In the 42 years since Brian Eno’s release of Music for Airports our understanding of ‘ambient’ has developed and changed, musically, sociologically and environmentally. Although it has some stylistic qualities - such as generally slow paced; a tonal or modal framework; fragmented melody lines; use of drones; a singular ‘atmosphere’ - using combinations of these features can result in widely divergent music.

Liner notes for Music for Airports by Brian Eno

The concept of music designed specifically as a background feature in the environment was pioneered by Muzak Inc. in the fifties, and has since come to be known generically by the term Muzak. The connotations that this term carries are those particularly associated with the kind of material that Muzak Inc. produces—familiar tunes arranged and orchestrated in a lightweight and derivative manner. Understandably, this has led most discerning listeners (and most composers) to dismiss entirely the concept of environmental music as an idea worthy of attention.

Over the past three years, I have become interested in the use of music as ambience, and have come to believe that it is possible to produce material that can be used thus without being in any way compromised. To create a distinction between my own experiments in this area and the products of the various purveyors of canned music, I have begun using the term Ambient Music.

An ambience is defined as an atmosphere, or a surrounding influence: a tint. My intention is to produce original pieces ostensibly (but not exclusively) for particular times and situations with a view to building up a small but versatile catalogue of environmental music suited to a wide variety of moods and atmospheres.

Whereas the extant canned music companies proceed from the basis of regularizing environments by blanketing their acoustic and atmospheric idiosyncracies, Ambient Music is intended to enhance these. Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities. And whereas their intention is to `brighten’ the environment by adding stimulus to it (thus supposedly alleviating the tedium of routine tasks and levelling out the natural ups and downs of the body rhythms) Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and a space to think.

Ambient Music must be able to accomodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.

BRIAN ENO September 1978

What has changed?

What exactly has changed in our understanding of ambient music? In the liner notes for Music for Airports Brian Eno wrote “… Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities”. This sense of "doubt and uncertainty" originally ascribed to ambient music is now being reintroduced by modern composers using fragility to disrupt and provoke the generally accepted innocuous nature of ambient music.

What critical aesthetical insights from the past 42 years can be drawn on to inform contemporary ambient music? The music of Eliane Radigue provides an intense listening experience and the ‘slow change music’ of Laurie Spiegel allows

… the listener to go deeper and deeper inside of a single sustained texture or tone […] The aesthetic aim is to provide sufficiently supportive continuity that the ear can relax its filters […] The violence of sonic disruption, disjunction, discontinuity and sudden change desensitizes the listener and pushes us away so we are no longer open to the subtlest sounds. But with continuity and gentleness, the ear becomes increasingly re-sensitized to more and more subtle auditory phenomena within the sound that immerses us […] we open up our ears more and more to the more minute phenomena that envelop us. This is also not “ambient music”, a term that came into use some years later. This is music for concentrated attention, a through-composed musical experience, though of course it also can be background

Eno encouraged the emphasis on active listening and reflection, writing that, “[…] the message of ambient music for me was that this is a music that should be located in life, not in opposition to life. It shouldn’t be something for blanking things out or for covering things up”

Fragility

Fragility can be thought of as a state of tension in ambient music where the sounds ‘failure’ is offset by its continued temporal movement forward. We will investigate Material fragility, Technological fragility, Temporal fragility and Gestalt.

This fragility gives a sense of both beauty and danger. Oliver Thurley writes:

A musical situation may be considered fragile if the normal functionality of a sound – or the means of its production – is somehow destabilized and placed at risk of collapse. Fragility, then, can be understood as a precarious state in which sound is rendered frangible and susceptible to being destroyed or disrupted. To compose a fragile sound or musical event would therefore involve organizing a system either a) vulnerable to disruption by some small external force, or b) positioned upon an unstable foundation such that the system collapses under its own weight.

Material fragility

Today, our music is generally supplied in digital form so we enter willingly into the deceit that the music is somehow fragile. The ‘failure’ could be an old instrument, tape machine, or in the case of Stephan Mathieu and Taylor Deupree’s Transcriptions - 78 rpm records and wax cylinders. The ‘fragility’ is personified through the depiction of dementia by increasingly fragmented old dance hall records in The Caretaker’s Everywhere at the End of Time which was discussed here. In the case of William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, the magnetic tape actually does ‘die’ as it disintegrated whilst looping during the transfer from analogue to digital.

The potential for damage to the object or instrument used in sound production gives a fragility which creates the tension experienced by the listener. Deupree states that:

I often make my music balance on the edge of fragility, which comes from a specific design of the sounds and the composition. When it’s successful you have this very gentle, hushed music that has a lot of tension in it. It’s a very strange, but effective contrast. The tension keeps you engaged, in a way fearful that at any minute it’s going to fall apart, while the gentle qualities can relax you and ease that tension. It’s playing with this dichotomy that I find the most interesting music can live

Technological fragility

We can hear technological fragility in the pitch warping of tape loops, hiss, wow, flutter and dropouts of many pieces. Good examples would be The Caretaker Everything at the End of Time: Stage 2 or Taylor Deupree and Marcus Fischer Twine

Very often these days ‘false noise’ is added to le bruit de fond giving a faux patina of age and fragility, heard often as record cracks and pops which also skilfully plays the nostalgia card.

Burial describes his methods of creating tension in his pieces like this:

I like putting uplifting elements in something that’s moody as fuck. Make them appear for a moment, and then take them away. That’s the sound I love… like embers in the tune… little glowing bits of vocals… they appear for a second, then fade away and you’re left with an empty, sort of air-duct sound… something that’s eerie and empty. Like you’re waiting just inside a newsagent in the rain… a little sanctuary, then you walk out in it. I love that

Temporal Fragility

The slow moving, repeated loops set out to destabilize the listeners perception of time. It becomes difficult to pick out moments to orientate their fragile listening experience. To render any changes almost imperceptible the pieces move very slowly with examples like William Basinki’s Disintegration Loops lasting around 5 hours and The Caretaker’s Everywhere at the End of Time lasting 6.5 hours

Gestalt

The listener is disorientated by isolated pitches or fragments of a suggested melody being presented, often isolated across the stereo field and using different pitches which imply multiple auditory streams progressing simultaneously.

Temporal connections are stretched so the musical line is difficult to track and the listener is left with a melodic line in which quasi-traditional polyphonic melodic syntax is implied but never actually stated. A beautiful example of this process can be found in Taylor Duepree’s Fallen album