EMUSIC-L Digest Volume 45, Issue 7b This issue's topics: FAQ: Ambient music [2/3] Your EMUSIC-L Digest moderator is Joe McMahon . You may subscribe to EMUSIC-L by sending mail to listserv@american.edu with the line "SUB EMUSIC-L your name" as the text. The EMUSIC-L archive is a service of SunSite (sunsite.unc.edu) at the University of North Carolina. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Fri, 9 Oct 1992 08:55:16 GMT From: "Mike J. Brown" Subject: FAQ: Ambient music [2/3] Part 2 of 3 ______________________________________________________________________ Recommendations: by others ===Lazlo Nibble Various: Ambient House -- The Compilation By DFC album [1990] CD: 1990 GE (BCM Records BCM 50422) (UK: BCM 422 CD) 6:13 Morenas: Hazme Son\~ar 5:45 Aqua Regia: N.Y.C. Smile On Me 6:00 The KLF: Last Train To Trancentral [remix 1] 4:44 Extreme: Trasparenza 4:07 Suen\~o Latino: Luxuria 5:27 The Orb: A Huge Ever-Growing... [why is six scared of seven?] 3:57 Suen\~o Latino: Suen\~o Latino 5:55 Morenas: Somnambulism 3:50 Aqua Regia: Aqueanosolo 6:00 Lux: Deep Down This was my first serious exposure to ambient-house, including my first KLF or Orb tracks, and I couldn't really tell you whether I like it because it's genuinely great or just because it was so fresh at the time but like it I do. The KLF and Orb tracks are otherwise-unavailable-on-CD ("LT2T" from the impossible to get original UK "LT2T" 12" and "Pulsating Brain" from the original "Loving You" 12" as well) and were the obvious draw tracks; most of the rest are Italo-ambient . . . a little more meat on the ambient bones, but still quite good. ===steve@cse.fau.edu (Steve Smith) Judging by all the attention the ORB gets here, I though I should check it out. Not willing to cough up 14.99 for an album, I bought the only single the store had: Little Puffy Clouds. I didn't care for it but I'd like to believe there's something more to this ORB thing. What's the deal? Is this representative of the ORB or should I give it a second chance? ===rej@bob.sal.wisc.edu (Randy Jones) Not "or", mate, "and"! YES it is representative of the finest hour (from within their more beat-oriented mode, pre geosynchronous sound collage stuff) of Orb-ness, and YES, you should give it another chance. Otherwise, you may be left in this mundane plane of being whilst those of us who are able to fly along with the Orb's sublime peregrinations will MUTATE ourselves RIGHT OUTTA HERE into a LIQUID FUELED perpetual spacelovevibe APOGEE. So kick back, Unfurl your Pagoda Probe Booster, and get ready for IGNITION. You got me? ===Andrew C Crosby Space _Space_ infinitely better than chill out Tangerine Dream _Poland_ perhaps one of the best ambient forerunning techno albums of all time Intermix _Intermix_ comprised of some of the people from front line assembly (bill leeb et al). haunting and hard in places, but still very musically powerful; it doesn't sound 'industrial' at all, mostly funky, orbish. a bit harder than the orb, though. Underground Resistance a lot of their stuff is screaming techno but many bits of it are ambient, bizarre, cool acid music The Orb Fortran 5 Crazy Earth 12" 808 State Pacific Brian Eno Eno & Byrne _My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts_ David Byrne _The Forest_ & Forestry EP ===jondr@sco.COM (Jon Drukman) GAT DECOR - Passion (Effective CD EFFS 1) passion (naked mix edit) [4.21] passion (d.emerson mix edit) [3.26] passion (naked mix) [7.44] passion (d.emerson mix) [14.06] total time: 29.47 wow - not a lot of music for your import cd single dollar, but this song is great. spacy melodic jam with a great bassline, some wonderful piano tinkles and lots of ambience. a good mood-setter. really, only the naked mix is worth anything - the d.emerson version has some nice bits but goes on way too long and has these annoying weird vocal things running throughout. i recommend the song wholeheartedly. i wish there was a more cost effective way to get it. the edit version is out on some CD comps but i think it's too short to do the song justice. ===barth@ihlpf.att.com (Barth Richards) Zoviet France _Shouting At The Ground_ I cannot think of a better ambient industrial CD than . The whole thing is astounding. ===kzim@watserv.ucr.edu (Christopher Zimmerman) Art Of Noise _The Ambient Collection_ ===cj@eno.corp.sgi.com (C J Silverio) The Orb and mixes of other people's stuff by Alex Patterson, Thrash, and Youth various _Give Peace A Dance II: The Ambient Collection_ various _Ambient House: The Compilation by DFC_ various _Trancemaster Vol. I_ Doubting Thomas _The Infidel_ Delerium Erasure Erasure Club Series 12"s (difficult to find) Primal Scream _Screamadelica_ and