Does Ambient Music Need A New Name?

Encountering ambiguity and a failing of nomenclature, are we finding "ambient" an overly evasive term? This essay identifies some current key players, and analyses why they are turning the tide.

Preface

Alongside the general music-sharing capacities of this blog I hope to try and intersperse some thoughts and interviews into the formula of Reach, partly as writing exercise and partly to try and wrangle some intellectual weight (and a bit of fun) into the platform.

Here’s the first, a little ongoing thought I’ve been having in the wake of following a certain strand of modern music for quite some time, and seeing relatively little about it online which tackles the problem adequately — not to suggest that this will succeed. As this piece explains, it’s a tricky topic for a number of reasons.

With the platform’s growth I aim to make these kinds of articles more regularly, and these will, alongside interviews with and features on labels, scenes and artists, become the body of the work earmarked for the paid subscribers, once it arrives, to give something more rich to those that have been generous with supporting the newsletter.

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The limits of a name

As someone pathologically interested in the ins and outs of “ambient music”, I’ve noticed — and personally experienced — something of a stutter in the music media around an emergent branch of the genre.

The problem can be easily followed by anyone: from major authorities to the artists and fans themselves, people are generally struggling to agree on a term that fittingly describes a form of ambient music which is showing an emerging popularity. The modern wave is spearheaded by West Mineral, 3XL, Motion Ward, INDEX:Records and Peak Oil, all of whom have released music that could be placed as originators at the scene of the crime, but there are many others — too many to name in anything close to fullness — which are important players and tastemakers, plus countless other musicians who join by incidence or coincidence.

Before getting towards tackling the question posed in the title, I must go back to the well-trodden beginning, and explain why the term “ambient music” is contained within those little markers of difference. Read the next paragraph with added sarcasm.

To take inspiration from that famous first line of Douglas Adams’ The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: “In the beginning there was nothing, and then Brian Eno invented ambient music, which made a lot of people very happy, and still more rather confused at the state of music. Generally, people still haven’t made up their minds on whether this was a good idea after all.”

This is my attempt at going over the traditionally-narrated history of what is called ambient music — very importantly, in the West — with due deference but minimal effort in loathsomely repeating those self-same paragraphs about Music for Airports. To my mind, the facts are that while Eno may have been responsible for a lot, and certainly laid the groundwork for what followed, a huge bulk of the best ambient music made today has little influence drawn directly from Eno’s music itself, and perhaps there’s a common derision towards the stuffy records gathering so much dust on the shelf of “records we ought to respect”.

This is all part and parcel of musical evolution, the smallprint which says that eventually the youngbloods will not honour the elder’s methods. It happened with Dubstep, Jungle, Techno, et cetera, and it’s happened/happening now with ambient music.

There’s a telling marker of my mindset in the final sentence there: ambient music comes uncapitalised next to a batch of genres denoted in capitals. Dubstep, techno, house, UK garage: all have distinctive markers that set them within one musical category, and outside of others. Does ambient music enjoy the same quality?

Certainly lots could be categorised together. Here’s three examples: drone music, devoid of anything bar shaped waveforms; beatless and near-beatless productions; field-recording-based listening musics aimed at recreating fictional or real-world sonic environments.

Mu Tate - Ish (UTTER) - December 9, 2022

So, if that is ambient music, where do Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works albums fit into the picture? What about ‘Ish’ by Mu Tate, released last year by UTTER? Besides the dense sound environment, there’s percussion and bass that form perpetual motion, and bears more than similarity in composition with a lot of club music. Can it be called ambient music too? What about the oceans of “ambient techno”? Much of it is closer to the second than it is the first.

Perhaps the understood difference between ambient music and the other listed genres is that it’s more of an umbrella term for lots of different styles of sound. This makes it hard to modify the term since it’s pretty inconclusive in and of itself. Drum and bass becomes very different things with the prefixing of ‘liquid’ versus ‘jump-up’, but you can bet that in an hour-long DJ set you’ll predominantly be hearing a formula of chopped amen breaks at a fairly static tempo, and deviance from that (dubstep or minimal “grey-area” techno perhaps) might be described as a “multi-genre” set from audience members.

