alexglower

[alexglower]

Grouper - A I A: Alien Observer (2011)

are the stars out tonight?

Another day, another Grouper album! This one is a lot more science fiction-y than Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill, what with its prominent use of synthesizer keyboards and stuff. Voices and synths smear together until you can't distinguish one frequency from another. What more can I say?

A lot more, actually! I was thinking a ton about the "width" of this music. It's almost mono, with all the activity happening dead-center and the reverb effects barely escaping a tiny bit to the left and right (or perhaps they're also completely mono? It's hard to tell what's a lofi illusion and what's actually, literally mono). This album invites comparisons to the Julianna Barwick album I just covered, not only because both feature reverby vocal harmonies, but also because that album has basically the opposite "width"---it uses the left and right channels prominently for a very wide stereo image.

With Barwick's album The Magic Place, I feel like I'm inside the sound. When audio dances in the left and right channels, the thing in the center is me! My head is between the left and right speakers in my headphones. But for Alien Observer, I feel like I'm far, far away from the sound. It sits perfectly in the middle, and I stare at it, trying to make out its blurry shape. I myself feel like the alien observer!

The space conjured by this farness is also a great deal larger than the space conjured by The Magic Place. That album undoubtedly brought to mind images of cathedrals and large, cavernous rooms, but Alien Observer's images are even bigger: whole forests; flat plains stretching out to the horizon; the endless sky.

I think this is part of why Alien Observer feels "sci-fi" to me---it makes me picture ranches with missing cattle, forests without trees and a variety of other locations where life is conspicuously missing, as if abducted by UFO. It's simple, but it doesn't deal in small images. It captures the epic-ness of the alien.

Also, "alien" is literally in the title, and the only understandable lyrics on the album are about spaceships, so that probably has a big impact on how I conceptualize the music as well.

I don't love this album as much as Dragging; I think the folk elements of that album made its ambience more conspicuous, and therefore more interesting. Alien Observer is more authentically ambient from the get-go. But it's still good, and in a different way, which makes it worth a listen!

[alexglower]

Julianna Barwick - The Magic Place (2011)

totally secular hymns for nature or nostalgia or nothing

Despite this record's relatively small scale (9 normal-length songs, 90% wordless vocalizations), or perhaps because of it, I am absolutely enamored. There are some fucking fantastic melodies on here that push and pull like the tide, or like gravity to a swingset. They're massive and yet also intimate, obvious, childish, homely. I feel like I'm in the middle of something, not intruding but resonating.

I thought for way too long about the reverb on this project. One review noted how Barwick's reverb effects don't erase her voice, but rather enhance it. I find that very interesting, given how every audio effect---especially reverb---muddies the original sound to some degree. Distortion, for example, degrades audio in such a way where all its composite parts burn together in one indistinguishable blaze. And reverb washes out audio so as to make its specificities impossible to pinpoint.

Yet I totally agree with that review. I work with audio all the time, and I'm slowly coming to realize that recorded sound is alien without a little of reverb. See, when you record an instrument, you usually put it right up to the microphone, so you can capture it in as high a quality as possible. But when we listen to sounds in our daily lives, it's not like everything we hear is pressed against our ears. We don't hear things in the crystal-clear way our microphones do. Most sounds, when they reach our ears, have been warped in some way by the spaces they exist in. You're always hearing a little bit of reverb.

So artificial reverb can "enhance" a recorded sound, make it feel truer somehow, by putting it back where it belongs. We take instruments off the stage and stick them in front of microphones, and they sound stiff and awkward. Reverb puts them back on the stage, where they belong.

This is where things get especially fun because "belonging" is a completely mutable construct often established in reverse. Example: when a choir sounds far away (because of reverb), our heads imagine some big space like a church, and suddenly the choir "belongs" where it has been set. Of course such a choir would be in a church! But if that same choir were only slightly reverby, we might imagine ourselves at the intimately small performance of an a-capella group, and the sounds would make just as much sense. Saying differently would be denying something seemingly ingrained within the audio itself. Because reverb is so natural to our everyday listening experiences, we don't hear it as being a separate factor. Our brains struggle to imagine it as a post-hoc addition.

Effects like distortion don't have such feasibility---we instantly recognize them as man-made. Reverb, on the other hand, is sort of like a freebie effect. It lets us write over the circumstances present at recording time, so we can pretend these sounds always came from somewhere else.

What's I love about ambient music is that you don't need to know its history in order to make it. Ambience is all around us! Direct quote from Barwick: "Ambient music is not a strong influence on me." And yet she made a great ambient album :D A lot of the basics of ambient music are intuitive. Many of the musical techniques you learn for other genres are completely applicable to ambient music, the only extra necessary skill being the ability to tune in to your surroundings. Ambience is as much a way of listening and thinking as it is a genre of sonic art.