The Dixie Narco EP Brian Eno _Another Green World_ (my favorite album ever) _Ambient 1: Music for Airports_ _Ambient 2: Day of Radiance_ (looped hammered dulcimer, performed by Laraaji) _Ambient 3: The Plateaux Of Mirror_ _Ambient 4: On Land_ _Discreet Music_ (the seminal work in the genre) _Thursday Afternoon_ (60 minutes of slowly moving sound-- the video would be a great thing to show in a chill room) _Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks_ (soundtrack to a film on the Apollo moon missions-- good stuff) _Music for Films I & III_ Fripp/Eno _No Pussyfooting_ _Evening Star_ (both tape-loop guitar experiments) Jon Hassell (mutant trumpet) Eno/Hassell _Possible Musics_ (mutant trumpet over Africanish drums) Holger Czukay/David Sylvian _Plight and Premonition_ Enya Jean-Michael Jarre Tangerine Dream Hafler Trio _Dislocation_ _Intoutof_ unmusical but unabrasive barely identifiable noises, no beats) Terry Riley _A Rainbow in Curved Air_ _Descending Moonshine Dervishes_ Steve Reich _Drumming_ _Music for 18 Musicians_ _Electric Counterpoint_ (w/ Pat Metheny) (Reich is a modern minimalist composer) ===pwh@bradley.bradley.edu (Pete Hartman) various Give Peace A Dance II: The Ambient Collection I'd like to second this recommendation. I bought it with the advice of alt.rave, and I think it's fantastic. ===lazlo@triton.unm.edu (Lazlo Nibble) The KLF _Chill Out_ Try listening to it while driving on the interstate fifty miles from anywhere or anything at 3 a.m., preferably during a snowstorm. Only then can you truly understand Chill Out's miraculous perfection. ===fuzzbox@world.std.com (Jason Bilsky) I just found a CD in the UK by a band called "Red Sun". Supposedly this band contains Alex Paterson form the Orb, although no mention is made of his name on the sleeve. But I do have a tough time believing that the people who actually made the CD are really named "Niki Patriarchaea + Yale Del Fabbro". Anyway, the CD is ultra-ambient, with mostly just lolling synth sounds and the occasional keyboard or guitar, and an occasional beat. I highly reccomend it... ===bbs.brienv@tsoft.sf-bay.org (Brien Voorhees) Doubting Thomas _Infidel_ _Father _ Clock DVA _Buried Dreams_ Will _Pearl of Great Price_ Delerium _Euphoric_ In The Nursery _Counterfeit_ _Koda_ _L'Esprit_ Dead Can Dance _Passage of Time_ _Aion, Spleen, and Ideal_ Art of Noise Jean-Michel Jarre _Zoolook_ especially. Anne Dudley & Jaz Coleman _Songs From The Victorious City_ ===cramsay@nextweek.Reed.Edu (Celeste Ramsay) Zoviet France Brian Eno Coil _The Consequences of Raising Hell_ _Unnatural Histories_ The Hafler Trio Illusion of Safety (if you can find them they're great) SPK ===darrell@twics.co.jp (Darrell Berry) Practically any music on 4AD prior to 1986ish, especially This Mortal Coil _It'll End In Tears_ (essential) Cocteau Twins _Spangle Maker/Pearly Dew Drops Drop_ _Treasure_ and some of their later stuff, especially Elizabeth Fraser/Simon Raymonde/Robin Guthrie/Harold Budd _Moon and the Melodies_ Durutti Column _LC_ (at least first track side two) Brian Eno _Thursday Afternoon_ (CD mix) Eyeless in Gaza _Caught in Flux/Eyes of Beautiful Losers_ _Pale Hands I Loved So Well_ (my favorites) Klaus Schulze _Mirage_ _Dune_ Eroc _Eroc_ (not exactly cool, but can be perfect at the right time) Slowdive (though they're a bit twee) B-sides of pre-1985 OMD singles are another excellent find. (Honest, they didn't always do shit) ===gtaylor@vme.heurikon.com (Gregory Taylor) I'm sure that there are a host of angst-ridden young men working toward that high-paying computer job who can slam orthodoxies much better than I, but 4AD as ambient industrial? Come on. One of the earlier works that I can think of from the late 70s/early 80s would be Jeff Greinke's "Cities in Fog" [on the Seattle indie label Palace of Lights]. Unlike the label's head Kerry Leimer, the music is far less tonally organized, and the noise sources function more as well layered kinds of white noise over a drone. Lots of slowed - down tape stuff from train crossings, metal on metal in large spaces, etc. Quite lovely, in a chilly sort of way. You might find Greinke's later works on the German import label Dossier of some interest as well. I think that Jeff is really an unsung hero of the genre's early days. You could also try and hunt up a copy of the PoL cassette release "Music for Industry" by Marc Barreca. Mostly heavily filtered spoken word where it's used at all. Nice square corners and lots of steam escaping. Marc's other work doesn't really fit well in Industrial IMHO [but hey. Holger Czukay and David Sylvian's "Plight and Premonition" would even beat out This Mortal Coil], but it is nonetheless