? Or were the songs set up to go through a certain number of variations / loops and then end? I just imagine it would be so sweet to pop open a patch and have it play a couple hours of pt2ph8 while you’re doing things around the house.

Sean:

yeah exactly the original takes are long as fuck. i was doing that most days, followed by loads of editing in the evenings

lumpenprol:

when making Oversteps, was there even a small element of it being a reaction against those folks who had been saying “they forgot how to make nice melodies”? Or were you just following your muse as per usual?

Sean:

oversteps - basically we were making algorithms with a view to using them repeatedly, and seeing how flexible we could make them in terms of being able to reuse them in lots of different contexts (making diff styles of music) and it kind of grew out of that i dunno if we were really successful in achieving our aims (not really, we got very sidetracked and went with it into a different zone) but we liked the result and ended up shaping it further into that kind of oversteps territory i think we were concentrating on melody, harmony counterpoint and all that cos the rhythm stuff has been second nature for a while, in terms of programming and algos and such, and we thought we might learn more if we came at it from the opposite angle

marf:

how did you teach yourself? did you read up on computer programming? dsp reading? have you ever read old books like the allan strange synthesis book, did you have to re-learn Maths to develop your custom patches? Stuff like your aleatoric sound, did you just do it trial and error? Did you have to educate yourself in any specific way to build your sequencers?

Sean:

i just learn stuff as i go, but patchily and not in terms of high level techniques at all.  i did have to learn some new physics a few years ago but usually i just need tiny bits of info to get on with what i’m doing.lots of trial and error as well. 

digit:

each of your albums have their own unifying 'vibe’ or identity that comes both from the hardware / software used as well as the compositional process:

untilted - densely programmed step sequenced kit. quaristice - looser & sparser live jams with hardware. oversteps - evolving generative melody (i’m assuming sequenced via Max?). i’m curios what the process/vibe was for Exai? what was the hard/software situation that the album grew out of and how were those early experiments refined and evolved to get the 'Exai sound’ ?

Sean:

the software used for exai grew out of the software we made for oversteps mostly realtime stuff so, long jams edited down not all of it tho, some of it was worked on more compositionally (the software can do both)“

auxien:

Is this software that’s part of something else (Max/Msp or whatever) or software that you two’ve created entirely on your own?

Sean:

we use max as a hub really, with c externals and gen, few bits of hardware

we don’t program in OSX Assembler (would that count?)

xf:

You guys are huge on generative music; ever considered releasing an album of puredata patches or something along those lines, rather than prerecorded audio?  I recognize the issues with doing so, but it’d probably blow some peoples minds to have that happen.

Sean:

yeah this comes up every few years maybe in the future

digit:

do you guys still build synths in Max or just use it for sequencing hardware?

Sean:

we use it for both, and as a hub for connecting other bits of software, and sometimes hardware but increasingly less the line between sequencing and synthesis is pretty much gone now.  textures are sequences, sequences are like harmonies.  it’s all the same thing when you get down to it.

sweepstakes:

When programming, do often spend a long time trying to make more general purpose tools with a ride range of uses, or is it usually more ad-hoc? What are some of the more interesting/unexpected design challenges for you when making these tools? I’m particularly curious about how you decided to handle recording/storage and playback of continuous parameter changes, i.e. stuff you control with knobs/faders. 

Sean:

i might start out making a specific thing but then i get distracted by an idea for something else do it becomes the new thing i don’t really care if i get to finish the thing i started everything is continuous basically, there is no recording as such, just a stream of data being generated strictly

blos:

Over-thought question time: one of the main differences between "early Ae” and “"later Ae”“ is the tension between rhythm and arrhythm - at least that’s one of the main things I get. Obviously "flutter” was consciously in that vein but it wasn’t a major part of the toolkit until maybe cichlisuite / chiastic / envane. At least that’s how it seems to me. Obviously we all like a massive 4/4 boom-bap, and that’s like junk food when you guys do it well (e.g. 6IE.CR, IO, 1 1 is, etc) but my very favourites (e.g. Pencha, Osla for n) seem to scatter beats around like confetti while a steady pulse runs invisibly through it.

Oh yeah, the question. How does that come about? Is it usually programmed? Some kind of time-scatter algorithm that you push right up to the bleeding edge of rhythm v chaos? Micro-editing? Played live and tweaked? The reason I ask is that it’s probably the number one thing I like about Ae and the most difficult to describe.

Sean:

various ways, sometimes it’s all programmed step by step, sometimes played in, and sometimes defined in advance and then run off in realtime (i guess you could call that algorithmic) my spellcheck was turning realtime into teatime then

Redruth:

would u plees name one ambient music recording which u fancy?

Sean

god that word ambient is such a loaded term (thanks brian)  - i’m gonna say phaedra

coax:

Are you interested in artificial intelligence in the realistic sense? Do you think machines can become conscious, if not very intelligent? It seems to me we are well on the way to machines learning pattern recognition and becoming smart. Check out “Qualcomm Zeroth”, a neural processor. It actually doesn’t have a von neumann architecture. It learns by feeding it info and it did image recognition without being programmed to do so. I wonder if in a few decades we’ll have convincing robots etc. 

