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The Ambient Belief System -- an Introduction

by Eliot Bates

I wanted to make a kind of music that existed on the cusp between melody and texture, and whose musical logic was elusive enough to reward attention, but not so strict as to demand it. (Brian Eno, from the liner notes to Neroli, 1993)

Brian Eno and many other composers work in a style that fans call "dark ambient music." As a commercial category, it enjoyed widespread recognition only in the last few years, but it dates back to 1972 and Eno's and Robert Fripp's No Pussyfooting, the first self-described ambient album. Contemporaneous with Eno's experiments with "sonic wallpaper" (his term for ambient music), the industrial culture movement in England was underway, experimenting with noise, shock, and auto-destructive art, and British progressive rock and psychedelia were breaking down the traditional rock band format and moving beyond the three-minute pop song format. What ties these three movements together is that they all came out of the British art schools of the late 1960s and early 1970s; that they were intellectual and highly planned; and that the artists involved worked in isolation -- from each other and their fans.

Dark ambient music, which I will simply call "ambient" or "ambient music" hereafter, thus has a rich twenty five-year history of theory and philosophy, a reflection of the varied visual, sonic and written art of the art schools. Not all of ambient's developments originated in Britain, however. In Germany, the U.S. and Canada, the source of key experimental rock groups, the genre known as "space music" developed in tandem with ambient. In New York City, minimalist composers were integrating concepts from Indian raga, experimental intonation systems, and electronic synthesis into long meditative performances.

As the compositional form of ambient music continues to evolve, there have been changes in the way fans discuss the music. Debates over what works are ambient have led many fans to conceive of the genre as a way of listening to music, rather than an established canon of compositions. In describing this, some fans mention listening rituals, altered states of consciousness, and firmly held theories about the power of the music to communicate visual imagery. In addition to studying ambient music as a compositional form, I will also present it as a belief system, and my term "ambient belief system" refers to the rituals, beliefs, and sacred history that surround ambient music.

First, I attempt to make some sense of the musical origins of ambient music, which are broader than what I described above. Chapter 1 defines six "trajectories," which start from a cluster of musicians working in a subcultural music scene and trace their paths and ideas as they are transformed into a component of the ambient belief system. Here I also trace the history of music recording, looking critically at issues such as Walter Benjamin's concept of musical "aura," the debate over sampling and musical theft in other musical forms; this sets the stage for ambient composers' justification for their compositional techniques. Chapter 2 profiles six major composers, selected primarily because of the significant amount of information on them in print. The mystique surrounding their work and personal lives mirrors their compositions and creative techniques, and to understand their appeal to fans I have suggested how each represents a certain "archetype." In chapter 3 I look at the fan base of ambient music, including a basic ethnography and the results of surveys conducted on the Internet. A detailed profile of one ambient listener is also included.

A tantalizing mystique surrounds the possibility that ambient music induces altered states of consciousness, particularly those thought of as "waking dreams." Chapter 4 explores the rituals that listeners engage to attain these experiences as well as ambient music's affinity with fantasy and science fiction literature and role playing games. As nothing exists in print on the structure of ambient music or the studio techniques that are used to create it, in chapter 5 I propose why it is so difficult to analyze and offer six sample analyses of important pieces. Much of the production is hush-hush, so I can work only with my anecdotes and my own knowledge of the recording studio. Chapter 6 is a case study of my own music, which I believe parallels some of the compositional structures of better known ambient composers.

This thesis is the most recent work in a lineage of subcultural studies of postmodern popular music genres, although, as I will demonstrate, ambient music relates differently to the mainstream than other better-studied subcultures do. The main studies referenced for the construction of this work are Sarah Thornton's Club Cultures, a look into the British underground club scenes of the 1980s; Simon Frith and Howard Horne's Art Into Pop, which gives an excellent history of the British art school scene and the emergence of punk rock from these roots; and David Toop's Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds, conceived as an aural history of the twentieth century and which includes a number of interviews with ambient, dub, and jazz musicians. A major inspiration for my composer profiles were the excellent examples of cross-cultural micromusics and the studies of bimusicality in Mark Slobin's Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West.

One way in which this work differs from the works listed above -- and the main problem in organizing this thesis -- is that the ambient music scene is not dead yet. In fact, it probably has not even peaked! Thornton's work is an invaluable study of the trendy club scene of London and how localized movements such as acid house come -- and go. The retrospective Art Into Pop looks at the already passe British punk rock movement, and many of the composers profiled in Ocean of Sound are no longer alive but live on in print and CD re-issues. At the point of publication of this thesis, almost all the artists are still composing ambient music, and they continue to work (as do their fans) in an anarchistic and non-deterministic environment. It is still possible to see the incongruities of the ambient music belief system. For example, there is the tricky relationship between the purported non-commercialism of the artists and the fact that they make their living by selling CD's; there is also the discrepancy between the living naturalistic experiences that happen in bedrooms around the world and the mass-produced disc of binary information that is created in an artificially inseminated recording studio. I imagine that as ambient music fades into memory these discrepancies will be erased. This thesis, in part, delights in the chance to witness the unpredictable evolution of a living musical form.