Ambient

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Ambient

This week, it’s (loosely) ambient music. This is an efficient musical form since you can achieve a state of hypnotic profundity that lasts for ten or fifteen minutes by just repeating the same bar on a loop, running a flanger or phaser set to a slow sweep over it, adding a few industrial sound effects and having really cool cover art.

Anyway, as I was listening to the Chromatics’ pretty cover of I Want To Be Alone, an odd thing happened: quite deep in the mix, there is an oddly discordant backing. Perhaps a Mellotron, a Farfisa or something exotic, but to my uncultured ears, it sounded uncomfortably like a weed-eater.

Well, that’s quite discordant, I thought — it rather spoils the sweetness of the music — but who knows? These artists feel things more deeply than I do. Anyway, I carried on. Next up was Our Lord Debussy’s A Winged Victory for the Sullen — equally, but differently, portentous: tolling piano chords, shimmering synth pads — and there is that same discordant backing, like a leaf-blower, again!

How odd! Two songs in a row! Is this a genre, perhaps? A collective? Perhaps a famous guest ambient instrumentalist of some kind?

I got up to make a coffee and as I did, spotted my neighbour in the garden with his Flymo.