interesting. ===max@teleride.on.ca (James "Max" Morehead) Tear Garden, Cocteau Twins, Lush, Severed Heads (you'd probably like their later stuff)... ===thoth@uiuc.edu (Ben Cox) The KLF _Chill Out_ The Orb _The Orb's Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld_ Tangerine Dream _Tangram_ (not industrial? who can say?) Brian Eno _Music for Airports_ Neu! Nurse With Wound _The Sylvie And Babs Hi-Fi Companion_ (This is not really "Ambient" but is more like Zappa's stuff--cf. Lumpy Gravy) ===paul eng-yi tan The Orb, KLF (not the house/techno songs), The Grid (esp. Floatation... GREAT single), 808 State's Pacific ===Todd Keenan Bowman Halfer Trio, LustMord, Zoviet France, Morthond, Vasalisks O Yuki Conjugate, Jeff Greinke ===Keith Lewis Brian Eno. Everything he ever did. My personal favorite is the album he put out with Robert Fripp (marketed "Fripp and Eno"). ===Christopher Eborn Philip Glass and Ravi Shankar _Passages_ An ambient mind-blow. Listen to it after a rave with your SO, when you are still up, and strange things happen... ===foetus@ucscb.UCSC.EDU (rocky) Spacemen 3 _DreamWeapon_ The best ambient bit i know of, which i like to call hypno-drone. It should blow your mind. ===Mike Brown I knew that using Negativland as an example wasn't the best thing to do, but actually they exist out on the fringe of what I'm including in the definition of "ambient" ... when you hear entire songs composed of looping sound effects and samples, there is an ambience to them that is a little more subtle than in something more obviously ambient like KLF _Chill Out_ or The Orb stuff... A friend recommended I listen to Severed Heads after he heard the ambient stuff and Art of Noise stuff I am into. So I happened across their _Clifford_ double-LP and listened to it, and thought, gee, this is like Negativland, and it's got an ambient arrangement to it, and it would sound like other ambient music if they replaced each sound and sample with less abrasive, less disjointed sounds. ===aankrom@isis.cs.du.edu (Anthony Ankrom) Maybe it's just me (and it probably is...) but I could never figure out the connection between acid and The Dead. It just doesn't fit the psychedelic groove for me (of course neither does almost all of that psychedelic crap from the 60's either...). Maybe the big thing is, I'm just not a Grateful Dead fan. I would rather listen to 20th century avant-garde or ambient industrial like Throbbing Gristle's Heathen Earth and CD1. Brian Eno's ambient stuff is also very tuned to the psychedelic mind-state. _______________________________________________________________________ Ruminations: On the other hand... ===REEKES@applelink.apple.com (Jim Reekes) How sad. You seem to be following the wrong roots of the family tree. I don't think you should call this the "Ambient Music FAQ" since such house music isn't what I would call ambient music. It's much more "house" than it is "ambient." The Orb is a good band, and I rather like them. BUT, I would not necessarily recommend ambient music to someone that said they like The Orb. You need to differentiate between "Ambient" and the new term "Ambient House". The first time I can remember hearing the word ambient to describe music was from Brian Eno (a trend setter for many pop music fields). His album "Ambient I: Music For Airports" dates back to 1978. I think "Discrete Music" was even earlier. You should read the back cover of the Discrete Music album, and the liner notes for his Ambient series. I also have reference material from a couple of books about Eno if you need more. You should reference the Editions EG label (started by Eno) which was producing many ambient recordings. Such artists on his label were Mike Nyman and Gavin Bryars. These dated back to at least 1974. I would not consider anything that Tangerine Dream nor Steve Hillage has done to be ambient. Ambient music includes an element of chance or randomness. For example Eno used many tape loops in his music which he considered ambient music. Eno also has a very distinct production style, which Daniel Lanois has successfully integrated into his own style. Groups such as The Orb have incorporated this style of sound into their music, but not the aspect of randomness that is truly contained into the definition of ambient. At first hearing, you might want to classify the sound as being similar to Eno's ambient music because of this sonic quality to the production, but it does not contain true ambient aspects such as treatments, signal processing, tapes loops, etc.. Ambient House is not ambient music. Bach and Beethoven did not write Classical music. Mozart was Classical, Back is Baroque, and Beethoven was Romantic. I'm a