Sean:

ai is a funny thing, i mean, if i was to use the average game programmer’s definition then we’re already using ai in our work, but i would never make that claim outright cos i think describing a series of if statements as ai is a bit reaching and self-congratulatory but i’m pretty interested in it from some angles, but most of them to do with analysis and mining tbh, and that’s not really the way i like to make things it would be fun tho if one day we just turned a machine on and it wouldn’t make us a track cos we had ignored it for a fortnight, and just started spitting out really bad trance tracks out of spite

ZombieLincoln666:

In the past you expressed discomfort with not being in total control with regards to generative music. Have you changed your mind or have your methods/algorithms for making generative music changed?

Sean:

nah we never said that. iirc i said that there were always details we’d want to edit the way we were working then was like, make an algorithm for each track, whereas since 2006 we worked on a more general system that we can expand as we go, and those kind of problems are solvable in the long term with that strategy

daed:

It’s pretty well-known that you guys use MAX. I was wondering what some of the other languages you guys use are. I’m a Linux head and tend to fiddle around with PD when I’m not using Renoise.

Sean:

just c, used to use lisp a bit (kyma and symbolic composer), and as a kid i was all about bbc basic and dabbled with pascal i don’t even use c much since gen arrived tho

Maxwell:

I’ve been using Reaktor for a few years now and find it hard to leave cause it’s got a very nifty randomize 1-100% button. I’m getting tired of being stuck at my computer all day though. There any good beginner piece of hardware that would enable me to get the depth and randomization ability? You guys ever mess around with any Reaktor ensembles?

Sean:

u ever played with synplant? it’s well basic but the way it works is good fun, for about 10 minutes

Maxwell:

Is it really worth $99??

Sean:

can’t u just get a demo i dunno, prob not, i used it for about a day and didn’t record anything but i liked the idea of it

Rob:

u mean a button that moves all parameters a bit more. 1-100. yeah ok that is diff a bit, but what if your really close to something quite good, and u press that, u may never find what u were after - and be further from it than b4. we call that 'pot’ luck

Maxwell:

Yeah exactly. It’s risky. Like u said, I could be on to something. Usually if I can feel something sounds decent I’ll begin the manual tweaking and cleaning. Synplant looks like a quirky thing. I could mimic that using a more complex patch with hundreds more values and randomize everything in 1% increments. I use this method mostly when I have a blank slate and am feeling lazy. It can be tough jumping into things cold when there’s no idea of what sounds I want to get into. That being said, I am gearless thus subject to the electronic abyss. Shit can be scary. The elektron looks like fun id like to get my hands on one

Rob

more like u should have 2x reaktors , then make the one u like less, become more like the one u like, i guess thats what synplants more about.

Friendly Foil:

Just how “generative” (not sure this is the right word for this) were some of the tracks on Confield? Tracks like Sim Gishel, Parhelic Triangle and Uviol, for example. I’ve read so many rumors and theories about this, that I don’t know what to believe at this point. I mean, it sure doesn’t sound like you just hit record and then left the computer running for a few minutes, since all the tracks seems to go somewhere. Were you adjusting stuff on the fly or?

Sean:

parhelic triangle wasn’t algo at all sim gishel was slightly uviol was a lot but none of it’s in the way you prob think  of 'algorithmic’ with loads of randomness.  it was all planned out, with bits of it being executed after intervals etc like a track but codified that’s the thing when u say algorithmic people think you mean unplanned and sprawling. doesn’t mean that at all in our case, just means procedural

mgore10:

Either of you have any interest in Supercollider anymore, or does Smalltalk code do your head it too much? I love Max to death, but often feel deflated when some algorithmic process takes an extraordinary amount of patching in Max, but is only several lines of code in Supercollider.

Rob:

i never used SC. no good at coding really.

daed:

What are your opinions on the use of fractal formulas for generating beats or melodies? Any particular favorite types for particular applications? (i.e. L-Systems for melodies… Mandelbeats…etc)

Rob:

i prefer moire effects in music more than fractal - in aesthetic ways anyway - tv transmissions recorded off tv with video etc… fences phasing each other on motorways so on, its a bit more wild but simpler too, and is more like things i find IRL on larger scales. i know theres loads of args to shut me up there, but mbe we o’d d on fractals as a generation. really like L-systems for graf/ix, tho’

Sean:

yeah (altho some people prob already know this) i’m a huge fan of simulating fluid dynamics to make things move around in a controllable but beautiful way (using navier-stokes equations)

ZombieLincoln666:

For generating sounds? Can you also do turbulence?

Sean:

sort of yeah it’s a lot easier since gen came out as well

laloslalos:

I think that your albums have different character, but for me Confield is special because is based on generative sequences, how did you avoid using random number generators?

