It began with a revisitation to Morton Feldman's
Rothko Chapel / Why Patterns? album. Headphones fit cozily around my ears, I’d decided to disappear from my office environment one Sunday afternoon and explore the more thoughtful headspace afforded by Feldman’s tranquil piano melodies. I was instantly transported, and the record prepared me for some reflective and solemn music to while away the hours at my desk. Resultantly, I soon found myself compiling a list of essential listening I was keen to either revisit or to explore for the first time in the spirit of that mood.
Morton Feldman -
Rothko Chapel / Why Patterns?
The list would be a survey of key recordings of German ambient music both classic and contemporary. Berliner ambient essentials including:
- Nils Frahm - Wintermusik and the post-minimalist Felt LP
- Nils Frahm and Ólafur Arnalds collaborative work, Trance Frendz
- British-German composer Max Richter's 8.5-hour post-minimal ambient opus, Sleep, as well as his critically-acclaimed Memoryhouse and The Blue Notebooks LPs
- Thomas Köner (a member of Porter Ricks and Kontakt der Jünglinge) - Permafrost
- Cluster & Eno’s self-titled 1977 album recorded in Cologne
- Eno/Moebius/Roedelius - After the Heat, featuring the haunting album-closers, "The Belldog" and "Tzima N'Arki"
- Alva Noto - Xerrox Vols I & II (the sound of desolation, itself)
- Highlights from Wolfgang Voigt’s recordings under the Gas moniker - Pop, Königsforst, Zauberberg, and his triumphant latest effort, Narkopop
- Popol Vuh’s choral classic, Hosianna Mantra
- Klaus Schulze’s space music debut epic, Irrlicht from 1972
- Hans Zimmer’s score to Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar
- Favorites from Tangerine Dream - the albums Zeit and Phaedra
- And for a taste of ambient darkjazz, Bohren & der Club of Gore’s Black Earth LP
I was awestruck by the listening experience of the first three recordings, so much in fact that I remained with them for the duration of the week. I spent days and nights immersed in Richter’s
Sleep, never tiring of the fundamentally succinct central theme which carries throughout the entire opus. And even now, six days later, I am still reveling in the gentle elegance of Frahm and Arnalds’ pastoral melodies.
A distilled vinyl edition of Max Richter's 8.5-hour epic
But more importantly, I found that I was not engaging these works as I had so often approached 20th-century music. I confess that I've routinely engaged recordings in an overtly academic fashion. I obsessed over structure, form, and socio-cultural context. I preoccupied my mind with where each composition fell in relationship to the artist’s other works. I examined music so critically, that I failed to experience it emotionally.
There were notable exceptions to this standard - particularly those ambient recordings I chose to engage through music meditation. When consuming specific works of consequence for the first time, (and again thereafter if they became beloved favorites), I would don my circumaural cans, swaddle myself in blankets, extinguish all lamps, lay still in bed, and let the music fill me. The most recent album to receive this treatment was Brian Eno’s monumentally intimate album,
The Ship from 2016.
Brian Eno - The Ship
What I found so arresting about these contemporary releases from the top of my list was that they explored the ambient genre differently than by their vintage predecessors. I quickly surveyed the albums and discovered that I had developed an affinity for post-minimalism. Borne of a reactionary movement to the impersonality of minimalist works in the 1960s, these artists aimed to resolve minimalism's often cold and over-intellectual nature by introducing more expressive qualities, often evoking the body and aspects of sexuality. The resulting works are intimately affecting, soothing, and serene with more organic sonic textures than the mechanics of traditional minimalism.
It was that very quality which inspired in me such a novel and emotional response. Frahm’s
Felt LP exquisitely embraced these organic elements, captured in its unique compositional process.
From the ErasedTapes label’s website:
Having recorded his last album live in a large, reverberant church, Nils Frahm now invites you to put on your headphones and dive into a world of microscopic and delicate sounds – so intimate that you could be sitting beside him.
Recorded late at night in the reflective solitude and silence of his studio in Berlin, Frahm uncovers a new sound and source of inspiration within these peaceful moments:
Originally I wanted to do my neighbours a favour by damping the sound of my piano. If I want to play piano during the quiet of the night, the only respectful way is by layering thick felt in front of the strings and using very gentle fingers. It was then that I discovered that my piano sounds beautiful with the damper.
Captivated by this sonic exposition, he placed the microphones so deep inside the piano that they were almost touching the strings. This brought a host of external sounds to the recordings which most producers would try their hardest to hide:
I hear myself breathing and panting, the scraping sound of the piano's action and the creaking of my wooden floorboards – all equally as loud as the music. The music becomes a contingency, a chance, an accident within all this rustling. My heart opens and I wonder what exactly it is that makes me feel so happy.
It is his emphasis of those very sounds, which in traditional recording would be trimmed away as nuisance rather than beauty, which make Felt such an intimate and captivating listen. To quote a card from Eno's Oblique Strategies deck - "Emphasise the flaws." I found myself holding my breath so as not to miss the curious “non-musical” sounds present in the recording. I permitted the music to create a space for pure experience, rather than considered analysis, which I found immeasurably rewarding and satisfying.
And it is that exemption from quantification - the absence of left-brained cognitive study which freed my mind to just enjoy the music.
I don’t feel compelled to pore over academic texts examining post-minimalism. I feel no urge to read critical papers from music journalists on the merit or inferiority of works of this musical category. I just want to experience it. And that is wonderful.