Posts tagged music
My friend Keith finds sweet tunes and writes some cool words about ‘em. This track makes me feel like the world and everything is going to be okay.
I started listening to ambient when I was about fifteen. I began with Steve Roach’s Immersion: One, and even made some of my own (awful) synth-based, drone-y ambient. It wasn’t until about five or six years later that I started exploring the more dynamic sides of the genre. Like The Caretaker, who manipulates old recordings to function like ambient. Like Fennesz and Sakamoto, who combined piano wanderings with glitchy electronics. Like Black Swan, whose dark ambient takes you strange places. For me, ambient works best when it takes something familiar—like ballroom singles or piano recordings—and makes it obscured and unfamiliar.
Take Liz Harris of Portland, Oregon who performs under the name Grouper. Gently repeated downstrokes on an acoustic guitar blend easily with Liz’s lofty, layered voice on a soft bed of white noise. With the help of heavy reverb, tape delay, and other effects the music is taken from being another singer with a guitar to an experience from another world. Listen to “Stuck” off of her 2008 LP Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill. It’s kinda like listening to Low, but you’re in a deep depression and laying at the bottom of the ocean. In a good way.