Sean:

i dunno it’s easy enough not to use random in max not that i’m against it any more (at least in principle - as long as it’s done carefully noise can be really useful), but on confield we weren’t doing that

laloslalos:

UnderBOAC has one of my favorite complex beats, did you program a polyrhytm sequencer in max?

Sean:

no that was all programmed in logic audio

[alexglower]

Oneohtrix Point Never - Replica (2011)

my friend's brother in high school really liked this album for some reason... i played "Andro" on our school's radio station, and he was the only listener, and he thought it was sick! i gave him the vinyl because i moved on to collecting CDs

We finally have a Oneohtrix Point Never release on this list! For those of you who don't know, OPN is credited as one of the major forces in creating "vaporwave," that internet-y genre representing old message boards and dilapidated malls through blissed-out ambiance. By 2011, OPN had already been pretty influential on the scene with his "sunsetcorp" YouTube channel and the experimental echoing samples of "Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1" (which actually is pretty similar to The Caretaker's stuff, now that I think about it). Replica was both the capstone of his time in vaporwave and a reflective commentary on it.

Replica is constructed almost entirely from ads and commercials, with stock synth plugins and OPN's trusty Juno synthesizer adding some extra texture. The sonic landscape is desolate. Fragments of speech and music, intentionally brief so as to be divorced from their original contexts, are looped and stacked with operatic gusto. The tracks are surprisingly dramatic, considering their sterile sources --- on "Power of Persuasion," a piano dances up and down a scale as if played by a jubilant phantom; "Remember" ends with a disembodied voice that sounds like it's wailing "cryyyyyy" over and over and over again. All of it is caked in VHS static to multiply the feelings of emptiness.

OPN stated that his choice of samples was not political. He intentionally picked commercials that were not iconic; he downloaded collections of ads and listened to them without watching their accompanying visuals; he tested out compositions by opening multiple files at the same time on his computer. The ads were purely chosen for their sonic content --- their melodies, percussive elements, even "lyrics."

But of course, even if the specific commercials were not chosen "politically", the choice to use commercials as a basis for music is a political choice. Replica is an album about replication. Specifically, it's about replicating a society through its advertisements. If one accepts that that's possible, then it follows that advertisements are representative of and/or shape society. Which is political! America's is a consumerist culture; by portraying consumerism, OPN portrays America.

Replica is also about death, kinda. The cover art is literally a skeleton looking at itself, from the POV of the skeleton. It's us, the viewers, seeing that our replica/representation is dead. It's fitting, then, that the album is so bleak in tone, that it only uses samples from decades past. Perhaps the album isn't about contemporary consumerism, but the death of a specific kind of consumerism. How the old model of advertisements became obsolete as the internet destroyed the monoculture. How we now live in a world of personalized commercials, pandering and artless. Or maybe it's about how consumerist culture has turned us into a nation of zombies.

Anyway, listen to this no matter what because it's so good! It's epic and sad, but it's also super fun because of how melodic it is.

[alexglower]

The Caretaker - An Empty Bliss Beyond This World (2011)

you see, back in my day...

Why do so many articles describe this album as "humorous?" Sure, authors typically use the words "dark comedy," but I'm having trouble hearing what's so funny about this.

I was introduced to The Caretaker a little before he went viral on TikTok for his "creepy" music, though that later virality was what made me pay closer attention to his work. Even if his six-part series Everywhere at the End of Time wasn't billed as the most disturbing thing ever by a bunch of teenagers online, it still would've creeped me out.

That series was released after An Empty Bliss Beyond This World, but it still has the same "theme" of representing dementia through music. Both works feature old ballroom recordings clouded by swarms of vinyl crackle and static. Both works sound ghostly, like their samples are rising from out of their graves. There was a period of time when I couldn't get past Everwhere's opening track because I felt like spectral hands were reaching out toward me, belonging to some long-dead soul trapped in a looping record. That's pretty embarrassing to admit, but I was young! I also was pretty depressed, so any "downer" work of art hit me with 100x effectiveness (another example was the video game Omori).

In a way, An Empty Bliss is sort of like Everywhere-lite---while it lacks the latter's overarching structure (slowly becoming less and less recognizable as "music" over the course of many hours), it endeavors to represent the same feeling in microcosm, as if representing a day in the life of someone with dementia, as opposed to several years. It's actually a pretty breezy listen! If you ignore the notions typically associated with old, slowed-down, reverbed music, it's pleasant and catchy. I could imagine this soundtracking a study session. Perhaps such a utilitarian use would seem sacrilegious, but I think it's pretty apt considering how this album is meant to simulate a wandering subconscious.