The same can’t really be said of ambient music, at least in contemporary wording. We don’t have ‘eco-ambient’ for music heavily using sounds of animals or even plants, and while you might find instances where terms like ‘industrial ambient’ are used, on Bandcamp and so on, the category hasn’t stuck with the hive mind: neither offer the same instant recollection of style tropes that “liquid drum and bass” enjoys.

The one exception is ‘power ambient’, ostensibly coined by Maya Kalev in this article for FACT dubbing it as the ‘sound of 2014’. As A Strangely Isolated Place note, saving me the bother, it describes music which defers from Eno’s definition of ‘ambient’ (yaawn), which recalls music that is “as ignorable as it is interesting”, as Kalev cites the likes of Ben Frost and a then-new album from Lawrence English as proponents of this antithetical stance.

This is inherently quite interesting as I find Eno’s initial description of early ambient works a bit lacking: all music is ignorable if you try hard enough, and all music is impossible to ignore when heard at (in)appropriate volumes, which is probably how Maya was listening to Frost back in 2014. Devolving the propensity for fancy self-talk around the subject, which ultimately clouds things further, I think Eno was really involved with making music as enjoyable at low volumes as it is at higher extremes, with notable elements becoming more or less prominent depending on the amplitude, affecting the depth of the experience.

Hoavi - Flay (Peak Oil) — October 8, 2021

Importantly, Maya also caveats her description of ‘power ambient’ nearly completely by ensuring the reader knows she is being ‘deliberately vague’, which is quite foreshadowing of the emptiness of ambient prefixes in modern talk on the genre, but also of the doomed-to-fail ‘Conceptronica’ bracket which Simon Reynolds started a lot of indignant furor over when he coined it in 2020.

Conceptronica’s failure was, as it seems to me, assured by two points: firstly was its broad definitive parenthesis that categorised all and nothing in one go — is it enough for a techno producer to make a ‘conceptronica’ club album by some mentioning of Greek myth, and could that be grouped together with a hip-hop release with a novel storyline? — and secondly, astutely noted by Rami Abadir, that the listening public have come to rather despise deeper, more precise categorisations of music.

The self-evident cautiousness of Kalev’s ‘power ambient’ term, and the vitriolic outbursts over social media in the wake of ‘Conceptronica’, scarred in the consciousness of any aspiring writer seeking to tackle a difficult topic, walk us hand in hand towards the problem we’re now facing with “ambient” music. With writers insufficiently empowered with terminology to describe releases that one can relax and study to, can illuminate your daily walk or hour of emails, or that slaps hard on a club rig — often simultaneously — modern stakeholders in the genre walk in grey ambiguous space.

Like Schroedinger’s Cats of music these producers are at the same time club DJ’s and listening-space commandants; both and neither in the same instance by the sheer audacity of not self-defining what they’re doing, and leaving release page information utterly stark beyond a few comments of thanks and credit where it is due. The unclassifiable style is difficult to critique, and to praise. What a nightmare for us poor journalists!

NUG - IS UNDER THE BLANKET (3XL) - October 20, 2021

Some examples of attempted genre-fication of this music includes anti-ambient, ambient IDM, ambient/tech, future ambient, parallel ambient, ambient club, ambidub, hyper-ambient, non-ambient, “malleable musics” (West Mineral’s tag on BC) and endless swathes more. None fit. Why?

I suggest that it’s due to the all-encompassing nature of the music, which inhales everything from dub to techno, UK hardcore and breakbeat, dubstep and downtempo. As sonically crossbred mutts, whose stock is a list of just about every club genre plus wide-ranging influences from virtually any type of music likely to be played to a seated audience, music-makers such as Pontiac Streator, exael, Ben Bondy and uon/Special Guest DJ (omitting plenty more) are happily in their role as a critics’ unscratchable itch.

