Presently:There is a lot in ambient music that people enjoy: the sensation of being immersed in a sonic environment...the expansion that comes with listening...the spiritual resonance that can occur if the listener is open to it...ambient music has the ability to underscore one's everyday life while washing dishes, making love, playing chess, reading a book, meditating, driving a car, or walking in the rain. It's an auditory tranquilizer, it's music for the "cocoon," the chill room, the bedroom, the back yard, the car. It defines space as it fills space. It's odd that such a music has become the focus of an audience that found it through dancing to 140+ BPM techno. Thank goodness ambient music has nine lives, because it almost disappeared under the sludge of new-age titles that populate the CD bins.Historical:The history of ambient is fascinating, but its detail goes beyond the scope of these liner notes. Ambient has been around since the dawn of humankind - that is to say, humans probably sat and listened to the ocean waves and enjoyed their therapeutic effect as much as we do today. People have always needed a relaxing sonic environment. Witness the incredible success of a currently popular Gregorian Chant CD, not to mention the sludge previously mentioned. Imagine the shape of a sine-wave and that will give you some idea as to the shape that fads/trends follow (ambient being a current one)...peaks of ambient activity have occured in the 60's (space rock, raga rock), 70's (prog rock, electronic head music, space jazz) 80's (new age, space music) and 90's (ambient techno). Each peak has had its celebrities - some of them a brief 15 minutes of fame, fading into the background only to be resurrected in the next peak as a mere footnote and a vague musical reference. The artists that have worked outside of the fad cycle have done so without much fanfare, yet they have been the ones that have made lasting contributions to the genre, proving that fad cycles are transitory, but the spirit of ambient music is long-lasting. Technology has given us the tools to easily work outside these fad cycles and to become "faceless." The Internet holds an interesting future for the distribution of media and the shape that fad cycles will take.Futurismo!:I've been asked many times: "what's the future of ambient?" Does it have to have a future? The question foremost in my mind is: will ambient music continue to outfox pop culture/media? A curious cultural phenomenon is happening to ambient music: the fast and furious pace of the dance music industry is being superimposed onto ambient music (there seems to be a race to see who can put out the most product, holding the audience hostage with sheer quantity). Meanwhile techno's "faceless" quality is missing, as there seems to be a pervasive cult of personality in ambient. Both quantity of product and cult of personality have only served to increase the competition for both the record labels and recording artists, thereby making the prime motivation number of units sold, and creating isolated cliques. If ambient music is to be the vehicle for subtle messages to be transmitted, then surely its ego-driven "star system" will be its demise. This doesn't seem very conducive to ambient culture's continued growth. There is a story where a country had a parchment map laid out over the entire land so the citizens would always know their location. The map started to wither away and after some time the citizens became lost without it...Celebrities are merely maps, what they create is the territory, and to confuse the two is cultural entropy.Kim Cascone San Francisco 1995 |