'Ambiance Music?'

Music for a Time and a Place

August 25, 2024.

Sunny afternoon. Summer. Waves in the cold. Ankles, calves, knees. Great lake.
Children playing. Windy rushes. A spot to stop. Sway, listen.
A place to stay.
A place for a moment to be in.

Pukaskwa Waves is music that has a place and time to it. Based on a recording taken standing in the waves of Lake Superior, at Pukaskwa National Park, the music holds reverence for that place and time. Shifting waves and children playing set a tone for the pulsing warmth of buzzing synths and bubbling gongs. It feels like closing your eyes, absorbing the sunshine, and breathing in time with the lake.

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Lately I’ve been making music that is designed to honour a specific time and place. Taking sounds from a place, and trying to weave music around that as a foundation, I feel like I’m grounding the music in relationships that already exist, rather than merely ‘creating’ from my own whims. Like it causes me to listen first.

I’m planting a lot of time into this endeavour. Excited to see what grows. I think it develops an essential tenet of ambient music, as Brian Eno original conceived of it: as music for a space.

‘Ambiance’ means the feeling of a space. “The character and atmosphere of a place,” says Google’s dictionary. Ambient music is built on the idea that music is actually part of the space that it exists within. Perhaps even that music does not happen ‘within’ spaces, but that music is a part of what makes a space.

Maybe we can start to call this practice ‘Ambiance Music,’ to differentiate from the vast ocean of Ambient Music?

This is music that is, for me, most profoundly experienced as a conversation with living spaces. Like Richard Skelton’s work, where he creates his own stringed instruments and records them outside, in moors and fields around where he lives, to gather the sense of a unique reality, a real place, which the space conveys. That excites me the most. I want to weave my sound into the sounds that are already erupting from life, in the places where I exist, where I breathe, swim, walk, dance, laugh, love, listen.

I have a few more projects based on this idea that will be coming into the world this year. I don’t know why this is what is drawing me in. Do we ever really know why we’re inspired? Does it matter? It’s an inspiration. So there’s no need to explain it. But I also like explaining things, and I’m curious. So I wonder….

One reason I’m interested in this (I think) is because it’s a mediation on listening. It’s a way of hearing first. It has to be receptive. I can’t just ‘express myself’ or ‘speak my truth.’ I’m interested in finding other forms of expression than that. I don’t want it to be about ‘me.’ I want it to be about connections.

Musicians might be the most primed to listen, you’d think. And yet we’re often making noises, as opposed to listening for them. But the best music happens when it’s both at once, of course. I cherish the skills I’ve developed from playing in live bands - a very specific way of being present and adaptive, tuned in and responsive, able to speak and listen at the same time, trying to balance voices rather than shout over others or be drowned out by their insistences. These are valuable skills, which we can also turn on when we’re living in all sorts of other ways. I’m not sure where else I would have learned these skills so clearly, except in playing group improvised music.

Living and listening within the world gives us a space to respond. There are moments all around us. Surrounding us, enveloping us. We can listen to them. But even deeper, we can listen inside them. Being inside a space. Being part of an ambiance.

Streaming Links for Pukaskwa Waves