Several years ago I was in Miami on business and the city was out of rooms so I was put up at a very exclusive hotel. I don’t know how much a room was but we are talking in thousands a night.
In my room, ambient music played 24/7. At first I didn’t notice it, and then I barely noticed it, and finally it began to make me uneasy -I was trying to ignore me and the sound of waves and maybe whales commingling.
Reminded me of Music for Airports.
A huge Eno fan at the time, I listened to it incessantly and, in the end, was obsessed and indifferent to it. I can see how dance is utilitarian and I can see how muzak is utilitarian but ambient plays so deep in the background it is almost like a dog whistle, like a different frequency.
I am not a huge fan of Eno any more
It has been a long time since Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy.
And I can’t take those deep sounding U2 productions he does: it is like when you throw everything into a stew, it ends up tasting like nothing. Well when you throw infinite layers of sound on to a track it all sludges out; it sounds like nothing. Like U2.
Even that recent David Byrne collab was a drag.
But his new one, a return to ambient Small Craft On A Milk Sea, currently streaming on NPR, is pretty excellent. It is all of a piece the way you might think, it repays listening in a different way because it isn’t all recorded on the same sound level sounds come to the forefront. A concept I would consider at odds with ambient music except I didn’t invent it, Eno did.
By the time you are half way thru the album it seems as if there are airbrushes and violin strings me scissor fucked in unison and the tension it is mean to be controlling is beginning to uncoil. We are not discussing metal machine here: it plays too well low and it isn’t about vibrations (again, but again what do I know), but still it is music with a set use meant to play on, help me Alyson, not the front lobe of your brain.
And if it is meant to sooth, it doesn’t. And if it is meant to continue from On Land it doesn’t.
But it is up to something and it is worth listening to or just playing out somewhere else while you wonder why your sense are feeling so edgy.
PS remind me to tell you the story of Eno, Michael J. Pollard (you know, from “Bonnie And Clyde”) and a very tall, very beautiful transvestite one very long, very very drugged up night at CBGB’s.