What follows is a collection of five short reviews of ambient music (taken in its broadest sense). The works reviewed have all been seeing heavy rotation on my iPod and I would gladly recommend them all. The first two works are my favorites, but only slightly so; overall, I think any one of them deserves equal praise. I hope that I have managed to put together a collection here that will provide at least one “hit” for anyone at all interested in the genre. If you have any recommendations of your own, or agree or disagree with my reviews, please feel free to leave a comment. Thanks.

Alvin Lucier: Music on a Long Thin Wire (1977)

Alvin Lucier, Music on a Long Thin Wire @ eMusic

The work is described as a “sound installation for audio oscillator and electronic monochord”. It’s really not much more complicated than that. And yet, Music on a Long Thin Wire offers the fruit of a most unusual hybrid. It represents the crossing of a field recording with a purely mechanical composition. Lucier describes the work simply:

[The] wire is extended across a large room, clamped to tables at both ends. The ends of the wire are connected to the loudspeaker terminals of a power amplifier placed under one of the tables. A sine wave oscillator is connected to the amplifier. A magnet straddles the wire at one end. Wooden bridges are inserted under the wire at both ends to which contact microphones are imbedded, routed to a stereo sound system. The microphones pick up the vibrations that the wire imparts to the bridges and are sent through the playback system. By varying the frequency and loudness of the oscillator, a rich variety of slides, frequency shifts, audible beats and other sonic phenomena may be produced. [Source]

It is certainly one of the most interesting recordings I’ve had the pleasure of listening to. As Lucier further explains, “The wire played itself. All changes in volume, timbre, harmonic structure, rhythmic and cyclic patterning, and other sonic phenomena were brought about solely by the actions of the wire itself”. What is difficult to describe is just how beautiful, strange, and mesmerizing the results are. The results of this experiment in sound are soothing and pleasant, but not essentially soporific. I have found that I can drift off to sleep with it, but it also works quite well as an aid to concentration or simply as something good to listen to. The music of the wire feels organic and natural. Tonal “compositions” of all kinds are part of nature (e.g., the sounds of stars and planets), but we normally don’t hear them. The music we produce is purposeful, a manipulation of the qualities of strings, for instance. Yet Lucier has here exposed an inherent quality of a single piano wire which may be interpreted as musical in its own right.

Tetsu Inoue: Yolo (2005)

Tetsu Inoue, Yolo @ eMusic

A minimalistic glitch composition, ambient and often eerily beautiful, that feels like film and static photography both. It is a multimedia experience made solely of sound—evoking light, physical momentum, air, time, distance, with its skilled use of frequency and modulation. There is a cleverness in the work that easily transmutes the tiniest elements into poetic, cinematic patterns. And Yolo certainly comprises many, many tiny elements, which are ingeniously mixed with promontories of dreamy, drifting elements that describe larger arcs of time.

Perhaps one way to visualize such music—and I hope allergy sufferers will forgive me here—would be to imagine dandelion seeds spreading through warm, rising air, air shimmering with motes of dust or pollen. The motion of or along a flight path of one of those dandelion seeds would reflect the longer notes, while the dancing, shifting motes would produce the shimmering backdrop of sound. But you would also have to imagine that certain variations in color and lighting (i.e., the very blurred, if not indecipherable, background against which the seed floats) are themselves interpreted musically. Of course I do not know what is in Inoue’s head, visually, when he creates his work, but it would be hard for me to believe that he would eschew the visual interpretations of his pieces. His use of field recordings lends itself to this idea. The songs unfold in a very organic fashion, and the various hints of birds scattered throughout the songs, along with other “natural” sounds—wind, fluttering, rustlings as of leaves or grass—hint at there being a core naturalistic essence to the work as a whole.

Rapoon: Errant Angels (1996)

Rapoon, Errant Angels @ eMusic

Robin Storey’s work has found its way into my life time and time again. Back in the day it was his work with the inimitable Zoviet France, whose surreal, droning loops frequently dropped me into trancelike states of mind. Rapoon, much like Zoviet France, seems to aid in the evocation of an alpha brain wave state. Unlike the more tribal work of, say, Steve Reich, Rapoon’s looped rhythms and intonations often feel more forceful than guiding. There is a certain “dangerous” quality to the music, a certain relentless edge, the threat of being swept away or overwhelmed. This can be quite pleasing, actually, but doubtless it is not for everyone.

