New Age or Ambient? An Experiment

My final prediction is she says, "it was...different", and probably avoids getting into music discussions with you in the future.

A) the mix...new age generally is very stingy with the bass frequencies, whereas ambient "soundbeds" are very bass-frequency friendly

B) the arrangements...new age tends to have very jazzist music "changes" often, whereas ambient music tends to take it's time with "changes" (I like to think of ambient as "the most patient genre")

She might not like it, she might consider it too "weird" or "spacey". This is my prediction.

What do I win if I'm right?

i think it's all what you do with it. if you wanna pull out your power crystals while listening to boards of canada, i suppose that's your right.

m.

Your coworker will remark that New Age generally relaxes her, but Kompakt's stuff generally didn't.

A: "New Age is ambient that pulls its punches."
B: "What punch would that be?"
A: "The punch of silence, of course."

So my guess is that she'd say something like: "It was pleasant-sounding, but it kept going on and on without changing, and there weren't any memorable melodies. Though I did like [insert her pick for most conventionally melodic track]."

I mean, does anyone who currently listens to "New Age" actually listen to ambient-soundscapey New Age? My impression of this stuff is that it's mostly meditative piano compositions and big highly-arranged "ethereal" world-pop productions.

No pleasing some people.

PURleeezzzze.

Re Pop Ambient 2001, she said, "It sounds really neat. It reminded me a lot of Ray Lynch. I have all his albums. Some of it seems like the kind of music that would be playing in the background to a movie, like something by Vangelis. Do you know him? It seems like it would be really hard to write about this music -- you would have to talk about the environment it makes you feel a part of, like 'This sounds like you're in a swamp' or whatever."

So there you have it from a New Age fan: Pop Ambient 2001 sounds like Ray Lynch mixed with a film score.

that's a really awesome response. i never get that much response when i loan people records.

I don't think I've laughed so hard all year. Thanx for the link!

This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Silje Zuno Vågshaug

This is from a review of a Laraaji album on Pitchfork:

Why has new age music floated back into the musical conversation? The answer is complicated. Reissue culture in general has kicked into overdrive, as music across the spectrum gets rediscovered and re-packaged at a pace we've never seen before. The line between ambient music with cultural cache (Eno, spacey krautrock) and relaxation tapes for the bourgeoisie has grown blurrier, not to mention the mainstreaming of yoga, locavore eating, and sustainable culture, all of which focus on the body and the senses as a ballast for data-driven digital reality. And there's also the fact that the idea of "functional music" in the playlist era has become so widely accepted. In this climate, it makes sense that mellow music designed for meditation and relaxation would wind its way back around.

Anyone on here wanna start a band that blurs the line between involuntary speech recordings with cultural cache (Robert Ashley, Plux Quba I guess) and ASMR??

were you inspired by the robert ashley review yesterday ?

Layered together, these four sonic elements—or characters in an opera, as Ashley saw them—have a proto-ASMR quality, textural and sensual.

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/robert-ashley-automatic-writing-improvement-don-leaves-linda/

haha, that's a funny coincidence, it looks like - the post above was from 14 hours ago, while the review was published 12 hours ago.

i think there's a really interesting space to make music that is based on unique, constantly changing biological signals. like this, for example:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/05/Quintephone_brainwave_regen_poster_colour.jpg

in practice, though, i find the experience of listening to those kinds of experiments to be disappointing. back when i aspired to be something more than human #6723011, i wanted to try to do something like that but with musical output that was pleasing to listen to (test: would the listener say "this is good! i like this music i'm listening to!" without knowing the process by which it was made?). obviously there have been tons of attempts and i've only listened to maybe 7 of them, so i'm sure i'm just missing it

(that's not a comment on ashley or automatic writing, btw, just on that kind of experimental music/art space)

haha, that's a funny coincidence, it looks like - the post above was from 14 hours ago, while the review was published 12 hours ago.

Right, i rarely read p4k and hadn't seen it, that is a funny coincidence. But the comparison of Automatic Writing to ASMR has been drawn plenty of times.

i think there's a really interesting space to make music that is based on unique, constantly changing biological signals. like this, for example

There's an old interview with Suzanne Ciani (since we're still vaguely on the subject of New Age music, i think) where she talks about working with synthesizers and says that she's really so interested in the color of a sound, she is more interested in the way a sound evolves over time. This might be from the radio interview on the FKR Logo Presentation Reels tape actually.
There's a confluence of the intention with the medium here: "music based on unique, constantly changing biological signals"- biological synthesis, and the "synthesizer". And this is something New Age music has often exploited, investigated and addressed. 'Music for the body', 'music for the spirit', etc.

in practice, though, i find the experience of listening to those kinds of experiments to be disappointing.

I think you may be conflating deliberation and experimentation here? 'High concepts' seem if anything to foster a more deliberate approach to making music.

really so interested in the color of a sound

*not* so interested

“Relaxation tapes for the bourgeoise” Omg please

in practice, though, i find the experience of listening to those kinds of experiments to be disappointing.

I think you may be conflating deliberation and experimentation here? 'High concepts' seem if anything to foster a more deliberate approach to making music.

i think of experimental music as music which leads to results which are uncertain. it's possible to be both very deliberate (in the design of the process) and experimental (not knowing exactly what's going to come out at the end of the process), and i would put music based on everchanging biological signals to be in that category. admittedly, i read 14 pages from a book by michael nyman on experimental music, in which he laid out a similar kind of thinking to differentiate between avant garde and experimental music (one has certain results, the other does not), and that's about the extent of my thinking. you're talking to a doofus here, in other words.

in either case though, i just meant that subjectively speaking, i am usually very interested in the concept of music created using the apparatus in the photo above, but find the musical results to be boring. not a new idea, i know, but in my more optimistic moods i think of that as a huge opportunity for someone to create something incredible

way off topic, but another hare-brained idea i have is that a lot of 20th century conceptual art/music was about pioneering new ways to do things, but many of those avenues were just barely explored before the artist moved on to the next new concept. maybe when the galactic population hits 35 trillion, there will be a sub-community of artists who revisit all of these ephemeral concepts and scrape all of the possible permutations out of them like peanut butter out of the bottom of a jar

i want to visit john cage's planet of Silence, where all the thought experiment vectors are followed to their logical ends

i think of experimental music as music which leads to results which are uncertain. it's possible to be both very deliberate (in the design of the process) and experimental (not knowing exactly what's going to come out at the end of the process)…

that sounds about right to me. i meant deliberate in the sense that the elements are controlled to produce a particular outcome. starting with a result in mind, etc.

you're talking to a doofus here, in other words.

nah

i am usually very interested in the concept of music created using the apparatus in the photo above, but find the musical results to be boring.

oh, i see- i didn't realize that was a music-making apparatus (whether in actuality or just hypothetically). yeah, there was this guy who made an fx pedal with a kind of scanner in it that 'translated' pictures into audio - that kind of thing. It failed on all levels, really. Didn't sound anything like the imagery and wasn't much to listen to... now I'm with you.

But... something like this where the guy started with the idea of translating Sottsass furniture into music, found confluences between his work and general midi instruments... and totally succeeded.

Another funny coincidence - I'm off to check out David Tudor's Rainforest thing at MoMA right now...