Staff Pix 10/16: Ambient

“Cauled Ones and Birth Rugs” by Natural Snow Buildings

Oh Natural Snow Buildings, what would we do without you, our most esoteric soldiers? The French musical project of Solange Gularte and Mehdi Ameziane is one-of-a-kind, their 20-odd albums released over the course of less than 15 years seemingly pulling from the band’s experience on every known plane of existence and then some — from the frostbitten desolation of The Winter Ray, to the hallucinatory occult nightmares of Daughter of Darkness and Night Coercion into the Company of Witches, and so on and so forth.  Few groups have dared to peer so deeply and without fear into the abyss, and in return extract something as spiritually resonant as “Cauled Ones and Birth Rugs,” a track so evocative and so overflowing with inscrutable sentiment that it seems almost inhuman in it’s creation. Like the best of Natural Snow Buildings, “Cauled Ones” balances mind-boggling layering and composition with an at times overwhelming bombardment of aesthetic and emotional puzzle pieces. The first half of the song, a piercing synth drone, accompanied by an eerie vocal track which wavers up and down like a flag upon a flagpole. The two elements interlock and then come undone and rejoin once more, never content to let the song gain any semblance of form or predictability. It is bleak but never distant, fantastical but always grounded, like the music that plays after a lost battle in a great holy war, staring out over the battlefield and contemplating the resources depleted, the immeasurable potential of the lives lost. But then, Natural Snow Buildings work their magic, and the music takes us somewhere entirely new. Now, there is light percussion, there is form. The vibe is no longer dismal — we are in a clearing, a bazaar, somewhere beautiful and lively and free. Natural Snow Buildings have transported us to their abstruse little occult fantasy haven, where the evils of world exist tenfold, but the wonderful parts of life shimmer just as brightly. There is music, there is wonder, there is light. — Lucca Swain

“Miano Little Miss 1565” by Casino Versus Japan

Suspended somewhere between a neglected memory and an unspoken dream, Casino Versus Japan’s “Miano Little Miss” twirls above you like a dim, fading star in a black nothingness sky. Under 2 minutes in length, it’s un-skippable and always makes me hold my breath for a bit. An intimate break from my typical playlist and a departure from Erik Kowalski’s usual electronic, beat-filled tracks, “Miano Little Miss 1565” resides in a hazy heap of fluttering snow and sun-bleached pictures. It’s elegiac, named after an unidentified child victim of the 1944 Hartford Circus Fire. But even past its titular meaning, the track provokes an innate feeling of sadness and longing for innocence. The heavy reverberated, disoriented yet harmonic piano floats through the song, mostly unchanging and repeating, but sometimes pausing for a second, blinking swiftly and softly like a flickering home video. Rather than assembling into a crescendo of sound and static like many ambient songs do, it chooses to wander in its world, muddling into a softened fog. Intimate and hypnotic, the melody begins to make you feel lost in some daze of thought. Rewinding memories and scenes of frosted pale blues and gentle purples as you drift off before dissolving into silence and stillness. — Julia Schramm

“#19” by Aphex Twin

A song – no, a masterpiece– of a lifetime. The track fluctuates, swelling in its resonant synth before waning back into its shallow murmurs. Its fluctuating chord arrangement and natural ambient soothe makes for a beautiful aural recreation of waves crashing into the surface. Despite its simplicity – which could chalk the song up to nothing more than a frequent appearance on one’s sleep playlist – the individuality of the sonic texture that Aphex Twin achieves here is admired by many and has been deemed as one of his most evocative pieces. It’s difficult to capture, in words, just how “#19” aches in contemplation in the seamless way that it does, but once you allow it to capture you, it never lets you go. — Sophie Parrish

“Drywall Is Getting Expensive” by cult friends

On their second EP, Vaticide, cult friends uses the motif of walls to convey loneliness frequently. The word vaticide itself means the murder of a prophet, though here it means the killing of a higher truth. “Drywall is getting expensive” has a haunting sound, a sense of isolation between walls, focused on feeling minuscule in a large world. The only vocals can be heard in the background saying, “talk to you through the walls”, a search for meaning manifesting in your physical surroundings, enveloping you. The loneliness centered in the EP is meant to signify the rejection of the expectation that we must search for life’s greater meaning. The song was written during a winter in Poland, where cult friends described feeling minuscule compared to the grandeur of the Tatra Mountains, and the echoing, empty instrumentals push that isolation through. An all-encompassing sense of being surrounded comes through the lonely ambience of Vaticide. There is a longing for more, a hope for more meaning, and yet a lack of an answer to the desire for significance. I know an ambient song is well-made when I feel as if the sounds are closing in around me. It’s a very unusual feeling that cult friends manage to capture magnificently. — Andy Brown

