What Ambient Music Means To Me #1
Ambient music plays many crucial roles in my life.
It’s through ambient music’s slow, spacious and careful attention to detail that I’m able to slow down and pay attention to the present moment. In other words, ambient music is a way for me to achieve mindfulness.
Ambient music also echoes many of the traits and virtues I feel are essential for living in the modern world. For example, ambient music is warm, inclusive and inviting. It is often composed of field recordings of wind, footsteps on snow, rain, and animals calls. It brings the outside world in and celebrates it. It invites you to listen, to pay attention, and to hear what the world sounds like in a patient, non-judgmental way.
In the over-compressed, intrusive world of dance, hard rock, metal and pop genres, all of which scream for attention, ambient music is quiet and thoughtful. Its persuasion is subtle and gradual. Chords gradually shift and morph, like clouds in an ever-changing sky. Something twinkles at the corners of the stereo field. Then there’s a creak — the lid of a piano opens. The microphone is so close that we can hear the depression of the keys moments before the reverberating next chord. There are rarely focal points in ambient music, but there are always emotions and themes. Joy and loss, growth and entropy. All of these are examined with sensitivity, compassion and introspection.
Rather than be selfishly motivated, ambient music focuses on you, the listener, with clear and simple aims: to help you relax, to consider, to slow down, to pay attention, to feel the light on your skin, or the wind on your face. Ambient music is a reassuring voice close to my ear, whispering that everything is going to be fine. Slower is fine. Slower is good. Together, this state of mind is conducive to study and learning, creativity, and to open and frank conversation.
On occasion, ambient albums are made with an explicit time or location in mind, such as Brian Eno’s masterpiece Music for Airports, designed to help relieve the minds of worried flyers, or their love ones they’ve left behind. My personal favourite from Brian Eno’s extensive catalogue is Thursday Afternoon, which as the name implies, tries to capture the breezy, open atmosphere of the day and time. I love this about ambient music. With the possible exception of dance music, no other genre of music feels so utilitarian. It’s this marriage of art and utility that appeals to me.
In a disposable age of low quality MP3s and high-speed downloads, ambient music celebrates uncompressed, high-quality audio and physical hardcopies. In other words, ambient artists make their music with care and want their listeners to have a genuine attachment with the music. Albums are often accompanied with detailed colour booklets, travel diaries, letters from the artists, and even, in some cases, scented candles and soaps.
The community of ambient artists is collaborate, creative, and kind. Artists frequently work on each others’ albums, help with mixing or mastering, and share in each others’ successes. Artists frequently release albums for free, with pay-what-you-want schemes, or for minimal fees on services such as Bandcamp. Furthermore, ambient music brings together people from around the world, from Russia to England, or from Japan to America, for example. In this way ambient music is aspirational — it shows a way of living and sharing in an open, caring, warm, and inviting way not commonly seen in other areas of life.
I could go on to mention the importance of other genres of music in my life, such as jazz and soul for conversation, or dance for exercise, or alternatively mention other media, such as my love of documentary films, audiobooks, or lectures, but none are as important to me as ambient music. Unlike other genres of music and media, which help me run faster or teach me new things, ambient music nourishes my soul and shows me a calmer, more compassionate, more genuine, more attentive way of being.
