Ambient music for the chronically un-chill

A music dummy’s guide to harsh tones and minimalist drones

“The Symphony of Action” (1922) by Konstantin Yuon

For a change of pace in this week’s newsletter, I thought I’d share some of my recent favorite albums for writing and working from home.

Most of these albums could be categorized as “ambient,” but I feel like the genre tag doesn’t do them justice. The songs are no good for mellowing out. They’re for concentration. Here, listen:

A distant color, secluded (2019) —David Granström

In his artist bio, David Granström says he makes “synthesized electronic music formed by algorithmic and aleatoric processes.” Alone in my room, I read that phrase and instinctively nodded as if I understood — yeah, algorithmic and aleatoric, totally.

By “algorithmic,” he apparently means that he’s creating sounds with the free audio synthesis platform SuperCollider. This is an open-source piece of software that’s been around since 1996, and people have figured out all kinds of neat tricks on it. One challenge is to write a piece of code in 140 characters or fewer, paste it into a tweet, and attach a clip of what it sounds like. You can click here to check out some examples.

By “aleatoric,” he means that some of the composition comes from random chance, as if by a roll of the dice.

On one level, that sort of composition is veiled in mystery to me. I barely remember any music theory from the year of guitar lessons I took in high school; I’m not going to bluff my way through this. But I do appreciate the acknowledgement of serendipity in the creative process.

What one artist might call divine inspiration, another might call pure chance. When writing a song, you input some data into a machine — by fretting some notes, pressing some keys, or pursing your lips on a brass instrument a certain way — and you listen to what sounds come out. Even when performing solo, improvisation requires close listening and adjustment based on responses from the instrument. That’s as true with my banjo as it is with a tool like SuperCollider, I think.

Anyway I listened to this album probably 10 times before I sat down and read the description. The centerpiece is a 25-minute track called “Waning moon” that feels like a soundtrack to deep space exploration. I would not call it soothing. It inspires a sense of awe. Granström seems to have achieved a sort of mind-meld with the tools of his art.

Ambiences (2019) —GARDNSOUND

My friend Gardner Beson, a.k.a. Gardnsound, is one of the artists I respect most in my personal life. He once wrote a song every day for a year and posted a video about each one on YouTube. I still can’t believe he pulled it off.

Gardner’s influences are eclectic. He’s been playing upright bass since we were children (he was a tall kid), and I had the good fortune to showcase his bass and production chops for several years with our Americana band The Camellias. He broadened my palette with Nine Inch Nails and the electronic avant-garde stuff he learned about at the University of South Carolina School of Music. He was the first person to turn me on to Iannis Xenakis and Wendy Carlos.

Gardner was also the first person to introduce me to the concept of aleatoric composition. I remember at one point in college, he created a music synthesis project that took live updates from various stock exchanges and translated them into musical notes. Over the years, watching him work with analog synths and other byzantine machinery, I gained an appreciation for music that’s built with fiddly knobs and soldering guns.

Under the moniker Gardnsound, he’s created dubstep and trap beats and angsty Reznor-esque anthems. But on this one album from 2019, he went fully ambient. He references Philip Glass, John Adams, Brain Eno, and Tim Hecker in the liner notes, and you’ll hear their minimalist and New Age influences all over these tracks.

When Gardner was making this album, he decided to do it the hard way. Each track required an array of analog synthesizers, a nest of wires emanating from a Eurorack, and a zen-like state of concentration as he triggered each sound manually. He built each song from scratch, recorded a live take, and then took everything apart to build the next song. 

“The beautiful part about it is it can’t be done again,” he said in an explanatory video. “I’m never ever going to be able to write this song again.”

Blues (2020) —Lamin Fofana

The membranous, clicking drone of cicadas has been the white noise behind every summer of my life so far. I remember as a kid hearing cicadas and whippoorwills in the early morning and feeling like I could hear the heat.

The cicadas have been especially loud in South Carolina this year. No longer passive participants in the ambient swampland sound bath, they have taken on the aggressive musicality of harsh noise artists.

I don’t know the provenance of all the sound samples on Lamin Fofana’s standout track “And All the Birds Sing Bass,” but the constant ratcheting hiss makes me think of the cicadas. Fofana grew up in Sierra Leone and Guinea before moving to the U.S. as a teenager and then to Germany as an adult, so I suspect he’s familiar with the wall of sound in my backyard.

This album was my introduction to Fofana’s music, but from what I read, he is interested in the cultural exchange that came about via the brutal transatlantic slave trade. His liner notes quote Amiri Baraka on the ways African music survived and evolved in North America.

Listening now, I remember the time I traveled to Sierra Leone and Guinea. I remember hearing people speak Yoruba and Krio and recognizing traces of the Gullah language from the South Carolina sea islands. I remember the similarity of climate and the echoes in the arts and cuisine: the banjo beside my bookcase and the okra in my garden. I don’t claim to know Fofana’s artistic intent, but I know how his music moves me.

Rain Shadow (2020) —Golden Retriever and Chuck Johnson

Some mornings in the summer, my wife and I set up school work for our children to do at their own pace. After exercising outside, we had them roll out little mats in the living room to mark off their spaces. One of them chose a candle and we lit it. When they had stopped talking and gotten to work on the tasks we’d set out for them, I liked to put on a little music.

My go-to soundtrack for those rare peaceful mornings was Chuck Johnson’s landmark 2017 album Balsams. Previously known for fingerpicked guitar in the American primitive style, Johnson composed Balsams entirely on pedal steel guitar and synthesizers. The weeping notes of the pedal steel are sustained and dragged on for bar after bar, and the synth tones wash in and out like the tide. The effect is that you can rarely tell when one note ends and another begins.

Rain Shadow takes that sound in a more collaborative, band-like direction. Johnson is still playing pedal steel on the album, but he’s joined in the studio by bass clarinetist Jonathan Sielaff and synthesist Matt Carlson. No one takes a solo, per se, but you can occasionally hear when one player takes the lead and the others follow.

For organ and brass (2017) —Ellen Arkbro

Arkbro, a Stockholm-based composer, recorded this album with a microtonal brass ensemble and a 17th-century German church organ tuned in meantone temperament (“Why couldn’t she pick a nicetone,” etc. etc., insert your jokes here).

Truth be told, I don’t know what I’m listening to here. Arkbro says she’s working in intervals and modalities that resemble traditional blues music, but it’s all moving at such a glacial pace, it’s hard to tell. 

The music sounds austere and impenetrable at first. Listening on headphones, though, I came to appreciate the breathy interaction of the instruments. It’s been half a year since I stood in a room and sang songs with friends, but there was a choral element to the songs that brought me back to Sunday morning worship. Then I listened to the opening track again and it sounded like the slow, slumbering breath of some mechanical beast.

Pyroclasts (2019) —Sunn O)))

Sunn O))) are considered granddaddies of the minimalist drone metal scene. Don’t let the “minimalist” tag deceive you, though: Their music has always used the crushing growl of an overdriven guitar amplifier as its basic building block.

Think of this as the inverse of technical speed metal. No riffs, no lyrics, no drums, just a slowly pulsing wall of feedback. The back catalog of Sunn albums and collaborations is extensive, but I keep coming back to this one because I find it … accessible?

The band members are still traipsing around in black robes and acting like spooky high priests in their profile photos. But Pyroclasts eschews the ominous chanting of an album like Kannon (2015) and the ensemble atmospherics of Monoliths & Dimensions (2009). With the exception of some synthesizer and electric cello drones, Pyroclasts feels like Sunn O))) stripped to its barest essentials: two guys coaxing a dirge from a tower of quaking amplifier cabinets.

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If you are interested in attending church with me Sunday, I’ll be tag-teaming the sermon with my pastor, Wendy Hudson. We are a radically inclusive Methodist congregation in Charleston, South Carolina. Service begins at 10 a.m. Eastern Time via our church’s Facebook page and website. Our text is Leviticus 25, and we’ll be discussing labor and mutual aid. 

If you enjoyed today’s newsletter, you might enjoy this free newsletter I wrote on the lo-fi music of Rich Mullins and The Mountain Goats, or this subscriber-only podcast I recorded with the avant garde metal guitarist Travis Andrews of the band Freighter. Feel free to dig around in the archives; I’ve been doing this every week for 14 months now.

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