Review Summary: Ambient done right.
Just a quick online search for ambient music can result in a stack of records that cannot be listened to in a regular human being’s lifespan. Bandcamp offers 170 pages of ocean sounds, slowly developing -if you can even call it that- synth drones, and quiet washes of heavily processed guitars. YouTube forces three hour plus videos down your throat, with carefully constructed titles such as AMBIENT CHILLOUT LOUNGE RELAXING MUSIC, Ambient Study Music To Concentrate, and Miracle Tone Healing Delta Waves. It seems Ambient Music, in whatever flavour you are looking for, can be found everywhere. Many creators behind these hours and hours of sound collages seem to take quantity over quality too. And with monthly or even weekly release schedules, it is hard to imagine how artists can maintain a sense of quality throughout their output, regardless of whether that was even there to begin with. You get the feeling that they are in their attic, just twisting some knobs behind their laptop; a little bit of this, a little bit more of that: voil*, another album is done! And it’s three hours long! Who wouldn’t want that?
This bland sea of ambient music can partially be explained by user-based music sharing websites such as the aforementioned Bandcamp, or Soundcloud, that enable artists to release music without pesky labels filtering out the lower quality stuff. A side effect of this (of course occasionally wonderful) system is that many hours of music released under the ambient tag can feel particularly soulless and uninspired. After all, you do not need much more than some field recordings, and maybe some synths and a little tweaking, to produce a record in this genre. But what can you do to make it
good? Perhaps it is useful to look over our collective ambient shoulders and see what ambient albums did manage to stand the test of time.
Let’s have a look at Monolake, and their debut LP, Hongkong, which was released in 1997, in one of those iconic metal boxes of the Chain Reaction record label.
This album is classic in the genre, effortlessly blending ambient stretches with dub techno and minimal techno to form one coherent whole. And there we have the first point that becomes apparent: for an ambient record to stand out in a positive way, music with a sense of momentum is key. Each track here has a clear direction. As often is the case with techno music, patterns weave in and out of focus, with identities shifting constantly from one section to the next. On Honkong,
Index is a good example of this. Its beat provides the backbone, and just below this repetitious surface, synth lines move in and out of phase, ultimately ensuring that no section is the same as the ones that came before. There is a constant feeling of movement on this record, yet without losing that sacred trope in ambient music of repeating patterns, of long and seemingly homogenous tracks that stay well and truly in one mood throughout their runtime.
Lantau is another great example. Its bouncy sounding bass line repeats cycle after cycle, but with each iteration, slowly other sounds are added to the mix. Sometimes you do not even notice how much has changed, yet when you skip back to a previous section you can clearly hear the difference.
The album is diverse too. The diversity here can at least partially be explained by the fact that this album consists of a collection of four singles, which were welded together with field recordings of a trip to Hongkong. Yet however they achieved this, it seems that this is our second point: finding the right balance between diversity and repetition.
Whereas
Occam has a booming 4/4 beat, exemplary of so many techno tracks,
Arte instead opts for a sound that can almost be described as krautrock. And later on,
Mass Transit Railway discards beats altogether. This track certainly is an album highlight, and one of the best examples of what ambient music can achieve when done right. In a truly spectacular fashion Monolake just let the music breathe, and in doing so, they create an incredible amount of space. The confidence with which they stretch out the synth washes on which the track leans is astounding. They create an hypnotizing tidal-like effect by allowing a whopping 25 seconds for each cycle of just those two drawn out, parabolic synth notes, with what feels like an immense chasm of silence in between. This strong foundation creates so much tension that it could have been enough on its own. Yet Monolake do not stop there, adding a layer of effects that keep on evolving, and without even noticing it seven minutes have passed by and the album has come to a close.
Surely
that is how you do it.
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Monolake here are Robert Henke and Gerhard Behles. Around the time of release, they cofounded Ableton, the software company behind Ableton Live, with Bernd Roggendorf. Later, Henke would be the sole mind behind Monolake.