One may consider the minimally edited samples of An Empty Bliss to be a form of sound collage, but I hear more similarities to field recordings. Sound collage is the art of making something new out of many different sources, whereas field recordings usually try to invoke a singular thing as it "really is." Of course, the vinyl samples here aren't of "fields" (i.e. complete representations of spaces), but they're treated as if they are, as if the music holds some vital aspect of its original time and location. The staticy sounds that define these recordings are, apparently, not overdubbed---they're from the vinyls themselves, preserved as they are. Some tracks are barely legible beneath the crackling. If you strain your ear to hear, you might catch what sounds like the shuffling of people amidst the muffled sounds of music.

What's telling is what is edited. Most obvious are the time-based effects, like delay and reverb. Both of these effects serve to situate a sound in space (mimicking echoes, for instance), but in this case they also put the samples at a temporal distance. When a sound echoes, it feels like it's shucking off parts of itself, like the very act of being played is making it even murkier (a process that was done in a literal way on The Disintegration Loops).

Tracks also tend to stop and start at odd moments, so that you never know where you are relative to a song's beginning and end. Sometimes sections loop, sometimes they trail off in the middle of a phrase. The static and reverb make these samples feel like far-off memories; the structural shift-ups make the memories feel half-forgotten.

So with all that said, I can certainly see the "dark" in this album, but the "comedy" is harder to figure out. Maybe it has something to do with the catchiness of the recordings? How they are, ironically, relatively upbeat? Honestly, I can hardly hear these ballroom tracks as anything other than depressing, but maybe that's because of my pre-existing notions of "oldies" music. If you're someone who wasn't raised on tropey horror movies playing old songs for a scare, perhaps the irony is more apparent. For me, all I hear is darkness.

And it's great! An Empty Bliss taps into an unease that's relatively rare, one that's as comforting as it is disquieting. It feels like being smothered by a warm hug, like going to sleep for the last time.

Good album :D Listen if you want to feel cold wind blow over your grave, whilst beneath the soil your skeletal hand reaches out for a lover buried miles away.

[alexglower]

Grouper - A I A: Alien Observer (2011)

are the stars out tonight?

Another day, another Grouper album! This one is a lot more science fiction-y than Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill, what with its prominent use of synthesizer keyboards and stuff. Voices and synths smear together until you can't distinguish one frequency from another. What more can I say?

A lot more, actually! I was thinking a ton about the "width" of this music. It's almost mono, with all the activity happening dead-center and the reverb effects barely escaping a tiny bit to the left and right (or perhaps they're also completely mono? It's hard to tell what's a lofi illusion and what's actually, literally mono). This album invites comparisons to the Julianna Barwick album I just covered, not only because both feature reverby vocal harmonies, but also because that album has basically the opposite "width"---it uses the left and right channels prominently for a very wide stereo image.

With Barwick's album The Magic Place, I feel like I'm inside the sound. When audio dances in the left and right channels, the thing in the center is me! My head is between the left and right speakers in my headphones. But for Alien Observer, I feel like I'm far, far away from the sound. It sits perfectly in the middle, and I stare at it, trying to make out its blurry shape. I myself feel like the alien observer!

The space conjured by this farness is also a great deal larger than the space conjured by The Magic Place. That album undoubtedly brought to mind images of cathedrals and large, cavernous rooms, but Alien Observer's images are even bigger: whole forests; flat plains stretching out to the horizon; the endless sky.

I think this is part of why Alien Observer feels "sci-fi" to me---it makes me picture ranches with missing cattle, forests without trees and a variety of other locations where life is conspicuously missing, as if abducted by UFO. It's simple, but it doesn't deal in small images. It captures the epic-ness of the alien.

Also, "alien" is literally in the title, and the only understandable lyrics on the album are about spaceships, so that probably has a big impact on how I conceptualize the music as well.

I don't love this album as much as Dragging; I think the folk elements of that album made its ambience more conspicuous, and therefore more interesting. Alien Observer is more authentically ambient from the get-go. But it's still good, and in a different way, which makes it worth a listen!

[alexglower]

Julianna Barwick - The Magic Place (2011)

totally secular hymns for nature or nostalgia or nothing

Despite this record's relatively small scale (9 normal-length songs, 90% wordless vocalizations), or perhaps because of it, I am absolutely enamored. There are some fucking fantastic melodies on here that push and pull like the tide, or like gravity to a swingset. They're massive and yet also intimate, obvious, childish, homely. I feel like I'm in the middle of something, not intruding but resonating.

I thought for way too long about the reverb on this project. One review noted how Barwick's reverb effects don't erase her voice, but rather enhance it. I find that very interesting, given how every audio effect---especially reverb---muddies the original sound to some degree. Distortion, for example, degrades audio in such a way where all its composite parts burn together in one indistinguishable blaze. And reverb washes out audio so as to make its specificities impossible to pinpoint.

Yet I totally agree with that review. I work with audio all the time, and I'm slowly coming to realize that recorded sound is alien without a little of reverb. See, when you record an instrument, you usually put it right up to the microphone, so you can capture it in as high a quality as possible. But when we listen to sounds in our daily lives, it's not like everything we hear is pressed against our ears. We don't hear things in the crystal-clear way our microphones do. Most sounds, when they reach our ears, have been warped in some way by the spaces they exist in. You're always hearing a little bit of reverb.