Anyway! Listen to this album if you want to be blissed out for a little bit.

[alexglower]

Tim Hecker - Ravedeath, 1972 (2011)

the air in these pipes ain't air---it's wind! you'll start up a tornado if you play the wrong tune

I've been a little depressed >:D It's probably the weather. Whatever the cause, it's easier than ever to irritate me. Something I've been trying recently is a little bit of self-CBT (if you can call it that): I imagine that a person I'm interacting with is a royal heir who's rescued me from peasantry on the condition that I act as their servant. It adds a bit of spice and romance to the mundane yet cool parts of human interaction---like being nice to people, helping out, that sort of thing.

I bring this up because imaginative reframing exercises have exclusively been the medium through which I go from not liking to loving an ambient album. On my first listen through Ravedeath, 1972, I tried to picture scenes from my research. I thought of the MIT labs (the people on the cover of this album are MIT students), of stuffy academic halls, of old churches (this album was recorded in an Icelandic church), of snow, or small moments in time (and it was recorded live in a day, though heavily edited after the fact), of a computer monitor on a desk... I couldn't attach any of those pictures to the music. In the absence of a daydream, I mostly pondered how similar I thought the album was to Harmony in Ultraviolet, at least relative to Radio Amor.

It was only in describing the sounds with words that I started to cozy up to them. In my notes, I wrote about the scene from The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy gets swept up in the tornado. The wind, the claustrophobia of her being trapped in her room, the sepia tone---all of it nestled perfectly against this grand yet claustrophobic album.

So I listened again! I thought about how Brian Eno intended Music for Airports to calm the listener, to put them at ease with death. The negative space between key presses and vocalizations conjures up images of the afterlife, or at least something extralife, outside our notions of life and death. I felt that Ravedeath did the exact opposite, focusing in on the moment of dying, with its cacophonies of distorted organ sounds. Usually heavy distortion makes everything sound like electric guitar, but this organ produces something different under all those effects: it sounds like phlegm, like sickness, like death.

Trash and decay were a motivating theme behind the album. The cover depicts a group pushing a piano off a building---Hecker was inspired to use this photograph because it called to mind more contemporary images of bulldozers pushing around piles of discarded CDs. The title for track "Hatred of Music" seems to bemoan the intense proliferation and commodification of the art form, and how this translates to sonic art being more disposable than ever. It's worth noting that Hecker's most recent album No Highs is in that same vein, an album intentionally made to be un-playlist-able.

I'm particularly interested in why Hecker didn't use an image of a bulldozer pushing CDs for the cover of Ravedeath, 1972. I think it has to do with notions of "artistic purity" that crop up in some discourses. "Computer music sucks; we must return to the purity of the piano!" Meanwhile, the cover for Ravedeath features a soon-to-be-destroyed piano, and the music is mostly organ-based. In case you weren't aware (like me), the organ apparently predates the piano by roughly two millenia, even predating Christianity (and thus predating the use of the organ in Church music).

The organ is a simple, "pure" instrument, yet on Ravedeath it's warped, decayed and battered nearly beyond recognition. It's only in a few spare moments---notably the final track, for instance---that we're allowed to hear an unaffected acoustic instrument. This all connects to what I was thinking about when I heard Radio Amor: that Tim Hecker's work is all about the friction and harmony between pure nostalgia and modern cynicism.

Anyway, the sounds are great! I still think Radio Amor is my favorite Hecker, though. Ravedeath is a unique storm of an album; I can't think of anything that sounds like it. But Radio Amor just feels more unique, probably because it's the most human-sounding album from him I've heard so far.

Listen to Ravedeath, 1972 if you like stimulating music. There's some parts where the organ is screaming like fire on the side of a falling spacecraft. It's sick!!

[alexglower]

Deepchord Presents Echospace - Liumin (2010)

backlit airport LCD, up while everyone's asleep, neon sign behind some fog, modern techno travelogue

Ring the bell! We have another Alex-approved ambient classic on our hands. Numerous field recordings flatten urban Japan to little sonic Polaroids---trains rattle and pipes hiss and rain falls and crowds of people murmur in the background like relaxed spectators---that are then stacked so high as to become skyscrapers again, reconstructing the city like one of those digital mosaics where every piece is its own tiny photograph. On top of all these crackly sounds are the requisite "minimal techno" synth pads, thick in the middle and low ends so as to further muddy the already-impressionistic image.