The absolute entirety of the musical inspiration contrasts, quite fittingly I think, with notions of futuristic ‘music’ speculated within François Bonnet’s The Music to Come, a small booklet containing a series of vague impressions the noted musician (also known as Kassel Jaeger) and academic writer on music has on what music could, perhaps, aim for, or even be organically heading towards in certain instances.

Bonnet, like Kalev, intentionally uncouples himself from the ideas in his book by referring equally to the music made now and this speculative music of the future without clear distinction throughout, so — in fear of being accused of “missing the point” within these anecdotal and predominantly inspirational passages of text by a far more seasoned writer and thinker than myself — it’s hard to tell exactly what he’s getting at when he suggests that this “music” to come should be roughly devoid of any existing templates or contexts, and instead look to ascend from them.

I found a lot to enjoy in Bonnet’s short read, especially on certain ideas around environmentally-minded sounds for communal or shared spaces, but the suggestions that modern music cannot hope to attain a certain celestial quality because it’s bound in by corrupt cultural practices angered me a little: to attain Bonnet’s suggestions fully would be to strip music of everything that is familiar in it, everything that sets a crowd dancing or singing in unison, in favour of an undefinable open score. This seemed to me to divide music into distinct categories: that which is closest to this (higher?) state and that which falls short of it.

Xenia Reaper - HTZEE (Appendix.Files) - October 7, 2022

The branch of club-adjacent ambient music I’m interested in here undermines the smooth-walled intellectual pyramid posed by formal theoreticians of listening music: with one foot in the slightly sneered-upon club hedonism and the other well inside the formal listening world, these producers are splicing together the two hemispheres with themselves as a shakily-drawn, imperfect equator at the centre. Those already named are just as likely to be caught playing sets in Berlin’s hotspot nightclubs as they are to be performing a commissioned piece of conceptually-minded music in a repurposed church: sacredness and unholiness, to some, unified.

Ambient music within club spaces is, of course, nothing new, and there’s an unending list of musicians who operate in both worlds, and who draw from both at the same time. Great numbers of (famously) techno producers dual-wield in this way, yet there’s something that separates a lot of their music, in my mind, from what the new crowd are doing. There’s an adherence to the typical tempo and rhythmical structures generated in techno — which is often perhaps a byproduct of using the same machines at vastly different settings — but so much of it, found at the beginning of online mixes and early-night sets, is rigidly 120bpm and in a 4/4 time signature, lending itself to smooth sailing into the more overtly danceable versions of techno.

Ultimately, this particular ambient music is techno, too, and comes with the huge cultural baggage of the genre. Rarely do you find it mixed freeflow, not beatmatched in synchronicity with another, and the music carries an unignorable motion. This isn’t to classify it as inferior or otherwise to the music I’m discussing throughout this essay, but rather to draw a ring around it, and describe its differences.

The other side of this is the more extreme ambient/listening music which aligns itself closer to the kind of music that Bonnet/Kassel Jaeger makes, and therefore lends itself more to the sound art world. Multicast Dynamics might be a strong example here: this moniker deals with highly transportative listening environments (mostly) unstapled to a grid, while his VC-118a/Mohlao aliases deal in electro and techno.

Producers like exael do not fit into this category of musicians. Their music treats club modes like breakbeat and the kickdrum as an equal artistic expression to sustained drones, and often you find the two used interchangeably within a single composition. The persona is unsplit between the two, which means a new exael track is just as likely to be your new club set piece as it is your morning wakeup soundtrack, or a hybridisation of the two in one. Flowered Knife Shadows, exael’s LP for Soda Gong, pares down a gradient from high-octane polyrhythmic dance structures into smooth sleepy time music.

A further example is Ben Bondy’s Glans Intercum for West Mineral. My Inverted Audio review of this album deals with succinct versions of a lot of the views pushed in this article in more abbreviated form. There, I describe the NYC musician as “one which doesn’t see ambient music as something that must be so placid” as the Eno-esque forebears and academic heads imagine(d). The “easy listening” here is challenged, filled with roughness in melody, rhythm and timbre.

