My favorite release from the venerable Joann Brouk, considered one of the founders of New Age music, who studied under Terry Riley and Robert Ashley at the Mills College Center for Contemporary Music, and whose work you’re already familiar with if you’ve listened to the worldbuilding I Am The Centercompilation.
Streamlined, super minimal, classically inclined ambient that avoids a lot of the ornamentation and explicit emoting of new age. Just chimes, synth, and piano. Leave it on repeat for a few hours.
Listen to my third episode of Getting Warmer for NTS Radio below. Zheng, classical guitar, dilruba, harp, violin, piano, tambura, flute, vibraphone, synth, lots of tabla, a bit of drum machine. Mostly instrumental, and hopefully well-suited for background music while working. Made this while it was raining; I think you can hear it. If you like it, you can download an mp3 version here. Enjoy!
Tracklist:
1. Forrest Fang — Meditation
2. Luis Paniagua — Neptuno
3. David Sylvian & Holger Czukay — Flux (A Big, Bright, Colourful World) (Excerpt)
Big, big record. A Chinese-American violinist, Forrest Fang released this and a slew of other records on his own label, Ominous Thud. The Wolf At The Ruins was out of print for twenty years until it was recently remastered by Robert Rich and rereleased on Projekt Records.
I hesitate to call this an ambient record, as it’s dense and busy. Fang calls it a turning point in his sound, through which he began combining sonic palettes and recording methods in novel ways. Between traditional Chinese music, Balinese gamelan, synthetic textures, violin, zheng, yangqin (Chinese hammered dulcimer), bells, Terry Riley-esque tape delay techniques, and polyrhythms, there’s a lot going on here. Cosmic, ambitious, and occasionally gridlike à la Steve Reich, this reaches some incredible highs but arguably does not make for passive listening. Don’t sleep on this one.
The reissue includes two bonus tracks which are very, very good and which I’m not including here in hopes that you’ll buy the album directly from Projekt. Worth it.
The only available recordings from Satoshi Ashikawa, who passed away shortly after making this record. This was the second in a three record series called Wave Notation, which also included Hiroshi Yoshimura‘s Music for Nine Postcards and a collection of Erik Satie songs played by Satsuki Shibano–fittingly, fans of Yoshimura and Satie will find a lot to love here. Perfectly bare bones minimalism–just harp, piano, flute, and vibraphone. Crystalline, pastoral, picnic-ready. Midori Takada on both harp and vibraphone. Long out of print.
From the liner notes written by Ashikawa himself:
“Sound design” doesn’t just mean simply decorating with sounds. The creation of non-sound, in other words silence, as in a design, if possible, would be wonderful. There’s no question that our age — in which we are inundated with sound – is historically unprecedented. The Canadian sound environmentalist and researcher Murray Schafer warns of this state of affairs in the following: “The ear, unlike some other sense organs, is exposed and vulnerable. The eye can be closed at will; the ear is always open. The eye can be focused and pointed at will; the ear picks up all sound right back to the acoustic horizon in all directions. Its only protection is an elaborate psychological system of filtering out undesirable sounds in order to concentrate on what is desirable. The eye points outward; the ear draws inward. It would seem reasonable to suppose that as sound sources in the acoustic environment multiply – and they are certainty multiplying today —the ear will become blunted to them and will fail to exercise its individualistic right to demand that insouciant and distracting sounds should be stopped in order that it may concentrate totally on those which truly matter.”
We should have a more conscious attitude toward the sounds – other than music —that we listen to. Presently, the levels of sound and music in the environment have clearly exceeded man’s capacity to assimilate them, and the audio ecosystem is beginning to fall apart. Background music, which is supposed to create “atmosphere,” is far too excessive. In our present condition, we find that within certain areas and spaces, aspects of visual design are well attended to, but sound design is completely ignored. It is necessary to treat sound and music with the same level of daily need as we treat architecture, interior design, food, or the air we breathe. In any case, the Wave Notation series has begun. I hope it will be used and judged for what I had in mind as “sound design,” but of course the listener is free to use it in any way. However, I would hope this music does not become a partner in crime to the flood of sounds and music which inundate us at present.