This resulting huge mass is cut down to size by some unassuming yet powerful kick drums. They slice through the field recordings like God's knife through the Grand Canyon, laying bare the constituting layers so clearly that the whole sonic assemblage feels as minimal as any individual piece.

"Sidechain compression" is the name of this specific process, wherein one instrumental track (typically the one reserved for the kick drum) is used to periodically lower the volume of another track. Whenever the volume of Track A rises above a certain threshold, the volume of Track B quickly dips out, then fades back in.

Ambient music often utilizes fades, either to transition between sections of a song (as Éliane Radigue often did), or to fade in and out of the larger track itself. This latter use of fading positions the track as existing outside the listener's periphery, with the fade in being the moment the track happens to enter their view, and the fade out being the moment it leaves.

With sidechain compression, this fading process happens multiple times a second, as if the listener is being constantly reintroduced to the same track. That repetition, aside from easing the listener into a trance-like state, also encourages a person to see the composite parts of a track as they slide back into place. It's sort of like The Disintegration Loops, where layers of a sample are slowly stripped away through repetition, except much faster and in reverse: the track is rebuilt from the ground up over 120 times a minute.

The trance-like state is far from incidental. Liumin, being a sort of travelogue, makes extensive use of train noises, in particular the rattling of train tracks. This rhythmic shaking and thumping is like a non-techno techno song, and is utilized across Liumin as a rhythmic anchor. Like all techno, the driving force of the kick drum makes the listener feel like they're going somewhere, with the various train noises of course accentuating this. But Liumin doesn't offer much of a destination, instead luxuriating in that liminal space of travel.

I'm reminded of the seminal early ambient techno piece E2-E4, which Manuel Göttsching made on the fly and listened to on a personal trip. And I'm thinking of The KLF's Chill Out, which is like Liumin but for the English and American countrysides instead of Japan, complete with various train noises and throbbing techno beats.

Liumin is particularly fascinating to me in that it charts a clear progression from its stylistic predecessors. Techno is a genre beholden to technological progress. It is rigidly simple, and this simplicity is enhanced by new audio editing software in the way digital photography is enhanced by new cameras that can take pictures in 800k or something. Every new audio effect Ableton adds lets producers make their kick drums and synths even more specific, lets them carve out a space within the small niche that is four-on-the-floor minimal dance music. Liumin is a lot simpler than Chill Out, but it feels so much clearer for it.

"Pure" ambient, on the other hand, has been making lateral moves for many years up to this point. It's largely idea- and vibes-based, so the only barrier to making something "new" is coming up with a new idea, an idea that typically could have been realized had it come about any time in the past decade. Ambient music released in 1990 and ambient music released in 2000 can sound very different, but that doesn't mean the music from 2000 sounds more "advanced," just that the two pieces are based on different ideas.

So all of this is to say that Liumin is an amazing album. It's futuristic and liminal and all the other buzzwords. Listen to this if you love trains or Place, Japan.

[alexglower]

Black Mountain Transmitter - Black Goat of the Woods (2009)

music for an imaginary horror flick

I almost didn't do a write-up for this album! J.R. Moore / Black Mountain Transmitter doesn't seem to be a recluse, but he also doesn't have a Wikipedia page. He may as well not even be real. One of the few articles about his work I could dig up provided a hyperlink to an excellent and invaluable piece. Or at least the source article made the piece sound good---their link now gives a 404.

I did locate one good interview, which thankfully provided the only information I need to understand this album: Moore is a fan of horror movies! Which explains why Black Goat of the Woods sounds like a 70s soundtrack (Moore cites Tangerine Dream as an influence) and even, as one review points out, begins and ends with a few minutes of "conventional" music as if scoring the credits for a film.

The sounds in between scratch my horror itch. I don't particularly want to be scared (though I don't mind it), but I am infatuated with scary vibes. Stuff like this album is perfect for me. Black Goat of the Woods is probably intended to be scary, but not to scare, if that makes sense. It borrows the aesthetics of spooky soundtracks without stepping over the line to deliver loud jumpscares. It may make you wary of long shadows, but it won't make you want to cry (like I did when I watched my first horror movie at a young age).

It's also a really fun throwback to 70s ambient, with all its beeps, bloops, and lightly-peaking echo effects. And it thankfully lacks the over-zealousness that characterizes a few of that era's landmark releases (I am not a big Tangerine Dream fan...), perfectly serving as a Halloween Vibes Dispenser.

If you're looking for some music to play before a midnight slasher screening, this is it!