One thing is certain: Errant Angels creates an amazingly mysterious, haunted atmosphere as it unfolds. There is not merely a sense of deep tribal rhythms, there is also a sense of vast sweeps of time. Enduring horns (as run through “The Telling”) recall perhaps the ancient, but timeless, fearful sound of epic, imminent battle. Yet there are also moments of strangely hopeful music (as in “Hear Not Here”) that seem to arise with a future-looking promise of continuance reminiscent of certain portions of Vangelis’s Blade Runner score. All in all, it is a strange trip, dark and compelling as a deep river flowing onward to an unknown sea.

Nocturnal Emissions: Blasphemous Rumours (1992)

Nocturnal Emissions, Blasphemous Rumours @ eMusic

Nigel Ayers, like Robin Storey, has a long history (deserving of more attention) of musical experimentation and innovation. I got into the music of Nocturnal Emissions sometime in 1985 (when the band comprised the talents of Nigel Ayers, Danny Ayers and Caroline K.), some five years after the band was formed. They were among the very first bands to turn me on to industrial music. Like Zoviet France, who came after them, theirs was a distinct music. Over the years it would only become more distinct, proving N. Ayers’ talents as it diverged from popular trends in the genre in favor of pursuing the “pagan” roots of their native England.

Although Blasphemous Rumours does not differ so much from the work that precedes it or the work that follows, it is no less a solid offering. The music captures what I imagine to be the spirit of the heaths. In a way, it bears a striking similarity to Tetsu Inoue’s Yolo, insofar as there is a strong sense of nature in the music that effectively conjures images in the mind of natural, if somewhat surreal, scenes. However, the music here is ultimately structured more along the lines of Rapoon’s Errant Angels, especially the first track from that album, “Burning Rainbows”, with a recurring tribal pulse. The comparison is apt, but I don’t want to mislead anyone. Nocturnal Emissions has a wonderful sound all its own, a way of blurring and doubling sounds in a hypnotic, alluring way. Ayers is adept at capturing the “pagan landscapes” of the English (and European) countryside, and the pagan roots of the land are a leitmotif, even when they are recast in a technopagan light.

Kawabata Makoto: INUI.3 (2005)

Kawabata Makoto, INUI.3 @ eMusic

This work is one of the more mysterious and psychedelic I’ve obtained. It begins with a dreamlike music, a repeating progression of chords against a slowly building backdrop of feedback, that matches the cover artwork: sunlight blazing with a lens flare through the lining of a cumulous cloud with a deep indigo sky. From there the song descends into a realm of looping feedback with the chords of the song disappearing slowly in an electronic cicada buzz until the listener feels pulled out into that blazing light among the blue. In other words, the song is an initial 12 min. 33 sec. thrust into an acid trip. This makes sense, as Kawabata is the founding and only continuous member of The Acid Mothers Temple, a band formed to create “extreme trip music”.

But what follows in the second song is something less blissfull or hallucinatory. For those who’ve read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, I could easily recommend this piece as the soundtrack for many of its pages. It is an empty, eerie, haunted place (musically speaking), diverging from the scenes spelled out in McCarthy’s pages only in the addition of strange, birdlike, squeeling cries that echo throughout its 12 min. 35 sec. duration.

The third track, running for just a little over 47 minutes, returns to the original theme from the first track, but there is more layering of sound and the feedback—a high, slowly drifting sine wave—is complemented with a drifting, vaguely choral synth line. I am actually reminded of some of the prettier “Premonition” experiments by the Legendary Pink Dots, and especially the song “Home”, which are equally psychedelic. But Kawabata Makoto’s work is more minimalist in its approach, relying on a slowly skewed collection of repeating elements and tonal distortion.

It is not disorienting music, nor is it simply strange or beautiful; the three pieces on INUI.3 are simply works of art created by Kawabata at a certain time. The trip is worth it, but it is not for me to say how many people would care to retake it very often. Once experienced, discussion of its merits or limitations seems dryly academic. Of course, this is true of most music, no?