Wesleyan University Ambient Music by Eliot Bates A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Wesleyan University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Middletown, Connecticut May 7, 1997 Table of Contents Introduction and Acknowledgements . . . . 3 Part 1: trajectories and composers Introduction . . . . . . . . 13 Chapter 1. trajectories . . . . . . . 14 2. ambient composer personalities . . . . 61 Part 2: listeners and experiences Introduction . . . . . . . . 97 3. the ambient community . . . . . 98 4. the ambient experience . . . . . 122 Part 3: analysis Introduction . . . . . . . . 154 5. the compositional process . . . . 156 6. self-reflective case study . . . . . 180 Afterword . . . . . . . . 204 Appendix a. bibliography . . . . . . 208 b. discography . . . . . . 213 c. glossary . . . . . . . 219 d. selected Internet articles . . . . . 226 © 1997 Eliot Bates 2 The Ambient Belief System an Introduction I wanted to make a kind of music that existed on the cusp between melody and texture, and whose musical logic was elusive enough to reward attention, but not so strict as to demand it. (Brian Eno, from the liner notes to Neroli, 1993) Brian Eno and many other composers work in a style that fans call “dark ambient music.” As a commercial category, it enjoyed widespread recognition only in the last few years, but it dates back to 1972 and Eno’s and Robert Fripp’s No Pussyfooting, the first self-described ambient album. Contemporaneous with Eno’s experiments with “sonic wallpaper” (his term for ambient music), the industrial culture movement in England was underway, experimenting with noise, shock, and auto-destructive art, and British progressive rock and psychedelia were breaking down the traditional rock band format and moving beyond the three-minute pop song format. What ties these three movements together is that they all came out of the British art schools of the late 1960’s and early 1970s; that they were intellectual and highly planned; and that the artists involved worked in isolation -- from each other and their fans. Dark ambient music, which I will simply call “ambient” or “ambient music” hereafter, thus has a rich twenty five-year history of theory and philosophy, a reflection of the varied visual, sonic and written art of the art schools. Not all of ambient’s developments originated in Britain, however. In © 1997 Eliot Bates 3 Germany, the U.S. and Canada, the source of key experimental rock groups, the genre known as “space music” developed in tandem with ambient. In New York City, minimalist composers were integrating concepts from Indian raga, experimental intonation systems, and electronic synthesis into long meditative performances. As the compositional form of ambient music continues to evolve, there have been changes in the way fans discuss the music. Debates over what works are ambient have led many fans to conceive of the genre as a way of listening to music, rather than an established canon of compositions. In describing this, some fans mention listening rituals, altered states of consciousness, and firmly held theories about the power of the music to communicate visual imagery. In addition to studying ambient music as a compositional form, I will also present it as a belief system, and my term “ambient belief system” refers to the rituals, beliefs, and sacred history that surround ambient music. First, I attempt to make some sense of the musical origins of ambient music, which are broader than what I described above. Chapter 1 defines six “trajectories,” which start from a cluster of musicians working in a subcultural music scene and trace their paths and ideas as they are transformed into a component of the ambient belief system. Here I also trace the history of music recording, looking critically at issues such as Walter Benjamin’s concept of musical “aura,” the debate over sampling and musical theft in other musical forms; this sets the stage for ambient composers’ justification for their compositional techniques. Chapter 2 profiles six major composers, selected © 1997 Eliot Bates 4 primarily because of the significant amount of information on them in print. The mystique surrounding their work and personal lives mirrors their compositions and creative techniques, and to understand their appeal to fans I have suggested how each represents a certain “archetype.” In chapter 3 I look at the fan base of ambient music, including a basic ethnography and the results of surveys conducted on the Internet. A detailed profile of one ambient listener is also included. A tantalizing mystique surrounds the possibility that ambient music induces altered states of consciousness, particularly those thought of as “waking dreams.” Chapter 4 explores the rituals that listeners engage to attain these experiences as well as ambient music’s affinity with fantasy and science fiction literature and role playing games. As nothing exists in print on the structure of ambient music or the studio techniques that are used to create it, in chapter 5 I propose why it is so difficult to analyze and offer six sample analyses of important pieces. Much of the production is hush-hush, so I can work only with my anecdotes and my own knowledge of the recording studio. Chapter 6 is a case study of my own music, which I believe parallels some of the compositional structures of better known ambient composers. This thesis is the most recent work in a lineage of subcultural studies of postmodern popular music genres, although, as I will demonstrate, ambient music relates differently to the mainstream than other better-studied subcultures do. The main studies referenced for the construction of this work are Sarah Thornton’s Club Cultures, a look into the British underground club © 1997 Eliot Bates 5 scenes of the 1980’s; Simon Frith and Howard Horne’s Art Into Pop, which gives an excellent history of the British art school scene and the emergence of punk rock from these roots; and David Toop’s Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds, conceived as an aural history of the twentieth century and which includes a number of interviews with ambient, dub, and jazz musicians.1 A major inspiration for my composer profiles were the excellent examples of cross-cultural micromusics and the studies of bimusicality in Mark Slobin’s Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West. One way in which this work differs from the works listed above -- and the main problem in organizing this thesis -- is that the ambient music scene is not dead yet. In fact, it probably has not even peaked! Thornton’s work is an invaluable study of the trendy club scene of London and how localized movements such as acid house come -- and go. The retrospective Art Into Pop looks at the already passé British punk rock movement, and many of the composers profiled in Ocean of Sound are no longer alive but live on in print