ieafs, on 08 February 2010 - 08:05 PM, said:
Masonic Boom, on 08 February 2010 - 03:07 AM, said:
ieafs, on 07 February 2010 - 06:02 PM, said:
not to think of it like a lot of ambient type music - huge sweeping soundscapes of electric cathedrals and an angel in rainbow rainment and all that. it's more like a tiny little bit of magic lying latent in everyday life. a weird smell in the shed behind your house that you can't quite place, a strange old abandoned factory you pass by every day - eraserhead lady-in-the-radiator type stuff. that there's this little teeming world inside otherwise kind of mundane things. i read this simon reynolds quote a while back in which he said it should be subtitled "the secret life of minerals" which is sort of the same idea.
Argh, see I don't think of that "sonic cathedrals" stuff as ambient AT ALL. That's more like shit New Age gone horribly wrong. (Get a lot of that crap in the kind of ethereal end of shoegaze/nu-gaze.)
OK, I don't know jack shit about Ambient as a genre, then, really. But the whole point of this kind of thing is NOT that it's just meandering prettiness without a point. It has to have some kind of edge of evil or darkness or something to balance out the fluff and make it actually beautiful as opposed to just pretty. I have a friend who works in fashiony type stuff and she was telling me how they make perfume - that it's not just about finding beautiful scents, but also balancing it with something - I think she said a word that sounded like "perdu" - balancing it with something earthy and almost kinda gross and animal in order to make it actually smell good.
Sorry, off the point again.
But yeah. SAW II is almost like little dioramas, like those Victorian mechanical boxes and there's a representation of some tiny element of life - except instead of ballrooms and opium dens, it's like the space behind the radiator or the back of a loom as it's spinning. Or erm, sorry, I'm not really awake here. Not making sense.
well i was taking the piss there slightly. i don't necessarily mean stuff being super pretty or anything (that's from a tongue-in-cheek quote i can't remember where i heard "studio scientists conjuring six-string cathedrals").
but just generally a lot of ambience has a kind of epic-ness to it. or even just a kind of "important"-ness to it (for lack of a better word).
so me even things like 1/3 or 2/8 and the traditionally pretty bittersweet ones are more... watching the sunrise from your backyard rather than from the grand canyon. the effect is the same almost - it's just on a smaller scale.
Ha ha, no, that whole "Sonic Cathedrals" or "Cathedrals of sound" thing was totally an early-90s meme. I can't remember exactly which music journo coined it, but it was used as an insult du jour of the whole shoegaze scene (heck, it gave its name to the shoegaze revival club, after all.) I think that the pompousness of the description really does hit that kind of ... yeah, what you say. That the music aspires to a kind of "IMPORTANCE" and epic-ness.
(It conjures up visions of Sigur Ros after they jumped the shark - that whole "two chords away from Lord of the Rings kind of thing. Which is an ironic statement coming from me, a prog fan, but there's a time and a place for EPIC. And this ain't it.)
I like your idea of the sunrise over your backyard rather than the Grand Canyon. That sometimes it's the familiarity, seeing something so familiar imbued with a new and beautiful light. And also the unexpectedness of it. Perhaps that's what you mean by "smaller scale" - perhaps even on a nanoscale, where a mote of dust can reveal canyons and landscapes of its own.
It's funny. I was listening to SAW 85-92 on my commute this morning, and was absolutely struck by Delphium, how it was almost perfectly in synch with the train and its movement. And that metaphor has always struck me with SAW 85-92, that it's travel music. It's the sound of trains and long auto journeys, it's like a tiny, understated, British version of Autobahn or Trans Europe Express - but instead of these sweeping Germanic journeys, they're tiny enclosed carriages across small, enclosed English spaces.
The delay that Mr Twin uses all over both these collections often reminds me of that double-echo of train wheels. ANd how you hear the echo all down the tunnel as the carriages behind you cross over the same bump.
Mesh Gear Fox, on 08 February 2010 - 08:26 PM, said:
yek, on 08 February 2010 - 07:50 PM, said:
Mesh Gear Fox, on 08 February 2010 - 07:30 PM, said:
bigs, on 08 February 2010 - 07:04 PM, said:
edit: also i've always been confused that saw 85-92 was labeled "ambient"... there's a lot of beat going on there!
I always thought it was a pisstake of a title.
well it's "ambient techno"...
was that even coined back then?
God yes! Ambient techno as a concept and term dates back to the KLF's Chill Out album and the Orb's Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld - released in '90 and '91 if my memory isn't totally destroyed by the abuse I put it through in those years.
Mesh Gear Fox 
Help