So artificial reverb can "enhance" a recorded sound, make it feel truer somehow, by putting it back where it belongs. We take instruments off the stage and stick them in front of microphones, and they sound stiff and awkward. Reverb puts them back on the stage, where they belong.

This is where things get especially fun because "belonging" is a completely mutable construct often established in reverse. Example: when a choir sounds far away (because of reverb), our heads imagine some big space like a church, and suddenly the choir "belongs" where it has been set. Of course such a choir would be in a church! But if that same choir were only slightly reverby, we might imagine ourselves at the intimately small performance of an a-capella group, and the sounds would make just as much sense. Saying differently would be denying something seemingly ingrained within the audio itself. Because reverb is so natural to our everyday listening experiences, we don't hear it as being a separate factor. Our brains struggle to imagine it as a post-hoc addition.

Effects like distortion don't have such feasibility---we instantly recognize them as man-made. Reverb, on the other hand, is sort of like a freebie effect. It lets us write over the circumstances present at recording time, so we can pretend these sounds always came from somewhere else.

What's I love about ambient music is that you don't need to know its history in order to make it. Ambience is all around us! Direct quote from Barwick: "Ambient music is not a strong influence on me." And yet she made a great ambient album :D A lot of the basics of ambient music are intuitive. Many of the musical techniques you learn for other genres are completely applicable to ambient music, the only extra necessary skill being the ability to tune in to your surroundings. Ambience is as much a way of listening and thinking as it is a genre of sonic art.

Anyway! Listen to this album if you want to be blissed out for a little bit.

[alexglower]

Tim Hecker - Ravedeath, 1972 (2011)

the air in these pipes ain't air---it's wind! you'll start up a tornado if you play the wrong tune

I've been a little depressed >:D It's probably the weather. Whatever the cause, it's easier than ever to irritate me. Something I've been trying recently is a little bit of self-CBT (if you can call it that): I imagine that a person I'm interacting with is a royal heir who's rescued me from peasantry on the condition that I act as their servant. It adds a bit of spice and romance to the mundane yet cool parts of human interaction---like being nice to people, helping out, that sort of thing.

I bring this up because imaginative reframing exercises have exclusively been the medium through which I go from not liking to loving an ambient album. On my first listen through Ravedeath, 1972, I tried to picture scenes from my research. I thought of the MIT labs (the people on the cover of this album are MIT students), of stuffy academic halls, of old churches (this album was recorded in an Icelandic church), of snow, or small moments in time (and it was recorded live in a day, though heavily edited after the fact), of a computer monitor on a desk... I couldn't attach any of those pictures to the music. In the absence of a daydream, I mostly pondered how similar I thought the album was to Harmony in Ultraviolet, at least relative to Radio Amor.

It was only in describing the sounds with words that I started to cozy up to them. In my notes, I wrote about the scene from The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy gets swept up in the tornado. The wind, the claustrophobia of her being trapped in her room, the sepia tone---all of it nestled perfectly against this grand yet claustrophobic album.

So I listened again! I thought about how Brian Eno intended Music for Airports to calm the listener, to put them at ease with death. The negative space between key presses and vocalizations conjures up images of the afterlife, or at least something extralife, outside our notions of life and death. I felt that Ravedeath did the exact opposite, focusing in on the moment of dying, with its cacophonies of distorted organ sounds. Usually heavy distortion makes everything sound like electric guitar, but this organ produces something different under all those effects: it sounds like phlegm, like sickness, like death.

Trash and decay were a motivating theme behind the album. The cover depicts a group pushing a piano off a building---Hecker was inspired to use this photograph because it called to mind more contemporary images of bulldozers pushing around piles of discarded CDs. The title for track "Hatred of Music" seems to bemoan the intense proliferation and commodification of the art form, and how this translates to sonic art being more disposable than ever. It's worth noting that Hecker's most recent album No Highs is in that same vein, an album intentionally made to be un-playlist-able.

I'm particularly interested in why Hecker didn't use an image of a bulldozer pushing CDs for the cover of Ravedeath, 1972. I think it has to do with notions of "artistic purity" that crop up in some discourses. "Computer music sucks; we must return to the purity of the piano!" Meanwhile, the cover for Ravedeath features a soon-to-be-destroyed piano, and the music is mostly organ-based. In case you weren't aware (like me), the organ apparently predates the piano by roughly two millenia, even predating Christianity (and thus predating the use of the organ in Church music).

The organ is a simple, "pure" instrument, yet on Ravedeath it's warped, decayed and battered nearly beyond recognition. It's only in a few spare moments---notably the final track, for instance---that we're allowed to hear an unaffected acoustic instrument. This all connects to what I was thinking about when I heard Radio Amor: that Tim Hecker's work is all about the friction and harmony between pure nostalgia and modern cynicism.

