Category: ambient music

Beautiful Companions: Dakota Suite

The End of Trying

‘The End of Trying’ is not a ‘typical’ Dakota Suite Release. Unlike most Dakota Suite albums (except 1999’s Navigators Yard) it is fully instrumental, with Chris Hooson, David Buxton and Colin Dunkley playing piano and David Darling playing cello.
The latter fact may indicate the mood of the music on this album: it is extremely delicate, heartbreaking melancholic music.
A ‘classic’ release that immediately struck me when I first heard it in the beginning of this year.

The track titles indicate the overall mood of this music: How Could You Let Me Go, Things We Lost Along The Way, All The Love I Had Was Not Enough, A Quietly Gathering Tragedy, and not forgetting “Een Langzaam Lekkende Wond‘ (A Slow Leaking Wound) which reminds us of the fact that Chris Hooson lived in Holland for quite a few years.
This beautiful sad music is clearly not meant to brighten up your day. But it might soothe your sadness with rays of hope shining through empathic, understanding themes and fabulous cello sounds. 

‘The End of Trying’ is one of the most beautiful albums I have heard this year, and it even gains strength with the companion CD that was released shortly after the release of the original: “The Night Keeps Coming In”.

The Hum in the Room (mix)

“The Hum in the Room” the final part of the three-part mix dedicated to … the hum in your room! 

The buzz that you suddenly notice, that appears to have been there forever but unnoticed – until this moment.
The sound that will be there forever from now.
The hum that appears to come from the inside of your head, and that keeps changing when you turn your head or walk through the room.
The noise that can irritate as well as fascinate.

Or, to quote John Cage from a 1937 lecture: “Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at 50 m.p.h. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them, not as sound effects, but as musical instruments. “

Ryuichi Sakamoto & Alva Noto: UTP_


UTP cover

The short ‘Bartók pizzicato‘ string punches from the opening track, Attack, may give the impression that this is gonna be one of those uncomprehensible and almost unlistenable (to my ears, anyway) retro-avant-garde string compositions. But ‘Attack’ is an appropriate title: it brings the listener off-balance and thus make him more perceptible for the well-balanced, ‘Utopian’ music directly following this opening piece.

UTP_ (short for Utopia) was commissioned by the city of Mannheim (Germany) for it’s 400th birthday in 2007. Ryuichi Sakamoto and Carsten ‘Alva Noto‘ Nicolai (who partnered on Vrioon and Insen before – both highly recommendable albums) team up with Ensemble Modern.
Ensemble Modern is a chamber ensemble specialising in playing modern compositions. They performed work by Frank Zappa, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Steve reich, Olivier Messiaen, and many more.

The Notwist – Sturm O.S.T.

Although The Notwist generated a storm of hyped attention when releasing their Neon Golden album in 2002, that was never the music for me. And neither for this weblog, since it’s nowhere near ‘ambient music’.

My local record shop retailer recently insisted I’d listen to their recently released “Sturm” (Storm) soundtrack.
And right he was (Thanks Willem!)

Thomas Koener – La Barca

Thomas Köner started his musical career in relative obscurity. His first four albums were release on the Barooni label (from Utrecht, Holland!) – you’ll have a hard time finding these and if you do, be prepared to pay for it. Even the Mille Plateaux re-release of two of them (Teimo/Permafrost), is very hard to find nowadays.

In his work, Köner explores the ‘soul of sound’, and he’s not afraid to use remarkable sources.
He treated cymbal sounds to the extreme and unrecognisable (Nungatak Gonggamur, 1990), or even the dusty crackling of an old 16mm film (Unerforschtes Gebiet, 2002). There will probably be no musical sounds as deep as his Daikan (2002).

But in using his sources, there’s always a delicate space left for silence and stillness, which gives his music a Zen-like feeling of eternity.
If you ever want to experience a feeling of floating in indefinite space, listen to Thomas Köner’s music!

Stephan Mathieu & Taylor Deupree – Transcriptions

Those of you familiar with Stephan Mathieu’s beautiful album ‘Radioland‘ (2008) will probably find this follow-up equally interesting.

The concept is more or less familiar: using analog (found) sounds to create immersive layers of ambient electronics, using a process technique that makes the end result sound very ‘natural’.
And it’s exactly that what makes Stephan Mathieu’s music stands out compared to others.

Jamie Drouin – A Three Month Warm Up

Drouin

The ‘Warm Up’ this title refers to is the ‘cacophony of notes played by a symphony during warm up, where a single unified tone emerges out of the various intruments and voices” (from the liner notes).

In this ‘cacophony’ Jamie Drouin recognised the resemblance with the constant sound of traffic on a public square. He started recording these sounds at a public square in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. The 124 field recordings from a period of three months were used to create this composition.

But this certainly is not ‘just another field recording’!

Acoustical Illusions (mix)

“Acoustical Illusions”, a part of the “Hum in the Room-trilogy” (2005), is dedicated to the environmental sounds that sound like distant choirs or orchestras.

Sometimes when you listen to sounds in your environmental background, they may vaguely sound like a full string orchestra, or like soft whispering voices.
An orchestra tuning? Cars passing on the highway?Sound that sound different from what they really are – Acoustical Illusions.

Like the other wo mixes in this set (“Mantra of Walls and Wiring” and “The Hum in the Room“) this is a very minimal, drone-oriented mix.

And probably, you’ll also hear some sounds that aren’t even in it!

Machinefabriek – Dauw (videoclip)

What do you see when listening to ambient music?
I guess most answers would be something like: landscapes.
Desolate, comforting or alien, depending on the kind of ambient music.

I guess some of the images will be triggered by the track title.
So – what would a videoclip for Machinefabriek’s “Dauw” (“Dew”) look like?

when clicking the YouTube link to the video by Joost Meijer for this track, I was prepared for some abstract impressionist landscape shots. But I was not prepared for a heartbreaking story of an elderly couple growing apart.