KILOMETRE CLUB – EARNEST TUB
Long-form ambient tracks often explore a basic idea, which then is developed… or even just repeated in a loop. This remarkable album by Kilometre Club (Daniel Field, from Toronto, Canada) does the opposite: it presents just those basic ideas. 103 (One-Hundred-And- Three!) of them, to be exact, each of them 80 seconds (more or less), with a total playing time of 131 minutes.
Why 103? That’s simple: “Because that’s a very unaesthetic number. It’s the second prime number above 100. It’s not overly memorable.”
“One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned when making ambient music is that the longer one spends on a track has absolutely nothing to do with its success, with some of my most streamed songs ones on which I dwelt the shortest amount of time”.
In his extensive liner notes, Field elaborates extensively on the album’s context. The title, for instance, refers to country singer Earnest Tubb, who died on September 6, 1984 – the day Daniel Field was born. But: ‘it has absolutely nothing to do with him”.
Before creating electronic/ambient music as Kilometre Club, Field used to make folk music too. After releasing his first album and finding out that it garnered more listeners than his folk music ever received (“50 different listeners in total!”), he further explored the genre.
These liner notes are worth reading for the ironic self-deprecating tone, but there are also more serious remarks about the music and its place in society these days:
“Here’s the thing. I may be talking like this whole thing is a bit of a joke, but I actually think it’s a pretty great album. The short and simple tracks are like vignettes, and they don’t require much from listeners. […] At the same time, I want to be very transparent that this is an album also designed for algorithms on streaming services. These are short and inoffensive songs that fit the mold of many playlists and stations and I don’t think it’s worth pretending that they’re something else. […] I am sure I will get some flak from others, but this is music as a product; as ‘content’, as some might say. Does it cheapen its effect? I think that if it finds ears of listeners on a meditation or reading playlist, it has done its job as music. […] At what point is there just too much? Can we be satisfied with what we have? This album doesn’t answer that.”
Earnest Tub is released on the Imaginary North label (Fields’ own label) as a limited (24) double cassette as well as a digital release.
Oh, and it may be good to know that “at least three songs are performed in part by dishwashers.”
ROBERT RICH – LONG TAIL OF THE QUIET GONG
From a collection of short tracks to an example of a beautiful long-form ambient piece: Robert Rich‘s Long Tail Of The Quiet Gong.
Robert Rich is the Grandmaster of Sleep Music, but with its 90 minutes and 24 seconds Long Tail Of The Quiet Gong does not cover a full night of sleep like Somnium and Perpetual. But it serves a similar purpose, as ‘functional music, for sleep, contemplation, incubation or to color a space’. In fact, the 90 minutes represent the time of one REM sleep cycle.
The piece was created for the Hypno Campus Experiment, initiated by Gareth Whittock. Other artists involved in this project are Peter Chilvers, Martin Stürtzer, and Luca Formentini.
“Hypno-Campus project is part sound art, part psychological/sociological experiment. It’s an exciting first step into a branch of unconscious audio art, a special kind of sleep concert.
Participants not only sleep during the music but upon awakening, compare their dreams to see if the music has induced some sort of subconscious commonality of feelings or images.
Participants in the project download over 7 hours of music, (5 x 90 minute REM cycles) along with an anonymous dream questionnaire the results of which are collated and analysed using a large language model to search for themes and commonalities. Participants are not allowed access to the database of dreams until they have uploaded their own in order to avoid unconscious bias”.
The Hypno-Campus experiment ended in July 2024. I could not find any information about the results, but perhaps this will be published later.
Now, Robert Rich published his contribution (as a name-your-price download!) so that non-participants also can enjoy it. For those interested, there’s even a surround version, which is also available as a name your price download from the surroundmusic.one website.
Long Tail Of The Quiet Gong is a perfect piece to drift away on. There is, of course, no gradual build-up to a climax – the atmosphere remains consistent over the piece’s full lenght. But that does nót mean there’s nothing happening… it constantly shifts from calm and timeless to a slightly more intense surrounding, like a wind that picks up and then drops away again.
This is ‘sleep music’ at its best. Let’s hope that the other contributions will also be published, so that we all can find out what dreams they generate.