An underloved record from two masters. Trip hop feels like a radical genre departure for both Budd and Zazou, and yet it instantly makes sense upon first listen. Both leave their stylistic fingerprints all over Glyph–Budd’s melancholia, Zazou’s sinister sensibility–weaving haunted ambient jazz into fizzed out drum loops. Trumpet arrangements by Mark Isham, guitar by Barbara Gogan (with whom Zazou also collaborated on a very good trip hop full-length that I’ll be posting at some point), and poetry recitations by Budd. Attains startling heights of opiated beauty (“Reflected in the Eye of a Dragonfly,” featuring a wash of pedal steel guitar courtesy of BJ Cole; sinuous grooves on “Pandas in Tandem” and “As Fast As I Could Look Away She Was Still There”). Does exactly what good trip hop is supposed to do, and then some.
Arguably the definitive work from Penguin Cafe Orchestra, the project of UK-born composer and musician Simon Jeffes. Jeffes saw PCO as the ongoing soundtrack to a dream he had had while suffering from food poisoning in the south of France, as well as a vessel through which to explore his interest in “world” music, particularly African percussion. The ensemble’s music resists genre, though–you can hear Jeffes’s British proclivity towards the pastoral and an interest in folk music that splits itself between Western and non-Western traditions, but you can also hear a love for Reichian minimalism, a vaguely avant-garde quality that presumably compelled Brian Eno to release their first record on his Obscure label, Satie-esque piano ambling, flamenco, and even–going out on a limb here–the chug-a-chug forward momentum of Kraftwerk, for whom PCO opened in 1976 in their first major concert.
Penguin Café Orchestra moves comfortably between unabashedly beautiful (“Numbers 1-4,” “Flux,” “Harmonic Necklace”), cheeky (the famous “Telephone and Rubber Band,” based on tape loops of a telephone ringing tone, an engaged tone, and a rubber band), and the clever, all-purpose optimism that the best movie soundtracks happily exploit (“Air A Danser,” “Cutting Branches for a Temporary Shelter,” “The Ecstasy of Dancing Fleas”). There’s a sense of déjà-vu to much of PCO’s discography, but it’s especially present here, and combined with meticulous musicianship (this album took almost four years to record), it makes for a deeply transportive listen–with the caveat that the destination isn’t always clear.
Il Guardiano del Faro (“the lighthouse keeper”), aka Federico Monti Arduini, was a very prolific Italian musician, composer, and producer who was credited as an early adopter of the Moog synthesizer. Despite having had a slew of best-selling songs in Italy, there’s very little information available about him on the internet–I don’t even remember how this wound up in my hands! Really smart orchestral sensibility applied to lush, synthetic space-age smooth jazz fusion. Ideal cheeky retro-futurist bachelor pad soundtrack. Don’t miss the syrupy quavering cover of The Flamingos’ “I Only Have Eyes for You.”
The first of two releases from the mysterious Franco Nonni (keyboards) and Paolo Grandi (strings). They released a second album in 1990 with a larger ensemble (does anyone have this lying around?), and then Nonni went on to become a psychiatrist (cool reason to break up a band). This seems to get tossed around in progressive rock and jazz circles, though to me it’s neither. I’d call it squarely fourth world (cringe term), with a dip into murky synth drone (“Interludio con Dedica,” “Linfoceti”) and some moments of brassy baroque-isms (title track). For me, the album peaks at its bookends: “Mitochondria” and “Mitosi” are sublime, drawn-out meditations that build and bubble, leaning heavily on what sounds like a synthetic gamelan ensemble and smoothed out around the edges with strings. Ideal for fans of Jon Hassell, Yas-Kaz, and Hosono’s more ambient works. If it’s for you, it’s definitely for you.
Very, very special record. Hiroshi Yoshimura was a minimal ambient composer who, in addition to a slew of excellent recordings, also made soundtracks for Tokyo museums, galleries, malls, train stations, and (as is the case here) prefabricated houses. We’ll definitely be hearing more from him later, but this feels like the right place to start during such gnarly heat. Surround sounds very much like the cover looks, not just because of the field recordings of bodies of water but because of the way the music moves: in ripples, ebbs, and flows. This is, for lack of a better word, gorgeous. For fans of Yas-Kaz and Inoyama Land.
