Transmissions from the Ambient Frontier

This is the third article in our series, Music, Time and Long-term Thinking. Two previous articles explored long-term thinking in several musical domains, with focus on three artists: Brian Eno, John Cage and Jem Finer. For this third entry, we open our field of interest to broadly survey projects with unique temporal approaches. 

One of the easiest ways to explore temporality through music is to simply slow it down. Just as we would seem incredibly slow to a hummingbird, slowed-down recordings can make us feel like the world is slowing down, each moment resonating with new intensity.

Along these lines, Norwegian composer Leif Inge has taken Beethoven’s 9th symphony and stretched it to 24 hours in length while maintaining the original pitch. In 02004, the piece was presented as a “once-in-a-lifetime all-night pajamas-please sleep-over concert-event” at San Francisco’s 964 Natoma, organized by Member Aaron Ximm. As Ximm describes it:

The result is a remarkable remaking of Beethoven as massive soundscape: a piece in which familiar motifs develop twenty times more slowly than we’re used to, at times lovely, at times overwhelming. It is the best-known symphony in the world transformed: transformed into a dramatic and haunting and hypnotizing soundscape that passes like clouds over a vast landscape.

A meme from 02010 captures this same effect with a pop song. A user on Reddit posted a link to a recording he’d created of Justin Bieber’s “U Smile” slowed down 800%. The result was shared virally across the internet for the next several days.

The original Soundcloud post of the recording by Shamantis has been deleted, but remnants still exist on YouTube.

A Soundcloud user by the name of PsychicWhoosh captures the unnerving beauty of this piece in a comment on the track:

This thing is having a profound impact on my view of the universe at the moment, that here, hidden in this crappy, commercial pop song is a piece of music so transcendent in its cosmic beauty, it is moving me to heights of spiritual ecstasy. It was there all along, like a cipher hiding in plain sight which no one knew needed decoding. It simply needed to be tuned to the right frequency, to be tracked along the proper coordinates of time.

In contrast to dramatically slowing a recording down and extending its length, artists have also explored the possibilities of repeating short recordings over and over. The history of looping in modern composing is a story of the accidental beauty of technological imperfection and decay. In 01965, composer Steve Reich recorded a preacher in Union Square, declaring “It’s gonna rain.” While attempting to start a second loop halfway through the first recording, Reich found that the technology was imperfect, creating what is known as a phase shift.

The idea behind a phase shift is that two identical loops start off in sync, and then over time one drifts, creating a doubling effect. As the second loop shifts further, the loops conflict more and more, until their waveforms are exactly opposite. From this point the second loop continues its shift and eventually catches back up with the first loop, bringing the loops back into sync and completing the process.

Like any good musical genre, ambient music started as a description of something new and unique, quickly garnered a following and imitators, was codified and sub-divided, and ultimately spun off communities of creators, promoters and aficionados.

Beyond just coining the term, Brian Eno set forth many new paths through his foundational work. One direction ambient explorers inspired by Eno took was into textural explorations: music that was produced largely to aurally represent something — a place, a vision, a feeling — almost exclusively through its timbre. Harmony and rhythm aren’t unimportant to this music, but they tend to work in a subtle, supporting role to combinations of droning synthesized and recorded sounds.

A record label based in Rome called Glacial Movements produces a blend of this style that it calls “glacial and isolationist ambient.” The music is meant to evoke the vastness, the stillness and the cold of the Arctic.

The density of the Arctic’s frigid air makes sound travel quickly and crisply to one’s ears. But, because it can be such a still, isolated place, those sounds tend to be deep and structural — like ice floes slowly grinding against one another — or as diaphanous as ice crystals and snowflakes forming out of the air itself.

Just as John Cage’s experience in a supposedly silent anechoic chamber revealed to him the deep and low frequencies produced by his body itself, the seeming silence of the Arctic can heighten one’s sonic awareness. The music features sounds as hard and smooth as miles of perfectly clear, ancient ice, or as light and crunchy as footsteps in fresh snow.

The Arctic is also known for its extended light and dark cycles, alternating between months of day and months of night. Likewise, the music of Glacial Movements tends toward a kind of stasis, without clear rhythmic markings to count time as it goes by.

Similarly inspired by the polar region’s unique sound profile, Paul H. Miller, aka DJ Spooky, has created music that takes a very different approach to representing cold, icy realms. His particular interest in Antarctica stems less from its aesthetics than from the singular political situation it inhabits — Antarctica is without national affiliation — and the ecological implications of such an arrangement.

Miller has written a book in conjunction with scientists Brian Greene and Ross A. Virginia called The Book of Ice. Accompanying the book is an album-length composition featuring sounds recorded in Antarctica called Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica.