A CROSS-GENRE AMBIENT MUSIC PRIMER

1. Brian Eno Ambient 1/ Music for Airports (pure ambient)

I've got to start at the beginning with the CD that defines the movement. Music for Airports consists of 4 instrumental pieces, ranging from 8-17 minutes in length. Furthermore, the two middle pieces are variations on exactly the same tune. This is piano/ synthesizer music. There are no drums. Eno went on to make more CD's in this ambient series, but none match the simple beauty of this first one. I have easily listened to Music for Airports over 1,000 times. Everyone I know loves this CD – parents, punk rock friends, my wife, my dog, etc. It is the only CD of mine that my wife misses when I take it to work. Even though melodic beauty is not supposed to be an ambient criterion, this CD is a classic due to the strength of these tunes and the "floating-peacefully-about-the-rings-of-Saturn" mood that they invoke.

2. Vangelis Blade Runner Soundtrack (film music)

Vangelis's soundtrack is in many respects just an orchestrated rip off of the last song on Music for Airports, but so what? More of the same great stuff can only be a good thing. Plus, listening to this soundtrack reminds me of the movie, which incidentally is the quintessential ambient movie of all times. Why else would people watch it over and over and over and over again? (I might as well take this opportunity to mention that The Phantom Menace is best viewed as an ambient movie. Go and see it again with stadium seating and surround sound, disregard the acting and the plot, and just get immersed in the film's environment. Pay attention to the fine details – room furniture, costumes, etc. Then close your eyes and just listen for a while. Why every movie has to be as well acted as Rain Man is beyond me. Some movies aren't about acting, just as some music isn't about lyrics. But I digress.)

3. Miles Davis/Bill Laswell Panthalassa (jazz/funk)

For this project, producer Bill Laswell got his hands on a bunch of Miles Davis master tapes from Miles's electric/funk phase, and Laswell remixed/retreated them. What "remixed/retreated" entails is not very clear. All I know is that these newly remixed songs sound much more reverby and roomy, and much less like the theme from Good Times, which is an improvement in my opinion. Davis at one point had two Rhodes electric piano players in his band, plus numerous exotic percussion players, a sitarist, an electric guitarist, etc. So beneath Davis' lead trumpet (ambient enough in and of itself by this point in his career), his beast of a band was constantly swirling up a foundational cosmic drone brew. Laswell has accentuated this brew and brought it forward in the mix, so that even the flat-out funk stuff has an off-planet groove. You might say that Laswell has released Davis' repressed ambience, an ambience that wasn't ready to fully disclose itself yet in the proto-disco, strobe-lit era of Sly and the Family Stone. Lying more toward the "blaring headphones" end of the ambient scale, you could still compose a short term paper on plate tectonics while listening to Panthalassa.

4. My Bloody Valentine Loveless (alternative pop)

Loveless is my all-time favorite CD, ambient or otherwise. There are pop rock bands and there are ambient noise bands but very rarely are there both. (Nope, Sonic Youth is ultimately merely a pop rock band.) Someone described this CD as the loudest silence they've ever heard. That's a good one. How can something be so loud and so soft at the same time? Layered translucence? Loveless is so pretty in its own context that your parents might like it, but put some of it on a compilation tape next to any other song, and you'll be adjusting your car stereo to make sure your speaker wires aren't loose. There are many cool theorists who make crappy music, and there are plenty of cool musicians who accidentally rock but really don't know what they're talking about. But MBV's Kevin Shields is the man. Anyway, this is the best piece of recorded music in the history of mankind. That's all.

5. The Future Sound of London Lifeforms (techno)

A double CD of armchair techno music. You can't dance to it, but it's too sythesizer-filled to mellow out to. It doesn't rock; it doesn't groove. But man if you want to go driving around rural southern Alabama at night and have a trippy mental experience, Lifeforms is your ticket to outer space. I like the Future Sound of London because they're not as redundant as most other techno bands, and because they write pretty tunes. It just all flows together like one big futuristic blur. This CD sounds like that moment when you begin to lose track of a conversation in the other room right before you're about to fall asleep; but the CD doesn't just last for an instant, it lasts all night. Sound familiar? Well, I guess not.

6. Arvo Part Tablula Rasa (classical)

People have called the music of this contemporary Russian Orthodox composer minimalistic, but it's not. Although Part's music is sparse, it's sparse for reasons not dictated by minimalism. Part himself calls his music tintinnabulation, inspired by the resonant overtones of simultaneously ringing bells. The first Arvo Part piece I ever heard was "Fratres." I went to a Kronos string quartet concert because I knew they did a version of "Purple Haze," and I had to check it out. I was sitting with all my cool friends on the front row and Kronos played "Fratres" right before their break. I began weeping, and I couldn't talk. My friends kept asking me what was wrong, but I couldn't stop crying and I couldn't talk. Conviction had found me again. Tabula Rasa to me is Part's greatest ambient CD, less choral and more orchestral. It sounds like the broken heart of God. Equidistantly resonant. Epically subtle. Beautiful sad music. Much better than "Purple Haze."

7. Neil Young Dead Man Soundtrack (classic rock/ film music)

I never saw the Jim Jarmusch film that this music is from, but it seems pretty pretentious and cheezy. Every other song on Dead Man has excerpts from the film, mostly just Johnny Depp catatonically rambling on with music in the background. Consequently, I pre-program this CD to skip over all that junk. What's left is just Neil Young playing a single whacked-out electric guitar (with the occasional pump organ thrown in for good measure). Dead Man was recorded around the same time Young was recording Mirror Ball with Pearl Jam, and Young's bassy guitar tone is similar on both albums. His guitar echoes, it delays, it reverberates, it distorts, it feedbacks, it strains, and it murmurs. But mostly it echoes. These tunes are really more like unfinished riffs, or pre-tunes. Still, 25% of a Neil Young song over and over again is far better than 100% of most other songs any day. Similar melodic themes reoccur throughout, as you would expect on a movie soundtrack. Dead Man is one of the few truly ambient classic rock CD's I know. Leave it to Neil Young to rock on Mars.

8. U2 The Unforgettable Fire (top 40)

This CD has one famous song, "Pride (In the Name of Love)," and that's it.

The Unforgettable Fire was recorded in a stone castle and produced very muddily and bass-ily by, you guessed it, Brian Eno. Consequently, the album was not a radio success, since top 40 is all about bright crisp music. But The Unforgettable Fire remains my favorite U2 CD. These aren't the best U2 songs, but the album taken as a whole is more than the sum of its parts. A powerful mood is constructed, and it hangs there for you to return to and curl up in at any given time. The album's mood is less "hovering-above-the-rings-of-Saturn" and more "soaring-over-the-moors-of-Heatherton." I vote this CD most likely to be the soundtrack to a post-modern production of Wuthering Heights.

Ambient music is for people who listen to music closely, frequently and in a multitude of contexts. If you find yourself surrounded by music, and the CD's in your collection are losing their flavor, ambient music may just be your best music value (check local listings for details). I wouldn't listen to ambient music non-stop for months on end, but if I had to listen to only one style of music non-stop for months on end, it would be ambient music. If you can't move laterally, you can always drill down deeper. And isn't that what it's all about anyway?

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