[alexglower]

Natural Snow Buildings - Daughter of Darkness (2009)

seven-hour demon-summoning ritual

It was hard for me... This is a seven-hour, five or six disc (depending on where you look) album. I may have a longer attention span than when I first started diving into ambient music, but it isn't long enough to get through this whole project in one sitting, even if one review I read said that's the definitive way to experience it. I got through two discs in half-hour- to hour-long bursts, before bed and at the gym. Then I dropped it. I am very ashamed and hope you can forgive me...

Why wasn't I a fan? There's quite of a bit of distortion on these acoustic drones, but it sounds stuck at a crossroads between "light warmth" and "intense fuzz," to the point where it evokes neither. The textures here don't do anything for me except make me feel like I should be intimidated or scared or something, without actually generating those feelings.

The only discomfort I felt came from the lack of direction in these songs. The other Natural Snow Buildings album I heard, The Winter Ray, had stylistic shake-ups a few times per hour. Daughter of Darkness takes a lot longer to reach an intermission, and it's not telegraphed in the slightest, so listening to these tracks felt like staring down an endless barrage of mild annoyance.

Now the asides begin!

In writing this, I briefly perused some of these tracks again and came to the conclusion that they're actually not so bad. I couldn't write as much about why they're good because I don't have it in me to listen again, but that first-listen vs. second-listen dynamic is pretty interesting.

For me, I use a first listen to wrap my head around what it is I'm even listening to. For structured genres like pop, I also use it to get a grasp on hooks and song structures. The second listen is where I willingly immerse myself in a record. Knowing where it's taking me is part of the fun. There's a difference between listening to a very slow, very long record when you know how it's changing and where it's going (like Éliane Radigue's Trilogie de la Mort) and listening to a very slow, very long record that leaves you fruitlessly guessing every second. It's about trust. Can I trust this album to hum along in the background? Do I need to pay active attention? What should I be doing?

I realize this is a pretty restrictive way of looking at art, one that totally shuts out many live improvisational performances, and also one that probably reveals me to be a fundamentally anxious person. If there's any lesson to be learned here, it's probably that I should open myself up to surprises or something...

As luck would have it, this album has at least one surprise! Among the songs I listened to, there's one that cools everything down substantially ("Body Double") before slowly easing the listener back in to the fray. And it was euphoric! After however long of slightly painful music that I did not enjoy at all, a reprieve was more than welcome. Not just any reprieve, either, but a "legitimate" one. Ambient music exists (or at least endeavors to exist) beyond the listener's experience of it. It often tries to evoke the physical or spectral. If I gave myself a break from the music by simply taking my headphones off (as I did many times because I listened in many sittings), the break would not be "real." The music would still rage on outside of my perception. Only when the music itself quiets down can I get actual relief.

The final thing I've been chewing on is that I wouldn't have liked the calm bit of the album nearly as much if I didn't dislike the other parts. I firmly believe that art can conjure any emotion and still be worthy of existing, even if those emotions are dull or painful. Comedies are fun to watch, but sad dramas can be good too, blah blah blah. I just never before considered that "dislike" could be one such valid emotion. I guess if it's intended (I believe I read an article where the Natural Snow Buildings peeps said they didn't mind their music being overly long or hard to listen to), then it's not an inherent failing. Maybe this album is fine-tuned to intentionally avoid the "easy routes" of soft ambiance or intense catharsis? Maybe the grating middle ground vibe is on purpose?

As an occasional music and film reviewer, I'm pretty used to reading my dislike of something as a negative reflection of its worth, but this whole thing has me reconsidering what "worth" even means. Why note tonal inconsistencies and pacing issues in a movie if none of that means anything, if it's valid art regardless, if my petty dislike is actually a rich experience in this complex tapestry we call life? I guess "like" and "dislike" are arbitrary qualifiers we pair with certain emotions, and just because I added "painful catharsis" to my Like List doesn't mean I fully escaped the false dichotomy of binary rating...

All this circles back to the idea that basically nothing has any inherent meaning, which is true, but also makes life no fun. So I'm going to go back to pretending that there's meaning to reviews for at least a little while longer.

Listen to this album if you want to experience something interesting in the short time you have before you die!

[alexglower]

James Ferraro - Last American Hero / Adrenaline's End (2008)

late-night broadcast, bikers, big deserts

In concept, this album represents the mid-2000s upper middle class and the hellish purgatory in which they roamed. The use of bluesy guitars—none of which are sampled, apparently!—gives Last American Hero a Wild West twang, like tumbleweeds are about to start rolling down the aisles of Ikea. I think the "point" is to contrast the machismo of old Americana with the reality of easy, constant, on-demand consumerism. You can't be a cowboy in a gated community.

