Going on from my last blog post’s claim that ambience does not exert authority, a look into Brian Eno’s album Reflection only served to reinforce these feelings. Each side contains only one song, partly composed by artificial intelligence with an app that continues the automation process even further. In this sense Eno is no longer the sole creator. In reading up on Eno’s work, including in the book ‘Oblique music’, the dissolution of the hierarchies we find in music and the axis of creator and consumer is prevalent.
One of the most important parts of ambient music is its formlessness, in that we should be able to ignore it as much as we can focus on it, but neither is right or wrong. We are allowed therefore to make our own choices about our style of listening, regaining autonomy where we have subtly lost it in so many other arenas of life …
‘Brian Eno states that ambient shouldn’t come with an instruction manual and we should be free to ignore it. Ambient does not exert authority. Eno’s attempt at dissolving the last remaining hierarchies of this universal field. And he says that to navigate this field and tap into its energy is madly interesting. The calm tones without hierarchy encourage the brain to concentrate, to think precisely. It gives people the chance to reflect, to develop their thoughts, about themselves and the cosmos, about society and the political situation. Does that sound like do-it-yourself therapy for stressed city dwellers whose lives are devoid of meaning?
Constantly hooked to digital devices, their tablets and smartphones, networking with everyone and anyone, talking the world up or putting it down with their online friends and always staying within their liberal left comfort zone until they can’t see the wood for the trees.
Eno’s advice for the shaken souls of the liberal left: less time wasting online, less overexcited rushing around. Instead: calm down and think. That is the only way to keep track of everything, to leave one’s bubble, change one’s perspective, and regain such things as empathy and a sense of justice – all of which are prerequisites for political action. Eno’s theory is that we so-called goodies are allowing ourselves to be infected with the hectically apocalyptic it’s-the-end-of-the-world stress that the baddies cultivate. Yet if the running temperature is near fever pitch, then we cannot possibly win this fight. This requires an atmosphere of calm and contemplation. Not in order to remain within this inner self and consolidate existing structures but to encourage mental development which leads us to develop political opinions and to enhance democratic processes. After all, if we claim that we want to defend the Western values of an open society, then really we ought to be able to say what these values are – and how these can be consolidated and fostered in today’s digital society.“Friends, acquaintances, companies, advertisers …, all of these constantly try to bait us with new and ever changing triggers to consume more. That’s how fake needs are created.” We are expected to buy and to share, with every activity being turned into a purchasable commodity, “it’s a system we as people are trapped in”. In the darkest, furthest recesses of our brains we do harbour a belief that life without Uber and AirBnB, without Twitter, Snapchat, WhatsApp or Facebook is possible. But we aren’t totally convinced of that. We are of course aware that these service providers and all the options they offer, aggressively push us to “simplify our lives”, but mainly succeed in creating more stress. “Ambient music aims to encourage people to reflect on what their real needs are,” Weber says. “Open music like this creates a space onto which I can project all of those inputs that were projected onto me from the outside. And I can re-project those very precisely and intensively.”
This is the way in which humans find the answers to the question of what makes them individuals and what the kind of society they feel comfortable in might look like. And also the answer to what we as humans need in order to make our lives human again, rather than living our lives as a mere series of reactions to triggers. Only if they are able to answer these questions can human beings think politically. Therefore, a music genre that leads people towards reflection is in itself definitely political because it lays the foundations for protest to develop at all. “We are no longer self-sufficient, no longer autonomous,” Hendrik Weber explains. “First of all we’ll have to fight to reclaim these qualities.”THE MISERY OF OUR TIMES: ONE FOR ALL
You can see why this fight is important on a random walk around London. Let’s take South Hackney in north-eastern London. “In and lively” is what the travel guide says about this part of town. We know what that means: boutiques, galleries, restaurant chains. We take a wrong turn and end up in an apparently very hip and busy bar by the name of Bistrotheque. It’s trying to be a restaurant and a wine bar, somewhere to dance and see live events, a place to go with friends and dates. There are customers here who spend six hours or more in this place and switch roles several times during their visit. At first they enjoy a meal at a table they reserved, then they spend time drinking at the bar, later dancing downstairs, then flirting, and finally they end up back at the bar. The organisation for all of this is done by smartphone. If you ask these people whether they feel self-sufficient and autonomous, they’ll answer, “Sure.” However, if you ask them what they would need to make their lives more worth living, they’ll stumble briefly and then one will say, “Time.” Just imagine that: People spend several hours in a restaurant and wish for more time. That’s the world of the Bistrotheques, that’s what Hendrik Weber meant when he said that we, the people, are “constantly being triggered”: We hang out, but we don’t relax because we are continuously being assaulted with stimulation. I would bet that no-one in the Bistrotheque in South Hackney has ever written a novel, ever conceived of a political thought, ever planned a revolution. If the Bistrotheque were a piece of music, it would be a loud, overamplified, modern pop song that’s been compressed to death. SLOWNESS IS THE GOAL
Erased Tapes takes the liberty of opting out of capitalism. An industry is a hierarchy to him: top, middle, bottom. With his label, Robert Raths wants to prevent hierarchies. “In an ideal scenario there is no longer a stage; artist and audience become one.”
This is ambient music, too: the field is open to influences from outside, the rain becomes part of the audio, the reaction of the audience becomes an emotional track and the artist reacts to that. Why should this view of art not become a model for a new view of politics, for a kind of public participation that is different and not your typical information evening where the politicians and civil servants sit on an elevated podium at the front whilst the citizens struggle through the evening on uncomfortable chairs? “None of our artists would dare put themselves above the audience,” says Robert Raths. “That works because the music that we publish doesn’t do hierarchies. The chorus isn’t worth more than the verse. There are no hits, no lead vocals. Each track, each moment counts the same.” He stops, then laughs. “That sounds like dispossession and socialism.”
It doesn’t get any more political than that.
ULTRA-RED – a collective of artists that have made many works and performances ‘that combine ambient music with confrontational politics’.
Based in LA… Using field recordings to make sonic montages… – Complex collection of albums and public performances