The Quietus editor John Doran posted this on Bluesky over the weekend:
You might think as an alleged practitioner of the ambient arts I’m mentioning this to mount a spirited defense of my brothers and sisters in reverb but let’s face it: there’s a lot of stuff being released under the ambient banner. It’s a non-stop torrent of delicate microloops processed by pedals that cost around the same as the MOT on my absolutely fucked Vauxhall Astra, a ceaseless blizzard of discrete generative modular bleeps and/or bloops, a world-famine-ending feast of synth VSTs bunged through Valhalla Supermassive reverb where a note is played several working days before its heard. The amount of spare ferric tape discarded during the process of making loops in an average month could be used to gift wrap the moon. It’s hard to think of another genre where the ratio of listerners:creators is as close to 1:1.
As a dronemonger of some small distinction it’s something I think about a lot. As a listener it’s dizzying enough. So as a critic it must be absolutely maddening. If you look through the seasonal previews on A Closer Listen you’ll read about more music than any individual could possibly listen to, much less take the time for a-closer-listen to, in any given season. And that’s just a fraction of it all – a trawl through the ambient ocean with an impressively big net, but a net not nearly big enough to catch everything swimming down there. They at least break it down into niches within niches to try and direct their readership towards releases they’ll enjoy. But it must be like being the cartographer of an impossibly large alien continent where vast swathes of land looks exactly alike.
I used to have ambitions of being a critic myself. I ran the stoner/doom beat on Echoes and Dust for a little while. Those are genres with a similar problem – thousands of bands who sounded and looked exactly the same. I couldn’t review them all. You had to come up with a system to filter them. Singer sounds like Ozzy with the flu? No review for you. That riff is just a lightly rejigged and slower Sweet Leaf? Off to the bin with you. After a while you lose a sense of what good and bad are. What does any of it mean? Some of these guys will get a deal with one of the specialist labels and have a nice vinyl release and tour the world off the back of it. Some will make it to Roadburn or Desertfest or one of the many American stoner/doom festivals. Others will never quite manage it, usually due to bad luck or a lack of professionalism/ambition rather than talent. And as a critic you can’t hear them all to decide which should be which. If that is even a critic’s job anymore. After a while you start to get angry at the ones you miss. I think given enough time dealing with a PR inbox critics start to think like The Judge from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: “anything that exists in nature without my knowledge exists without my consent.”
And that’s a genre with at least some barriers to entry. You need the right instruments and amps and the patience to learn to play those slow handed riffs for minutes at a time. Ambient is much easier. If you’ve got the funds you can build yourself a modular kit or get a boutique pedal that’ll do most of the work for you. It’s a fabulous choice for a mid-life crisis. Modular takes some time to build and learn though, so if that sounds like too much work you can play anything into a Chase Bliss Mood or Hologram Microcosm and achieve Instant Ambient Bliss (or so I’ve heard – I don’t have the funds to try it for myself. But that’s another post). All you need is a nice tidy pot plant and a camera to position overhead and you’ve got a hit Instagram channel at the very least.
If you don’t have the time or the funds that’s no problem either. If you have any kind of functioning PC you can get Audacity and paulstretch any sound you like, bang the obligatory reverb wall on it and make a some lovely sounds. That’s basically how I made my first EP, drunk as a lord with no idea what I was doing. Many hours of chopping up and layering stretched audio I was an Ambient Artist. Simple as that.
So anyone can do it. It’s like punk: here’s 3 chords, form a band. Here’s a pdf of free software: start a cassette label. But instead of energetic 2 minute blasts of disaffected anger we get 8 minutes of introspective burbling. Suits the age we’re in, doesn’t it? And once you’ve got your 8 minutes of noise you can assign whatever meaning you want to it. It’s inscrutibility makes it very difficult to tell to what level a piece of ambient/drone achieves the lofty concepts put forth by its creators. If it’s labelled as a psychogeographical exploration of an area you can maybe get some handle on it, hear the winds and the ocean either mimicked by synths or in actual field recordings. But if you’re listening to a 15 minute subtly modulated drone about grief it’s hard to say whether its achieved its stated aims. The artist may have written it while grieving – but does that make it about grief? Does it reflect the grief, does it sound like grieving? I’ve written pieces about anxiety that I swear sound like feeling anxious. I asked to redo a track after hearing the master and deciding it sounded too anxious. It was giving me panic attacks listening to it back. The chap at the label responded by saying he’d been playing it to his baby to help get it to sleep. What we feel in the creation of a piece doesn’t always make it to the finished work. How does a critic properly evaluate that? What is there even to say about ambient music?
So why make it? Why make something thousands of people also make every day, often to a higher standard? I can only speak for myself. For me it’s a compulsion. When I sit down to make music it’s just me, the blank canvas o fsilence and the void.I don’t think about how there are almost certainly people twice as talented as me doing the same thing in countless cities and towns across the globe, as well as a few a lot closer to home. A lot of whom look exactly like me – not just as a cis-het white male but as a bald, bearded, haunted looking cis-het white male. I look at artist pics of ambient artists and often feel like I’m looking at a fun house mirror. It’s nice to see what I’d look like if I were thinner and with less salt in the beard.
So I’m opening my mouth to sing in an oversubscribed choir full of clearer voices. But still I feel the need to sing. If I must live a life of quiet desperation I at least don’t want to leave with the song still in me. Self-expression isn’t something that should be gatekept. But does that mean my songs deserve to be released? Would it not be better to keep my noodlings to myself? How dare I put my childish scrawls up in the gallery alongside the Proper Art? Unleashing the results of my efforts into on an ambient fatigued world and further muddying the near opaque waters is tough to defend, admittedly. There would be no great loss if I called it a day tomorrow. But for me having releases as markers and milestones on my journey is vitally important. Without them I wouldn’t make anything. That’s how my brain works. I’ve spent many years half finishing songs and novels and plays and screenplays – without deadlines and some external validation, however small, the music I produce would end up on the towering pile of unfinished regrets. Maybe it’d be better for the world at large if that was their destination. But I’m a man of small ambitions – I’m happy to exist without the critics knowledge or consent. I’m quietly pleased to fulfil the ‘ignorable’ part of Eno’s famous description of ambient even if I never quite manage ‘interesting.’
What does it mean to be a noisemaker drowned out by a whole galaxy of louder noise? In the final summation of things it almost certainly means diddly squat. But to me it means whatever I believe it means in the moment. For me my 15 minute opus on grief needs to be made. Perhaps it does not need to be heard. But it needs to be made. And despite the impression social media gives us these days its a big ol’ internet. There’s a room for all of us. The space I take up amounts to some Bandcamp pages with a pleasing – to my modest aspiratuons – number of purchase squares and a tiny bit of grist for the streaming content mill. I don’t think that’s too much to ask. Critics are just going to have to find their methods of filtering out the noise. Probably, ultimately, by putting all of us in the bin. Between us we’ll have a sweet sounding landfill.
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