A heavy dose of tape degradation (saturation, compression, the usuals) makes everything extra "nostalgic." It's a trick that could come off cheap but for some reason doesn't, and I have a hard time understanding why. Maybe it's because James Ferraro was doing nostalgic reflections on his then-present moment, rather than editorializing something from decades previous. Maybe it's because the album feels disposable, like something you'd pluck from the bargain bin, itself contributing to the vast churning sea of American consumption. It all feels very intentional, but not demanding.

Consumerism is really the name of the game here. It's probably true that in 24 hours the same amount of people eat at McDonalds as attend church. Ferraro asks, "What if we treated the Big Mac like we do Jesus Christ?" He commits to the bit so he can show us our own absurd fealty to corporations/products/things.

That theme isn't as prominent on this specific album as it is on other Ferraro releases, but it's still there if you listen. The raspy audio quality and occasional sonic "jump-cuts" bring to mind staticy late-night television. Think of the junk that would get thrown in the post-midnight slots, stuff that didn't need to be interesting because there were practically no viewers—media waste, basically. Or think of driving down long stretches of highway with a radio playing endless pop songs and advertisements, struggling to maintain a signal from one gas station to the next. Last American Hero's repetition of motifs without catharsis represents this junk, represents the stuff we get inundated with during our every waking moments, all the products and monocultural slogans and whatnot on all the billboards on all the highways etc etc etc.

I'm starting to feel a bit crazy typing this all out, so it's about time I wrap up! Give this album a listen if you're nostalgic for the real 2000s...

[alexglower]

Grouper - Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill (2008)

limited palette of vocals and guitar, sometimes there are lyrics, hazy but textured, kind of reminds me of pine needles

Grouper is in some way "singer-songwriter music," in that Liz Harris is a singer, a songwriter and the one person making up Grouper, but her writing and singing is merely the background for her greater style. Like a lot of ambient music, the main artistry happens in editing her recordings. Harris typically stacks many takes together and adds a good helping of reverb until the material underneath all that obscuring might as well be anyone saying anything. Dragging a Dead Deer was apparently her most intelligible album at the time of its release–and by a wide margin, too!–yet I challenge you to create a lyrics sheet for it with no "[?]"s. Reading the Genius lyrics for some of these songs feels like I'm watching people interpret "backronyms" (those supposed hidden messages in reversed pop songs).

The effect is that the album feels like something heard between waking and sleeping, just melodically focused enough to turn on that "I'm listening to a song someone wrote" part of your brain, but vague enough that you won't need to think too hard. But it's not some calm, uncomplicated thing. I read one piece that mentioned impressionism and the pain that comes with not recognizing a representation of something. Every effort to obscure the music makes it a little more painful, a little more nostalgic (hopefully I don't need to bring up that Mad Men quote about nostalgia and pain). This album could easily lull you to sleep, but it would be quite the turbulent slumber.

What interested me most when researching this album was Harris's approach to making music. The cloaking of her voice behind reverb—and her identity behind a stage name—is all intentional; she comes across very ego-averse in interviews. She even talks about songs like they're not entirely her own creations, but rather sounds she just so happens to be the one organizing. She makes it clear that her music is not a diary of her present circumstances, and she frequently populates albums with songs recorded in different decades of her career. Simile warning: it's like each track she makes is an orphan she's temporarily fostering until she can find it a good home. And it's not a exactly a fun process–she's compared releasing music to blood-letting, releasing ghosts, and sinking something heavy into the deep. I imagine every bad external force that's applied to her gets funneled through her musician brain and slowly, painfully excised every few years.

I think in another millennium, Liz Harris would be considered some sort of psychic, receiving unwelcome visions and stuff of that nature. But since we live in 2024 and I don't believe in any of that, I see it differently. Obviously, she's actively writing these songs, and not receiving them via magic. She talks about photographs, films and ideas that inspire her, so there's at least part of her that's a traditional songwriter. But I think creativity is instinctual to her, maybe even compulsive, and that's the thorny aspect.

I feel the same way a lot of the time. I don't want to harp on this for too long because at the end of the day it's not about me, but death is on my mind a lot. Like always. There's no philosophy I can intellectually support that says making music will prolong my life via legacy, but it's certainly the feeling I have when I write/produce. It's pointless and sisyphean, but I do it anyway. Much like dragging a dead deer up a hill! I brought it full circle in the end.

Anyway, listen to this album if you like shoegaze and stuff of that sort. It's not shoegaze, but it has that same feeling!

[alexglower]

If you like fat boys hit that mfing reblog