Music For My Friends 3
This edition of MFMF is not going to appeal to nearly as many people as previous editions. That’s fine by me. If you don’t like it, I won’t be offended. After all, there’s no accounting for taste.
In academia there are generalists and specialists. A specialist is a small, but deep, lake. He or she knows a great deal about a small area of study. A generalist is a shallow sea that covers a broad spectrum of study, but none very deeply. In my musical knowledge I am akin to the generalist. This is no more apparent than when I talk music with a specialist. The indie rocker will note glaring lacunae in my collection. Likewise, the fan of electronic and ambient music.
I was first introduced to electronica by my Old Testament professor at Berea and it was a revelation. He loaned me a CD by Aphex Twin and one by Orbital. Thanks, Duane! Since then I slowly added to and broadened my collection of ambient/electonica.
My tastes run from the nearly dance-able (Fat Boy Slim or Kraftwerk) to the barely musical (SunnO))). Since I tend to lump all my ambient and electronica together some are almost entirely constructed electronically, while others are played on traditional instruments with little or no electronic manipulation (Stuart Dempster). As before, this is my list. So there.
In this list I am going to focus on what I call Dark Ambient. Dark Ambient embraces music from other genres like Black Metal, Industrial, Electronica, and Noise Music.
A note on the commentary:
I find ambient music much more difficult to describe in useful terms than more traditional music. Terms like evocative, atmospheric, textured, may be good descriptors, but they are too subjective to be of much use. Because of this, my commentary is shorter than usual.
So here is a collection of
Dark Soundscapes
Tod Dockstader and David Lee Myers Bijou(2005). Tod Dockstader, a self-taught composer, was a pioneer in electronic music and Musique Concrète. Most active in the 1960s, he returned to composing in the 2000s with Ariel (2005). Bijou is one of the few recordings that has actually creeped me out. Imagine if you took a noir film and removed all the dialog, keeping only the background sounds. Without any context these sounds become pretty creepy. Bijou is definitely more like audio architecture than what we traditionally call music, but it is an incredible listening experience.
Samples of Bijou can be found on eMusic.
Lustmord and Robert Rich Stalker (1995) Robert Rich and Lustmord are two of the big names in Ambient music. When they combined forces on an album inspired by the Tarkovsky film of the same name the result was more than the sum of their combined talent. Very dark and evocative. Solo efforts by both Lustmord and Robert Rich are worth checking out.
Check out “Elemental Trigger” and “Undulating Terrain”.
Tribes of Neurot Static Migration (1998). Tribes of Neurot are a side project of Neurosis. Very textured with a guitars weaving through much of the tracks.
Samples can be heard at eMusic.
Nigel Ayers, John Everall & Mick Harris Mesmeric Enabling Device (1999) This is another collaborative effort between respected ambient musicians. In general this album is more atmospheric than the others on this list and has similarities to some of Robert Rich’s solo work. Here is a good review.
Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster & Panaiotis Deep Listening (1989) At Fort Worden Washington there is an unused 2 million gallon cistern with a 45 second reverb (now called the Dan Harpole Cistern). The three musicians improvised in this incredible acoustic space. The result is Space Music in a very real sense: the space itself is another instrument.
Here are some samples of Dempster and some students playing in the cistern. Sample 1, Sample 2.