long time Eno fan and listener. Jim Reekes, Polterzeitgeist | Macintosh Toolbox Engineering | Sound Manager Expert Apple Computer, Inc. | RAll opinions expressed are mine, and do 20525 Mariani Ave. MS: 81-KS | not necessarily represent those of my Cupertino, CA 95014 | employer, Apple Computer Inc.S To: REEKES@applelink.apple.com Thank you for the well-written reply; I will include it in the FAQ. I do realize that there is a distinct 'split' in the musical genre tree between ambient house and ambient, as ambient house descended as a natural extension of acid house, its creators being strongly influenced by but not really connected with the original ambient music. I don't think it's going at it 'from the wrong end' to consider ambient music alongside ambient house, as that is all I am trying to do -- ^^^^^^^^^ --I am not considering ambient house as a direct mutation of ambient music. I also consider ambient industrial as a parallel genre as well. All of these forms of music are very similar, despite the individuality of the actual composers. Just because the newer forms are not exactly like the original 'ambient' music doesn't mean they are not 'ambient' themselves; rather, they redefine 'ambient' as a more encompassing style, not just 'what Eno did.' Rock music of today sounds nothing like Rock music of 1958... jazz today sounds nothing like jazz of 1938... see what I mean? Mike _______________________________________________________________________ Ruminations: Chill Out Areas ===kurt@redbck.enet.dec.com (Kurt Svendsen) i know it's tangential to your query about appropriate ambient music for your chill out area but i was wondering about how you were going about setting up your area visually. From my experience of raves in Sydney, Australia, IMHO the organisers have somewhat lost the plot when it comes to COAs; the music is ambient & the volume is not assertive but the lighting tends to very dim or dark with perhaps some sort of slide shows. You could view a rave as being zoned into various Sensorium enclaves each with different function & an associated sensorial profile ranging over the 5-6 senses. The dance areas are characterisedby in-your-face, intense, NON-static visual & aural fields to which you add your own kinesthetic one of dancing, there is also the other intense field which is the movements physically, energetically & emotionally of your fellow dancers which impinge upon your sixth sense or mental-contents. The function of the dance areas is to immerse yourself into the sound & light & to possibly move; what is the function of a COA? to rest, to talk, to interact more deeply interpersonally...? if so it would contrast with the dance area but does it follow that the variation in one Sense naturally maps to the others? Thus the sound field quietens & the sound may not stir the organism so intensely but is it appropriate to map this to dim/dark lighting & unobtrusive graphics? What if the lighting was instead very bright but indirect & diffuse with perhaps some unobstrusive kinetic variations like a slide show or an oil film device such that the net effect was that all objects living & dead were all clearly & sharply delineated in an essentially STATIC visual field. Would this not be more harmonious with the intended function of the COA? The nature of the sound field allows you to talk without shouting & there is no rhythmic imperative to move, the light is bright but still & so you can rest the vision or view clearly & without interpretive effort the people you are interacting with. I have to a degree waxed rhetorical; defining my view of a COA & then espousing why the visual field of such should be rethought. This posting is a consequence of some contemplation, lately, about the direction raves have been going lately in Sydney, Australia; too much emphasis on how-big-is-my-dick sound systems & how-cool-is-my-haircut lighting rigs & not enough consideration to establishing & maintaining mood & other psychodynamics. In summary, in general, I prolixly wax: you have a rave it's divided into functional zones, the zones are differentiated by the nature of Sensorium presented, over the spectrum of the individual senses each with a panoply of qualities: intense vs mute, static vs non-static, simple vs rich...analysis-without-end; be aware! the nature of the transformation of a sense between zones may not be applicable to the other sense's transformations in concert with the intended function. hullo!?! i'm seriously waffling; stopped ______________________________________________________________________ Continued in Part 3 ------------------------------ End of the EMUSIC-L Digest ******************************