Post a controversial music opinion

Ironically I think that the only thing about "The Disintegration Loops" that is a "bad decision" on the part of the composer was the application of reverb across the entire result of the experiment. Cheapens it, but anyway

That’s more of an insightful music opinion than a controversial one.

Will listen to the disintegration loops some time this week

You mean I was able to convince you that the oft-cited #2 Best Ambient Album Of All Time was not actually ambient music in 100-words-or-less? For that I get a biscuit I guess

I didn’t see it was part of a larger conversation — i have a bad habit of just reading the most recent posts

I get the Eno/Satie definition but I'm usually OK with using "ambient" to just mean "non-dancefloor-oriented electronic music", given that i) we need a term for that and ii) pretty much all music is used as 'furniture' almost anywhere you go in the present day, pop music most of all.

I really don't care what anyone labels any music, but personally yeah I agree that music with "beats" is a bridge too far. GAS being the exception that proves the rule? idk. Stuff can have rhythm/percussion and still strike me as ambient.

If it has a kick drum, it is not ambient. If Boards of Canada are Ambient, so is The Cure.

Froggy, The Orb - COW is probably their most Ambient release. That and the one with that talentless fuckface from Pink Floyd.

lol i got into an argument with my coworker about 'what is ambient' the other day and it's like everyone somehow recreated a transcript itt

dunno, i think xtal is ambient...the beats are so soft to me, but everyone hears music differently

ambient definitely is not just something to chill out to as you said tuomas - it is also prime come down music and a life saver when shit gets rough, it is far from background music

i think as long as music is functional it is worth something, if that makes sense

lock thread

Would anyone be up for starting a new What Is Ambient board? It could be where we put all discussions about what is/isn't Ambient.

and every post can be safely ignored

If it has a kick drum, it is not ambient. If Boards of Canada are Ambient, so is The Cure.

I think that's fair and I would agree with it in a very general "rule of thumb" kind of way, with the addendum that it's a flexible definition.

After reading the developments here the last few days, I think my controversial opinion would be that I like to make (and listen to) ambient / drone music and I see a lot of possibilities in it, but I would agree that roughly 75%-90% of stuff being made by "DIY" ambient folks is pretty bad and, for the majority, just feels like somebody playing the same major / major / minor / major chords as a million other pop songs. Instead of doing something different, those folks seem to have an unearned sense of profundity because they play slow with a lot of delay and reverb; almost like they're hiding their lack of good ideas behind a wash of superficially "pleasant" sounds.

Would love an ambient discussion board.

it's more the snare drum that un-ambients something isn't it tho? Can think of a few throbbing kick drums in, say, Gas tracks that I consider ambient, but can't think of any with a prominent snare...

ah a good old fashioned genre-definition fight. it's like the old days.

I just so happen to be listening to Global Communication's 76:14 right now (an old favorite that I am pleased to report holds up), and I'm sure a lot of people would consider this ambient, but if we're using Satie's definition, it's not anywhere close. On the contrary, it is engaging in ways many more traditional (read; rock) albums could never hope to be. If this is ambient, so is Laughing Stock.

it's more the snare drum that un-ambients something isn't it tho? Can think of a few throbbing kick drums in, say, Gas tracks that I consider ambient, but can't think of any with a prominent snare...

― A True White Kid that can Jump (Granny Dainger), Wednesday, October 3, 2018 1:37 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

kick drum can be one of the most easy to tune out sounds imaginable in isolation and is completely congruent with ambient for me

ambient is no snares obv

All music is ambient

Unless you’re listening with headphones on, maybe

how do you hear it though

would you people call rhys chatham ambient

the 40 guitar thing was pretty sublime and droning

flopson
Posted: October 3, 2018 at 3:37:43 PM
ambient is no snares obv

Nephew,

Please stop.

Yours,

Papa Infinity

drone and ambient overlap a lot but drone isn't necessarily ambient and chatham seems of a different family to me

A Holy Grail was performed with four hundred guitars. And yeah, it can be ambient.

There are workshops in New Mexico that answer these types of questions.

Would anyone be up for starting a new What Is Ambient board? It could be where we put all discussions about what is/isn't Ambient.
― Mario Meatwagon (Moodles)

and every post can be safely ignored
― Number None

There's no such thing as ambient music.

I like the Eno quote - "Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting."

Good ambient music makes me think of music that I can listen to unengaged, without even realising when tracks change, and enjoy as a kind of driving scenery - an inconsistent metronome of sorts while working.

Great ambient music for me needs stand up to dissection, when I'm thinking about what's actually happening it has to be more interesting and complex than it might seem on the surface.

Arguably this Eno quote can be applied to many other types of music that are not typically classed as ambient - thousands of bars all over the world play house, hip-hop, rock or jazz that functions as background/mood music just as well as it works for active listening.

For me, good ambient erases the particulars of the now and encourages the empty mind.