Anyway, the sounds are great! I still think Radio Amor is my favorite Hecker, though. Ravedeath is a unique storm of an album; I can't think of anything that sounds like it. But Radio Amor just feels more unique, probably because it's the most human-sounding album from him I've heard so far.

Listen to Ravedeath, 1972 if you like stimulating music. There's some parts where the organ is screaming like fire on the side of a falling spacecraft. It's sick!!

[alexglower]

Deepchord Presents Echospace - Liumin (2010)

backlit airport LCD, up while everyone's asleep, neon sign behind some fog, modern techno travelogue

Ring the bell! We have another Alex-approved ambient classic on our hands. Numerous field recordings flatten urban Japan to little sonic Polaroids---trains rattle and pipes hiss and rain falls and crowds of people murmur in the background like relaxed spectators---that are then stacked so high as to become skyscrapers again, reconstructing the city like one of those digital mosaics where every piece is its own tiny photograph. On top of all these crackly sounds are the requisite "minimal techno" synth pads, thick in the middle and low ends so as to further muddy the already-impressionistic image.

This resulting huge mass is cut down to size by some unassuming yet powerful kick drums. They slice through the field recordings like God's knife through the Grand Canyon, laying bare the constituting layers so clearly that the whole sonic assemblage feels as minimal as any individual piece.

"Sidechain compression" is the name of this specific process, wherein one instrumental track (typically the one reserved for the kick drum) is used to periodically lower the volume of another track. Whenever the volume of Track A rises above a certain threshold, the volume of Track B quickly dips out, then fades back in.

Ambient music often utilizes fades, either to transition between sections of a song (as Éliane Radigue often did), or to fade in and out of the larger track itself. This latter use of fading positions the track as existing outside the listener's periphery, with the fade in being the moment the track happens to enter their view, and the fade out being the moment it leaves.

With sidechain compression, this fading process happens multiple times a second, as if the listener is being constantly reintroduced to the same track. That repetition, aside from easing the listener into a trance-like state, also encourages a person to see the composite parts of a track as they slide back into place. It's sort of like The Disintegration Loops, where layers of a sample are slowly stripped away through repetition, except much faster and in reverse: the track is rebuilt from the ground up over 120 times a minute.

The trance-like state is far from incidental. Liumin, being a sort of travelogue, makes extensive use of train noises, in particular the rattling of train tracks. This rhythmic shaking and thumping is like a non-techno techno song, and is utilized across Liumin as a rhythmic anchor. Like all techno, the driving force of the kick drum makes the listener feel like they're going somewhere, with the various train noises of course accentuating this. But Liumin doesn't offer much of a destination, instead luxuriating in that liminal space of travel.

I'm reminded of the seminal early ambient techno piece E2-E4, which Manuel Göttsching made on the fly and listened to on a personal trip. And I'm thinking of The KLF's Chill Out, which is like Liumin but for the English and American countrysides instead of Japan, complete with various train noises and throbbing techno beats.

Liumin is particularly fascinating to me in that it charts a clear progression from its stylistic predecessors. Techno is a genre beholden to technological progress. It is rigidly simple, and this simplicity is enhanced by new audio editing software in the way digital photography is enhanced by new cameras that can take pictures in 800k or something. Every new audio effect Ableton adds lets producers make their kick drums and synths even more specific, lets them carve out a space within the small niche that is four-on-the-floor minimal dance music. Liumin is a lot simpler than Chill Out, but it feels so much clearer for it.

"Pure" ambient, on the other hand, has been making lateral moves for many years up to this point. It's largely idea- and vibes-based, so the only barrier to making something "new" is coming up with a new idea, an idea that typically could have been realized had it come about any time in the past decade. Ambient music released in 1990 and ambient music released in 2000 can sound very different, but that doesn't mean the music from 2000 sounds more "advanced," just that the two pieces are based on different ideas.

So all of this is to say that Liumin is an amazing album. It's futuristic and liminal and all the other buzzwords. Listen to this if you love trains or Place, Japan.

[alexglower]

Black Mountain Transmitter - Black Goat of the Woods (2009)

music for an imaginary horror flick

I almost didn't do a write-up for this album! J.R. Moore / Black Mountain Transmitter doesn't seem to be a recluse, but he also doesn't have a Wikipedia page. He may as well not even be real. One of the few articles about his work I could dig up provided a hyperlink to an excellent and invaluable piece. Or at least the source article made the piece sound good---their link now gives a 404.

I did locate one good interview, which thankfully provided the only information I need to understand this album: Moore is a fan of horror movies! Which explains why Black Goat of the Woods sounds like a 70s soundtrack (Moore cites Tangerine Dream as an influence) and even, as one review points out, begins and ends with a few minutes of "conventional" music as if scoring the credits for a film.

