From sfraves-request@medisg.Stanford.EDU Tue Apr 13 04:26:41 1993 Received: from medisg.Stanford.EDU by soda.berkeley.edu (5.65/KAOS-1) id AA07899; Tue, 13 Apr 93 04:26:04 -0700 Received: by medisg.Stanford.EDU (4.1/1.34) id AA02823; Tue, 13 Apr 93 03:12:54 PDT Received: from noc.usfca.edu by medisg.Stanford.EDU (4.1/1.34) id AA02819; Tue, 13 Apr 93 03:12:50 PDT Received: by noc.usfca.edu (5.65/DEC-Ultrix/4.3) id AA15699; Tue, 13 Apr 1993 03:15:12 -0700 From: kawakami@noc.usfca.edu (Sea of Sin) Message-Id: <9304131015.AA15699@noc.usfca.edu> Subject: ambient house article To: sfraves@medisg.Stanford.EDU (sfraves), ne-raves@gnu.ai.mit.edu (neraves) Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1993 03:15:12 -0700 (PDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL8] Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 7388 Status: OR The New York Times, Sunday April 1993 Chilling Out With the Stocking-Cap Crowd Ann Powers In pop music, the route to spiritual epiphany is usually accidental. It might occur during the second encore at a Springsteen concert or nearing 4 A.M. on a downtown dance floor; at these moments, transcendence comes with an air of spontaneity, no matter how carefully orchestrated the circumstances. To actively seek some sort of nirvana (remember when it was used to be a state of consciousness, not a band?) seems silly to the ranks of skeptics and hedonists that make up pop's hippiest ranks. Enlightenment is iffy business, at the least it was until raves brought young scene makers into a brand-new age. Tipping its stocking cap to psychedelia, the English-borne dance movement known as rave encourages a belief in the possibilities of mind expansion through electronic beats and synthesized hallucinogens. On the dance floor the quest resembles the dervish's twirl into frenzy. But even the most energetic ravers sometimes need a break and seek a space where their mental journeys can flow a less physically demanding path. This need has resulted in the establishment of chill-out rooms in clubs as well as the closest thing in years to a fashionable form if meditative music-ambient house. Over the past two years, ambient house has moved from clubs to record labels, and some if its originators are beginning to find an audience in this country. Among the best-known groups are the Orb, Ultramarine and Orbital; 777, a collaboration between Alex Patterson if the Orb and the progressive house rock guitarist Steve Hillage, has yielded a self-titled American album, available on Caroline Records. Caroline has also just issued "Excursions in Ambience," a compliation of English, Dutch and American ambient-house music that provides a thorough overview this emerging style. The tracks on "Excursions in Ambience," which was complied by Brian Long of Caroline and the New York club D.J. Mr. Kleen, range from Ultramarine's sweet nostalgia trip for the 1970's, "Saratoga (Upstate Mix)," to Psychedelic Research Lab's "Tarenah." featuring Tibetan throat-singing and an East Indian drumbeat, to the happy android beats of "Afterglow by It's Thinking. Strangers to ambient house many find the variety in these works hard to grasp at first. But a few listens in the proper state of reflective attention reveal the span of experimental moves that the creators of ambient house are making with seemly random sounds. In the late 80's, as a disk jockey in a London club, Mr. Patterson established the first chill-out room as a retreat for dancers who were coming down from a chemical high or just tried. He mixed bits of progressive rock with slowed-down synthesized rhythms to produce music that was witty and seductive as the faster rave style. Mr. Patterson soon united with Jim Cauty, who had begun similar experiments with his group, the KLF, to create a more than 30-minute-long single entitled "A Huge Evergrowing Pulsating Brain That Rules From the Center of the Ultraworld." That 1989 track contained elements that remain integral to much ambient house. Layered pulsating beats supported a series of samples ranging from church bells to a rooster crowing to altered passages of Minnie Ripperton's soul classic, "Loving You." A female voice plucked out of context, often serves as muse in ambient house recordings, and noises that would not otherwise be considered musical help it redefine what music actually is. As does hip-hop, ambient house rearranges snippets of familiar sounds within a bed electronic; but in this case, rapping does not ground the tracks in narrative. Instead, the samples become a guide to an aural experience that is realized within the listener's own imagination. Ambient-house tracks (they're rarely songs, in the conventional sense) don't tell stories; they aim to encourage dreams. In this way, ambient house resembles the decidedly uncool genre of new-age music. New age is typically dismissed by young music fans as nothing more than easy listening in hippie garb, purchased by balding men in Guatemalan sweaters, desperately seeking psychic relief from their bourgeois burdens. Yet the genre shares one crucial element with the rock tradition: it seeks to affect its listeners with a life-changing intensity. The Rolling Stones, the Clash or Pearl Jam all offer their fans some kind of enlightenment whether sexual, personal or political. Rock's dedication to a do-it-yourself ethic and its often anti-intellectual fear of "preachiness" keeps its lessons informal and streetwise. New-age composers, on the other hand, think of themselves as gurus, manipulating sound either to produce specific physical responses (such as relaxation) or to lead initiates on so-called spiritual journeys. A somewhat willful obscure line of pop falls between these two extremes, and it's that tradition that inspired ambient house. The composer and producer Brian Eno, who named the genre ambient, released as series of minimalist electronic recordings in the mid-70's with titles like "Music for Airports" and Apollo (Atmosphere and Soundtracks)." Mr. Eno realized that music runs on a continuum with the random sounds one hears during an average day. He structured his pieces in a diffuse away that subtly created a mood, rather than forcing a narrative on listeners. The new approach to composition is central to ambient house. His collaboration with David Byrne," My Life in the Bush of Ghosts," sampled spoken evangelical texts and other voices within a melange of dance rhythms, foreshadowing ambient house's fascination with religious material and its roots in dance. Progressive rock by the likes if Pink Floyd, King Crimson and Mr. Hillage's former group, Gong, also leaves its mark on this music., mostly through a shared interest in fantastic themes like science fiction, Orientalism and mythology. But while progressive rockers were all too fond of a Dungeons-and-Dragons-style romanticization of medievalism, ambient house pioneers favor space-age imagery. Dub, a slow, thick and reverb-heavy style of reggae, also surfaces in ambient house mixes. The English producer Adrian Sherwood synthesized dub, hip-hop and dance music in his influential work with groups like New Age Steppers and Tackhead during the 80's. World music, notably Indian and Asian classical styles, also influences ambient house, with its use of repetition to establish a trancelike state. Mostly, however, the young brains behind ambient house feed their creativity from the forest of the media that surround them. Mr. Long notes that today's teen-agers, raised on hip-hops' beats and samples, possess an entirely different idea of music's possibilities than do the forebears, who are accustomed to the linearity of rock. Ambient house finds its soul in the link between the human experience and electronic information. Walking through Times Square, surrounded by video billboards, dialing the phone and hearing a friend's recorded musical message, channel-flipping after a hard day in front of the computer terminal, many people spend their lives in constant communication with electronic angles. Ambient house makes a musical home for the spirit using these signals sent through technology's stratosphere.