9/23/2023 0 Comments Easy listening music lists![]() ![]() Like Satie’s furniture music or Eno’s airport ambience, it’s a sound that both fades into the background and charges the very air around you. It goes on like that for 24 minutes, but it’s not hard to imagine letting it run for one’s entire waking day. There’s nothing more to it than a handful of short, overlapping loops, yet something about the way they wrap around each other only draws you deeper into the mix with every elliptical pass. On centerpiece “Do While,” glassy pings skitter like snowflakes across the frozen surface of a pond bell tones rise and fall in pitch, glowing with an eerie luminescence. Enter Oval, the German trio of Markus Popp, Frank Metzger, and Sebastian Oschatz, who made their name early on by sampling the sound of skipping CDs. If Systemisch is where Oval first distilled their idea down to its essence, then 94diskont is where they discovered their homemade medium’s expressive potential.īit-crushed chirps and desiccated hiccups establish the basic vocabulary that will come to define “glitch music” for the next decade some of the album’s more abstracted tracks, like “Commerce Server,” sound like a peripheral device coughing up pixels. In the run-up to the new millennium, as digital technology inserted itself ever more deeply into our lives, ideas about progress and creative misuse were in the air, as unmistakable as the gravelly pings of the dial-up modem sitting in the corner of your office. Listen: Pauline Oliveros: Stuart Dempster, Panaiotis, “Suiren” Deep Listening introduced into ambient music the radical possibilities of the body to overcome itself, just by listening hard enough. It begat a new philosophy of the same name which focused on the possibilities of truly paying attention, retuning and calibrating your ears to allow for meditation and the preservation of well being. ![]() The trio carried with them an accordion, trombone, didgeridoo, garden hose, conch shell and a pipe, which all became mangled by the bigness of the room.ĭeep Listening, the recording born of these sessions, feels cosmic, like listening to the echoes of the Big Bang. She brought the trombonist Stuart Dempster and the sound artist/vocalist Panaiotis to record music that doesn’t sound of this world. ![]() So, in 1988, she descended 14 feet beneath the earth, into a cistern located in Washington where sounds reverberated up to 45 seconds in the dampness. Pauline Oliveros has called improvisation the natural state of human existence-because, amidst even all the surface chaos of everyday experience, “the universe is improvising.and we have evolution, so is always happening.” It’s why, to Oliveros, the most considerate way to live is to listen. Listen: Robert Fripp & Brian Eno, “Wind on Water” ![]() Rather than co-mingle the two, Fripp and Eno split them like some kind of fork in the road. It stands in stark contrast to the rest of the 1970s, when others made ambient music that felt allegorically about life and death, the two locked in some eternal competition. It’s less playful than the first half, and more shocking. But the second side, the almost 30-minute track, “An Index of Metals,” shows the sinister side of the duo, with less synthesizer bounce and more iciness. That welcomeness owes much to King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp’s warm noodling and plucking he’s like a wedding musician if the whole world was getting married.Įvening Star, which opens with the National Geographic-esque titled “Wind on Water,” maintains its ebullient tone throughout its first half. Though it contains Brian Eno’s signature lolling synthesizers, Evening Star, more than much of his ambient work, has a feeling of induction. ![]()
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