open spaces made for implications

make sure we don’t see them again

The term ambient has begun to mean less and less to me. As my weekly searches for ambient begins to involve more drone, electroacoustic improvisation, and modern classical then pure ‘ambient’, whatever that really is, the idea of “music that de-emphasizes structure and active listening” has become too large an idea to contain. The lead genre of the year has really been ambient house, as the strongest non-structured/spatially oriented releases came from artist like DJ Healer, Leon Vynehall, Bass Clef, and Takecha. Is that really ambient though? I ask myself that a lot while composing lists of this type. Genre specificity sometimes hurts the intention of music sharing when something like Takecha’s Deep Soundscapes can’t be shared with the audience who most desperately wants it.

So I forget it entirely. These aren’t ambient albums, these are albums to lose yourself into, albums that do nothing more than meet the criteria which Brian Eno defined:

“Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable [sic] as it is interesting.”