I wasn’t going to post this. I deleted it… twice, but somehow, I just can’t let go of the feeling that I should share this… So, here goes, it’s a long one…
Welp, that about does it.
After three years and nearly a hundred releases, I’ve wrappped up the Bandcamp bi-weekly ambient longform series. The final release, “When you’ve given all – The end abides, fraught notions and ill-conceived expectations; deliver us.” is now live. This is another long, mouthful of a title, common in this series, the act of creating, I’ll miss as much as the music.
I started the series in the autumn of 2021, while still deep in the pandemic (but seeing some light on the horizon) and looking for a way to keep my creativity engaged. Three years later, I’ve covered a lot of creative ground within myself, my approach to making music and managed to stay fully engaged, creatively… First and foremost, this was a creative test, an act of creative endurance that started with this question: Did I have the creative stamina to release thoughtful, engaged, original and well-produced longform ambient tracks bi-weekly?
Honestly, I didn’t know the answer to that question. I wanted to do it without recycling or rehashing old material or phoning it in with crummy improvised one-offs framed as a present moment creative act; I set a high bar for myself and, three years on, I feel like I achieved it.
To be fair, I have enough creative energy and ideas that I think that I could probably keep the ambient longform series going forever. In fact, at one point, I almost moved to weekly releases as I felt that bi-weekly was too spread out, but alas, I didn’t want to be like so many of the newer breed of artists and labels working to maintain a cadence designed to feed an unsustainable algorithm (looking at you Spotify). If you’ve read this far, I don’t have to tell you that the rate at which new music, particularly ambient music, is being released is very high, breakneck, even and while the algorithm gets new content to churn through for an hour or a day, where does that leave artistry, creativity and the inspired gift of creative process? That’s a rhetorical question, because if it leaves it anywhere, if it’s even acknowledged, mostly, it leaves the creative work and the artist as little more than desiccated husk cast into the gutter to blow about until it dissipates into the ephemeral dust it was always destined for. Grim, I know.
Music is ephemeral, it always has been. If you don’t believe me, tell me what the number one hit, or whatever the comparable would be, around the shire when Joe Bard was busking on the streets of Nottingham in 1501. I’m sure somebody did a PhD thesis on this, but I surely don’t know. Or, a little closer to our own time, who was the #1 selling sheet music artist in 1901 or the Billboard #1 artist in 2001, or 1991, or 1981… Maybe it’s someone we’d still know; it’s also entirely possible that we would have no knowledge and couldn’t hum a single measure of one of the popular hooks of those times. Sure, some cream rises to the top: Mozart, Beethoven, The Beatles… Great hooks and great marketing to boot, pressing those melodies into our brains like slithering earworms for time immemorial, but we’re talking about ambient music… No hooks, much of it sounds the same, almost completely independent, anonymous and reliant on grassroots DIY marketing, mostly online. Brian Eno is the top of the heap, but is it because he’s the father of ambient or because of him being one of the best-selling music producers of all time, surely Music for Airports or strange experiments with Antares auto tuner in some weird contemporary art installation are not the reason we know the name Brian Eno; we have U2 (and their marketing arm) to thank for that, to take nothing away from (would-be) Sir Eno’s excellent body of work.
Ambient music lends itself particularly well to being discarded, forgotten, listened to or ignored. That’s the genre I work in. That’s the genre where I discovered my voice. Unfortunately, over time, my voice sounded just like everybody else’s and, when included, blended excellently into the chorus of other anonymous indie artists without Wikipedia entries that make up the bulk of the sleep, meditation, yoga and relaxation playlists on Spotify. Cool. We found our place, being even less offensive, characterless and more plain vanilla than the attributes of the ambient music genre allowed for. And let’s face it, crickets, river sounds, birdsong, etc… well, it doesn’t make it more interesting… instead it just feels like an errant, stale walnut that was floating around clandestinely in my bowl of plain vanilla ice cream – Yuck!
Where am I going with all this? I don’t know. I’m a little jaded and I feel like the genre has been over-run with a lot of disingenuous noodling. I got involved with ambient music, as a proficient, working musician. Ambient music became a musical meditation on opening up sonic spaces to “do” less and “be” more. This was hugely zen and totally freeing, for me. I could be with the sounds. It wasn’t about fast guitar “runs” on a variety of scales and modes and wringing out an instrument and instrumentalist’s virtuosity with every song, every measure, every note, but instead it was a response to that: Letting the sound and music breathe and using the instrument as a staff to navigate the unknown. Ambient music required an undoing, not a doing of less, which is quite a nondualistic perspective, I guess, because it is not undoing and doing less, but it’s both, and, but not doing less because it’s simple and it’s easy to produce or run a quick patch on your modular synthesizer so that one can put out a release every hour on Spotify and dominate the keyword search for a particular genre; but that’s exactly how it’s been used.
So it goes, I guess. Some might call that progress, but the diminishing of humanity from the creative process of ambient music will only pave the way to make AI-created ambient music the primary artist on your favorite Spotify playlist; a story that’s already begun to be written. Maybe that doesn’t matter so much, as long as there’s a ready playlist of music for meditation, yoga, sleep, bowel movements, etc…
In fact, all of this reminds me of the legend of John Henry. As you may recall, John Henry, the ‘steel-driving man’ took part in a mythical contest of man vs. machine, where he worked with his sledgehammer against a steam powered rock drill to drive steel stakes for the railroad into the rock, ultimately beating the machine, but then died, sledgehammer in hand, as his heart gave out from the activity.
I’m no John Henry and I can’t compete with algorithms or AI that wants to supplant humanity and I’m not willing to die trying. Frankly, as far as the arts and humanities, including music, are concerned, removing the inspired spark of humanity’s creative genius is something that we should all be reluctant to accept. Use AI to automate dishwashing, grass cutting and other repetitive and mundane tasks that take time away from our human ability to enjoy being alive, but AI for the arts and humanities, including music, is the beginning of a dystopian future where even the most sacred acts of humanity and our collective human experience can be be diminished into oblivion; where does that end?
These are just a few of things on my mind as I enter a musical hiatus; a period of dormancy that I’ve never really considered because music and the creation of music has always been the blood in my veins and the breath in my lungs. This is a big deal, for me. But I’m reminded of something I read and, honestly, couldn’t comprehend many decades ago, when I first picked up the great Sufi musician and spiritual teacher, Hazrat Inayat Khan’s The Mysticism of Sound and Music – He talked about giving up music so that he could get closer to the deeper spirit within music. This was a preposterous proposition at the time and had been for many years, but now, nothing makes more sense. Once again, this is nondualism at work, it’s not either/or, but ‘both, and…’ My commitment to music and understanding music is deeper than it’s ever been, but it’s time to unmoor myself from this land that I’ve become so familiar with and to set out for worlds I’ve never even imagined. As Joseph Campbell said: “We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.”