@ Siegbran

I remember a specific turning point around 1998 when suddenly the world was celebrating what I then called “lobby music”— stuff like Air, Moby, and that song that’s just a drum loop and “I want you to get together / put your hands together one time” (St. Germain?)

It bore no commonality with what was called ambient music back then but served the same function, and until it became the sound of hotel lobbies and car commercials, I remember it sounding to listeners and writers alike like “the best music in the world”— the only Moby cynics I knew in 1998/1999 were hardcore kids and art-school people who listened exclusively to Flying Lizards

But by 2000, this style of music was lobby music. I think generally the antecedent was SAW 1/2 and The Orb I guess

Can it be that what you called lobby music was called 'lounge music' for a lot of other people? St. Germain fits that bill.

Arguably this Eno quote can be applied to many other types of music that are not typically classed as ambient - thousands of bars all over the world play house, hip-hop, rock or jazz that functions as background/mood music just as well as it works for active listening.

This is what I was getting at upthread: the idea of 'furniture music' was radical when Satie came up with it in the pre-recording era. At this point, music is used as passive background material in every grocery store, coffee shop, bar, department store, party, etc, and Aerosmith is as or more likely to be used in this way as 76:14.

it would be interesting to read a history of pop (or even rock) that focused on the emergence of this music's "functionality" in public spaces and how that changed the music itself. Like, was the functionality of "Born To Be Wild" e.g. always there, just waiting for a world to adapt to its function? Or has popular music adapted to the functions of the world?

people who can only listen really intensively are not good listeners or reliable judges

the only Moby cynics I knew in 1998/1999 were hardcore kids and art-school people who listened exclusively to Flying Lizards

It's funny, I knew a lot of hardcore kids who loved Moby! I think it was the sxe / veganism connection or something.

Where do you slot Cafe del Mar comps in here? I feel like that kinda stuff (ie comps called, like, "Chill Ibiza" and stuff) had the opposite trajectory of what you are talking about, in that it seemed like that stuff (which was ubiquitous in the mid nineties) was specifically designed as hotel lobby music initially, and only later became hip Balaeric catnip (via guys like Mark Barrott, etc, who iirc also kinda pioneered the whole 'chill music in hotels' thing)

Also, where do the KLF fit into all this? I feel like Chill Out is sui generis in a lot of ways (and still sounds really unique to me). Would you call that ambient? I mean, if it is, is it the first (only?) ambient "concept album?"

Arguably, even Music for Airports was a 'concept album'.

The Moby hype was real, but there was already trip-hop and indeed balearic before him, 60s lounge jazz/bossa before that, and chillwave after him that functioned exactly the same way.

I think this application for music was always there, the old trope of the unflappable piano player tucked away in the corner of the bar is older than steam. It's more that Eno, Satie et al explicitly pointed it out and intellectualize it.

I like that comparison

Preceding "albums", much of Satie's work served this exact thesis too

My wife wants music on most of the time, including when reading, writing, or editing. Otoh I prefer silence when I'm reading, writing, or editing.

I can just barely tolerate ambient or instrumental music in these situations, but if the music has words I will listen to them, and I can't focus on more than one stream of words at a time. So if we're working on the same room we need background music that occupies a very narrow range - interesting enough for her but not so interesting that I start listening actively.

Yeah, I can't focus mentally on something else when listening to music with lyrics. It's somewhat better when the lyrics are in a language I don't speak, but not ideal. I need stuff with beats though, pure ambient makes me fall asleep.

Funny, I remember Moby being a punching bag from Day 1

it would be interesting to read a history of pop (or even rock) that focused on the emergence of this music's "functionality" in public spaces and how that changed the music itself. Like, was the functionality of "Born To Be Wild" e.g. always there, just waiting for a world to adapt to its function? Or has popular music adapted to the functions of the world?

― droit au butt (Euler)

Joseph Lanza's Elevator Music gets into some aspects of this topic although the analysis needs to be updated to our moment where anything goes as background music. But among it's other revelations, that book at least plots out how Beautiful Music/Muzak was conceived of, then evolved into Easy Listening which later evolved into Lite FM/Adult Contemporary. Seems to me that from this final point it was inevitable that rock and hip hop etc would eventually become acceptable in the public sphere. Part of it is that first the pre-rock generation had to die out.

This theory feels a bit too convenient, but yeah I can see the narrative of 1930/40s jazz sliding into lounge jazz/easy listeningg, 60s boomer rock morphing into AOR, Gen X trading their NWA for mumble rap today.

there's an easy listening aspect to a lot of the music I favor, I like music with zero edges when I'm just chilling out. Balearic tends toward this direction. An album like The Sea and Cake - Oui is my ideal, it just breezes over you.

xp The narrative you describe is one dimension, and those developments have happened, but what I was pulling from the Joseph Lanza book was this other narrative - that background music has always existed as a parallel counterpart to foreground music, but that what we consider acceptable as background music has evolved