The sounds in between scratch my horror itch. I don't particularly want to be scared (though I don't mind it), but I am infatuated with scary vibes. Stuff like this album is perfect for me. Black Goat of the Woods is probably intended to be scary, but not to scare, if that makes sense. It borrows the aesthetics of spooky soundtracks without stepping over the line to deliver loud jumpscares. It may make you wary of long shadows, but it won't make you want to cry (like I did when I watched my first horror movie at a young age).

It's also a really fun throwback to 70s ambient, with all its beeps, bloops, and lightly-peaking echo effects. And it thankfully lacks the over-zealousness that characterizes a few of that era's landmark releases (I am not a big Tangerine Dream fan...), perfectly serving as a Halloween Vibes Dispenser.

If you're looking for some music to play before a midnight slasher screening, this is it!

[alexglower]

Natural Snow Buildings - Daughter of Darkness (2009)

seven-hour demon-summoning ritual

It was hard for me... This is a seven-hour, five or six disc (depending on where you look) album. I may have a longer attention span than when I first started diving into ambient music, but it isn't long enough to get through this whole project in one sitting, even if one review I read said that's the definitive way to experience it. I got through two discs in half-hour- to hour-long bursts, before bed and at the gym. Then I dropped it. I am very ashamed and hope you can forgive me...

Why wasn't I a fan? There's quite of a bit of distortion on these acoustic drones, but it sounds stuck at a crossroads between "light warmth" and "intense fuzz," to the point where it evokes neither. The textures here don't do anything for me except make me feel like I should be intimidated or scared or something, without actually generating those feelings.

The only discomfort I felt came from the lack of direction in these songs. The other Natural Snow Buildings album I heard, The Winter Ray, had stylistic shake-ups a few times per hour. Daughter of Darkness takes a lot longer to reach an intermission, and it's not telegraphed in the slightest, so listening to these tracks felt like staring down an endless barrage of mild annoyance.

Now the asides begin!

In writing this, I briefly perused some of these tracks again and came to the conclusion that they're actually not so bad. I couldn't write as much about why they're good because I don't have it in me to listen again, but that first-listen vs. second-listen dynamic is pretty interesting.

For me, I use a first listen to wrap my head around what it is I'm even listening to. For structured genres like pop, I also use it to get a grasp on hooks and song structures. The second listen is where I willingly immerse myself in a record. Knowing where it's taking me is part of the fun. There's a difference between listening to a very slow, very long record when you know how it's changing and where it's going (like Éliane Radigue's Trilogie de la Mort) and listening to a very slow, very long record that leaves you fruitlessly guessing every second. It's about trust. Can I trust this album to hum along in the background? Do I need to pay active attention? What should I be doing?

I realize this is a pretty restrictive way of looking at art, one that totally shuts out many live improvisational performances, and also one that probably reveals me to be a fundamentally anxious person. If there's any lesson to be learned here, it's probably that I should open myself up to surprises or something...

As luck would have it, this album has at least one surprise! Among the songs I listened to, there's one that cools everything down substantially ("Body Double") before slowly easing the listener back in to the fray. And it was euphoric! After however long of slightly painful music that I did not enjoy at all, a reprieve was more than welcome. Not just any reprieve, either, but a "legitimate" one. Ambient music exists (or at least endeavors to exist) beyond the listener's experience of it. It often tries to evoke the physical or spectral. If I gave myself a break from the music by simply taking my headphones off (as I did many times because I listened in many sittings), the break would not be "real." The music would still rage on outside of my perception. Only when the music itself quiets down can I get actual relief.

The final thing I've been chewing on is that I wouldn't have liked the calm bit of the album nearly as much if I didn't dislike the other parts. I firmly believe that art can conjure any emotion and still be worthy of existing, even if those emotions are dull or painful. Comedies are fun to watch, but sad dramas can be good too, blah blah blah. I just never before considered that "dislike" could be one such valid emotion. I guess if it's intended (I believe I read an article where the Natural Snow Buildings peeps said they didn't mind their music being overly long or hard to listen to), then it's not an inherent failing. Maybe this album is fine-tuned to intentionally avoid the "easy routes" of soft ambiance or intense catharsis? Maybe the grating middle ground vibe is on purpose?

As an occasional music and film reviewer, I'm pretty used to reading my dislike of something as a negative reflection of its worth, but this whole thing has me reconsidering what "worth" even means. Why note tonal inconsistencies and pacing issues in a movie if none of that means anything, if it's valid art regardless, if my petty dislike is actually a rich experience in this complex tapestry we call life? I guess "like" and "dislike" are arbitrary qualifiers we pair with certain emotions, and just because I added "painful catharsis" to my Like List doesn't mean I fully escaped the false dichotomy of binary rating...

All this circles back to the idea that basically nothing has any inherent meaning, which is true, but also makes life no fun. So I'm going to go back to pretending that there's meaning to reviews for at least a little while longer.

Listen to this album if you want to experience something interesting in the short time you have before you die!