Ben Bondy - Drip on Nape (West Mineral) - July 22, 2021

Drawing an unbroken line from exael and Bondy to Eno is an impossible undertaking. Certain parts of the journey might be shared, but the overriding concept and ultimate goal of the music is vastly separate. Theirs is a truly modern take on the application of ambient music within the club strata, not a distinct or watered-down form of one or the other. It’s designed to provoke, instil movement, challenge and reward listeners on a completely different scale to slow-climbing, never-breaching ambient techno, and it relentlessly consumes modern culture as influence rather than sticking to a template forged over 30 years ago.

The result is a changing tide in the presentation of ambient music within club-adjacent situations, hyper-energised ambient sedated club music — looking to dubstep, jungle, even donk, rather than just techno — as an entire whole, inseparable. On New Year’s Eve I DJ’d at a tiny ambient room party here in Prague, filing peak-era Photek and contemporary club music from Notte Infinita alongside the likes of Ulla, Carmen Villain or ambient phase Strategy. Nobody questioned the club textures or got up to tell me I wasn’t playing “ambient” enough.

Arguably the key point in this dual heritage music is the comparison what goes on outside of the microcosms of this world: compared with a diamond, marble is a soft object. So much of current club music is predicated on hitting harder than what came before, to the point where a lot of the actual point of hitting hard is lost in a mire of kick drums and distorted drum patterns. There’s too much there to unpack in this already lengthy piece, and will better fit into the “anti-techno supremacy” article I’ve been drafting in my head at too many club nights over the last few years.

The bulk of my frustrations about the lacking sonic diversity at nightclubs can wait a little longer, but it’s pertinent to recall that the absence of ambient music in clubs is a newer thing, brought about by a polarisation (sterilisation?) at events over the last 20-30 years perhaps by certain social media and ticketing platforms and the commerciality and popularisation of the dancefloor. I am literally biting my tongue to stop from going further.

Arad Acid - Torqued Light (Motion Ward) - April 9, 2020

During the 90’s, there existed events in London (and, obviously, elsewhere) where ambient experiences were the main dish. David Toop talks inspiringly about events in Ocean of Sound, his formative book on the ambient genre (whatever it entails), where people turned up to chill out. And not for just a little while: there’s a marked difference between Toop’s descriptions of total musical free-for-all, all night long, baby, and the floor seated, corner-leaning ambient listening concerts of 40-minutes apiece we get today.

There are exceptions, and I hope to be writing to you about places like Berlin’s Kwia another time, hopefully with more experience of it. There’s also the certain caveat that the events Toop described were invariably not universally commonplace. But they did exist, and there was a movement, one which I’d like to see return to the current nightlife landscape.

So these new faces, creating something new as an amalgam of the old, offer a counter position in club music away from the hegemony of the last several decades. Narrowing the liminal distance between club and the long-estranged ambient room, they make a case for the (re)unification and reciprocal assimilation of one into the other during a period where the majority of music media is occupied with ever-more aggressive sounds.

Ultimately, I think this makes a case that being without a name is, for the moment, best. The point of all this music seems to be less about being distinct in certain ways, which a new genre name must inherently imply, and more about the openness of interpretation available when you forgo titles. For my part I’m happy to continue calling all this ‘ambient’ music, as complicated as it can be, if it enables this spirit to continue.

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Even with all this said there’s more to be written about this topic (both of the music, which continues to be excellent, and of the connotations to wider nightlife). For here and now, I’ll draw the line, hopefully having provided some insight to those newly familiar with the proponents, or some deeper thoughts for those already acclimated.

I hope you enjoyed reading the first longer piece on Reach. It’s been quite a pleasure for me to write this, as a lot of the topics I’ve discussed have been on my mind for some time. If you liked it, there’s a button below to subscribe for more, when it’s ready.