“I Love You Golden Blue” by Sonic Youth

“I Love You Golden Blue” begins with beeping techno sounds, churning out a heart-monitor rhythm of afterlife that slides into seven sprawling minutes of pure haunt and eerie, melancholic instrumentals. “Dead boy stares / Strange to meet you / Dead boy cares / So great to see you,” sings Kim Gordon, her whispery vocals ever delicate against guitar tender as a swollen heart. “I can’t read your mind / I can’t find the time / I can’t feel the thrill / I don’t have the will.” Released on their album Sonic Nurse (2004), Sonic Youth’s “I Love You Golden Blue” marks a departure from the heavier, noisier hits of their discography. The track revels in its vulnerability, wonderfully fragile as it embraces hair-thin fractures begging to crack. The sonic landscape of “I Love You Golden Blue” is delightfully spectral and ghost-like: a hypnotizing, haunting atmosphere impossible to tear yourself from. — Heather Thorn

“Why Do You Love Me?” By Cocteau Twins and Harold Budd

I don’t know if there is any band that is able to capture an ethereal sound more consistently than the Cocteau Twins; making them kind of the perfect group to break into ambient music. My favorite answer to this calling of theirs has to be the song “Why Don’t You Love Me” off of the album The Moon and the Melodies. In collaboration with pioneer ambient musician Harold Budd, “Why Don’t You Love Me” features all of the dream pop distortion you’ve grown to love from them and mixes in a piano that makes you feel like you’re floating. It reminds me of wanting to talk to someone really badly, and when you finally do, you instantly click. The conversation feels like one that could only come from years of friendship. I think that’s something really special about this kind of music, and specifically this song. Everyone can close their eyes and have their own interpretation; their own super specific feeling is transcribed just through an atmospheric sound, pretty ethereal if you ask me! — Nick Hendrickson

“Song 2” by Nurse With Wound

Nurse With Wound’s 1988 album Soliloquy for Lilith was created by Stephen Stapleton and his wife, Diana Rogerson, without the use of any traditional instruments. Instead, Stapleton arranged a series of effects pedals into an isolated feedback loop. With no original input signal to process, the only source of sound was the electrical hum generated by the chain of effects units plugged into one another. Stapleton discovered that changing the distance between himself and the pedals altered the sound of the feedback, resulting in slow, subtle variations shaped solely by the gentle movement of his fingers above the effects units. Soliloquy for Lilith falls under the dark ambient subgenre of ambient music, pairing the tonal and textural elements of traditional ambient with the unconventional methods of the post-industrial movement. I chose “Song 2” specifically because I felt it captured the ominous side of ambient music particularly well. The track is carried by a metallic drone reminiscent of a wailing siren or a creaky hinge. It feels harsh and industrial, yet simultaneously organic in the way it shifts and changes shape, almost like laboured breathing. Despite its lengthy runtime of 17 minutes and 7 seconds long, “Song 2” remains both meditative and unsettling throughout, immersing listeners in a dense landscape of textures. — Emeline Chopin

“Blue Spring” by Nathan Micay

“Blue Spring” feels like being suspended in a moment that you aren’t ready to let go of. The electronic textures it uses are cold yet deeply emotional, which, to me, creates an almost hypnotic experience when I listen. Especially when I listen to this song through the streets of Boston, it creates a weightless atmosphere around me, like I’m floating to my next destination through all the cramped, tall buildings. Since the song was created for the television show Industry, it makes even more sense, as it really captures the show’s feeling: youth, recklessness, and being completely consumed by your surroundings. The song makes me feel empowered, like I’m my own Harper Stern (iykyk), but it also has an underlying loneliness that comes with that feeling of power. Overall, I love how much emotion it evokes without spelling anything out for the listener, instead putting you in a feeling you can’t quite explain. — Oona Schulweis

“My Lost One” by Julia Holter

This seems to be the most popular hit from Julia Holter’s chamber-ambient-pop album Materia released this august, Holter boasting some of her most dreamlike and hazy songs on it; the record includes a few pre-released singles on top of some new additions. “My Lost One” stands out for the soft chime melody that repeats throughout the song, accompanied by Holter’s airy vocals delivering her signature cryptic lyrics. “I don’t want / these leaves on the floor,” she sings breathily in the first verse, using specific yet vague imagery to create that very singular ‘Holter-esque’ sense of atmosphere and obscurity. This song can upgrade an irritating walk in the rain to a transcendent part of your day, perfectly harnessing that surreal, washed-out, and ethereal feeling that you get looking outside your window on a cloudy Sunday. You really do get ‘lost’ in this song, and In my opinion it best encapsulates all the best qualities of the album. — Diego Gonzalez