[alexglower]

James Ferraro - Last American Hero / Adrenaline's End (2008)

late-night broadcast, bikers, big deserts

In concept, this album represents the mid-2000s upper middle class and the hellish purgatory in which they roamed. The use of bluesy guitars—none of which are sampled, apparently!—gives Last American Hero a Wild West twang, like tumbleweeds are about to start rolling down the aisles of Ikea. I think the "point" is to contrast the machismo of old Americana with the reality of easy, constant, on-demand consumerism. You can't be a cowboy in a gated community.

A heavy dose of tape degradation (saturation, compression, the usuals) makes everything extra "nostalgic." It's a trick that could come off cheap but for some reason doesn't, and I have a hard time understanding why. Maybe it's because James Ferraro was doing nostalgic reflections on his then-present moment, rather than editorializing something from decades previous. Maybe it's because the album feels disposable, like something you'd pluck from the bargain bin, itself contributing to the vast churning sea of American consumption. It all feels very intentional, but not demanding.

Consumerism is really the name of the game here. It's probably true that in 24 hours the same amount of people eat at McDonalds as attend church. Ferraro asks, "What if we treated the Big Mac like we do Jesus Christ?" He commits to the bit so he can show us our own absurd fealty to corporations/products/things.

That theme isn't as prominent on this specific album as it is on other Ferraro releases, but it's still there if you listen. The raspy audio quality and occasional sonic "jump-cuts" bring to mind staticy late-night television. Think of the junk that would get thrown in the post-midnight slots, stuff that didn't need to be interesting because there were practically no viewers—media waste, basically. Or think of driving down long stretches of highway with a radio playing endless pop songs and advertisements, struggling to maintain a signal from one gas station to the next. Last American Hero's repetition of motifs without catharsis represents this junk, represents the stuff we get inundated with during our every waking moments, all the products and monocultural slogans and whatnot on all the billboards on all the highways etc etc etc.

I'm starting to feel a bit crazy typing this all out, so it's about time I wrap up! Give this album a listen if you're nostalgic for the real 2000s...

[alexglower]

Grouper - Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill (2008)

limited palette of vocals and guitar, sometimes there are lyrics, hazy but textured, kind of reminds me of pine needles

Grouper is in some way "singer-songwriter music," in that Liz Harris is a singer, a songwriter and the one person making up Grouper, but her writing and singing is merely the background for her greater style. Like a lot of ambient music, the main artistry happens in editing her recordings. Harris typically stacks many takes together and adds a good helping of reverb until the material underneath all that obscuring might as well be anyone saying anything. Dragging a Dead Deer was apparently her most intelligible album at the time of its release–and by a wide margin, too!–yet I challenge you to create a lyrics sheet for it with no "[?]"s. Reading the Genius lyrics for some of these songs feels like I'm watching people interpret "backronyms" (those supposed hidden messages in reversed pop songs).

The effect is that the album feels like something heard between waking and sleeping, just melodically focused enough to turn on that "I'm listening to a song someone wrote" part of your brain, but vague enough that you won't need to think too hard. But it's not some calm, uncomplicated thing. I read one piece that mentioned impressionism and the pain that comes with not recognizing a representation of something. Every effort to obscure the music makes it a little more painful, a little more nostalgic (hopefully I don't need to bring up that Mad Men quote about nostalgia and pain). This album could easily lull you to sleep, but it would be quite the turbulent slumber.

What interested me most when researching this album was Harris's approach to making music. The cloaking of her voice behind reverb—and her identity behind a stage name—is all intentional; she comes across very ego-averse in interviews. She even talks about songs like they're not entirely her own creations, but rather sounds she just so happens to be the one organizing. She makes it clear that her music is not a diary of her present circumstances, and she frequently populates albums with songs recorded in different decades of her career. Simile warning: it's like each track she makes is an orphan she's temporarily fostering until she can find it a good home. And it's not a exactly a fun process–she's compared releasing music to blood-letting, releasing ghosts, and sinking something heavy into the deep. I imagine every bad external force that's applied to her gets funneled through her musician brain and slowly, painfully excised every few years.

I think in another millennium, Liz Harris would be considered some sort of psychic, receiving unwelcome visions and stuff of that nature. But since we live in 2024 and I don't believe in any of that, I see it differently. Obviously, she's actively writing these songs, and not receiving them via magic. She talks about photographs, films and ideas that inspire her, so there's at least part of her that's a traditional songwriter. But I think creativity is instinctual to her, maybe even compulsive, and that's the thorny aspect.

I feel the same way a lot of the time. I don't want to harp on this for too long because at the end of the day it's not about me, but death is on my mind a lot. Like always. There's no philosophy I can intellectually support that says making music will prolong my life via legacy, but it's certainly the feeling I have when I write/produce. It's pointless and sisyphean, but I do it anyway. Much like dragging a dead deer up a hill! I brought it full circle in the end.

Anyway, listen to this album if you like shoegaze and stuff of that sort. It's not shoegaze, but it has that same feeling!

[kumboochies]

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