and CD re-issues. At the point of publication of this thesis, almost all the artists are still composing ambient music, and they continue to work (as do their fans) in an anarchistic and non-deterministic environment. It is still possible to see the incongruities of the ambient music belief system. For example, there is the tricky relationship between the purported non-commercialism of the artists and 1 Two other popular music monographs consulted as sources in subcultural studies were Robert Walser’s Running With the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music and © 1997 Eliot Bates 6 the fact that they make their living by selling CD’s; there is also the discrepancy between the living naturalistic experiences that happen in bedrooms around the world and the mass-produced disc of binary information that is created in an artificially inseminated recording studio. I imagine that as ambient music fades into memory these discrepancies will be erased. This thesis, in part, delights in the chance to witness the unpredictable evolution of a living musical form. Personal history with ambient As this thesis is in part a personal reflection on the aspects of life that have inspired me to compose and listen to ambient music, it is appropriate to describe something of my background in it. My initial musical impulses were fired by my parents’ passionate interest in Scott Joplin ragtime and Bartok string quartets. We went to many ragtime and new music concerts, and at age nine I remember writing my first piano composition -- a crude piano representation of a hummingbird sound. The ambient sounds of nature interested me intensely from an early age, and living close to a large national forest and the expansive Pacific Ocean provided an vast array of natural sounds. I first heard composed ambient music in the late 1980’s, on the college radio station KCSB. They broadcast several space music shows and also the syndicated “Music From the Hearts of Space,” featuring space music, new age, Martin Stokes’ The Arabesk Debate: Music and Musicians in Modern Turkey, which are about heavy metal and Turkish pop music, respectively. © 1997 Eliot Bates 7 and the ambient music of Brian Eno and David Sylvian. By the time I was a student at the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1990, I had heard a great deal of music in this vein and was interested in composing music based on “natural” structures. A chance roommate assignment in my sophomore year paired me up with my good friend Alex Donahue, who introduced me to the music of Jon Hassell, Steve Roach, and others. Together, we spent large portions of our college budgets on new ambient music CD’s and devoted all our free time to listening in a dark room, on headphones. We found out about interesting CD’s from two sources: tracing the musical lineages of ambient composers to see if they had collaborated on some rare recording with other interesting artists, creating complete collections of several artists’ work; or through the miraculous Internet, an oasis for obscure taste cultures such as the ambient music subculture. A simple query on the ambient newsgroup about peoples’ “favorite ambient albums that sound like Brian Eno” could generate dozens of eager responses. After much listening and two years of music composition lessons at U.C.S.B., I gained access to the electronic music labs and began working on several tape pieces. In one, I simulated various atmospheric phenomena, creating artificial representations of rain, thunder, hail, and the like. Other pieces, composed with the computer program “cmusic,” explored manipulations of the timbres of sampled trumpet and ambient sounds. I structured most of the pieces on existing models of Jon Hassell and Robert Fripp but used different timbres to construct the pieces. The culmination of my west coast involvement © 1997 Eliot Bates 8 in the ambient music scene was as a performer in an industrial band with ambient leanings. We performed on KCSB radio shows on several occasions and produced the soundtracks to two underground films. Our sound sources were mostly amplified gamelan instruments and electric guitar feedback, though we used distorted vocalization, too. These radio shows broadcast late at night and once ran past dawn, attracting a surprising number of listeners, most in altered states (either music-induced or drug-induced, we don’t know which). Their phone messages, quite incoherent in content, became excellent sound material for the radio show. The producer of the show, Jason Brown, has run an ambient program at KCSB for six years, and I am indebted to him for the insight he has provided in interviews, personal conversations, and musical collaboration. Since 1996, I have worked as an ambient DJ for the local radio station, WESU Middletown. I have also been hard at work in the electronic music studio at Wesleyan University, composing a number of pieces with samples of commercial recordings. The summer of 1996 in California was productive, as I discovered the music of dozens of obscure ambient groups, many of whom I am writing about in this thesis. I also made many recordings of ambient sounds, both “natural” (insects and frogs) and “industrial” (hums from factories, road construction noises) that will be incorporated into my next phase of compositions. I also began codifying the notions of the musical interest I find in ambient spaces, and I began intellectualizing about the unique nature of ambient music in terms of listenership and the listening “technique.” My © 1997 Eliot Bates 9 interest in writing this thesis is largely in refining my personal beliefs about the ability of ambient music to communicate through the subconscious; I also have a keen interest in how people perceive music and in how “nonmusical” sounds can become “musical.” Acknowledgments First I would like to thank Mark Slobin, my advisor, who has made this thesis happen in more ways than I can possibly recount. The intellectual questions he posed, the philosophy, popular music, and sociology texts which he introduced, and his tact in steering me away from dead-end issues were my inspiration to pursue ambient music to the end. I also thank three other Wesleyan professors who have given considerable help: Gage Averill, Peter Hoyt, and Ron Kuivila. Professor Hoyt coached me on romantic theory and tuned me in to the Memoirs of Berlioz, and Professor Kuivila’s course on recording raised some difficult questions of copyright, theft, authenticity, and aura. I am indebted to my mother, Caroline Bates, for the extensive editing and questioning she did of my first complete draft. Without her insightful critique and help on writing style, the ideas I had would have never gotten across. She was also always there to hear about some new “discovery” I had made (even when my discovery was really old hat). My father, too, offered © 1997 Eliot Bates 10