I’m listening to Klaus Schulze and he’s really good at creepy ambient stuff.
I feel like, had technology been around to allow the production of this sort of music, it would have been perfectly on-time 50 years earlier. That’s a mismatch between the artistic aspiration and the faculties of the time to meet the requirements. Maybe painting and stage-play was then at where this music arrives later.
We have to consider the time-fractured sensorium, owing technological disparities, as a player in the defeat over the holistic human individual and their own coherent emotional expression. This is the trauma of the bomb, and the post-war ear.
Jackhammers and machines created Jazz with all its discontinuities out of environmental impetus. Le Corbusier called the staggered skyline of Manhattan “hot jazz in stone.” But perhaps ambient music was something ideal to counteract all that: a balm which arrived late in the injury.
Need the injury be so generational? Hereditary?
The long tones make it suitable for resonance within a stone cathedral. Heavy reverberation doesn’t lead to dissonance and slurring when the music is already slow. David Byrne, in How Music Works goes deep into the acoustics of such music and stone walls of old cathedrals providing the acoustics for long notes to slowly roll through changes. Such pieces are ideal for insinuating environmental belonging, as opposed to violent kinetic thrashing or spasm. As the top YouTube comment says,
In college I was a night watchman in a warehouse overnight and would hook up the PA system to echo Klaus throughout the building especially on starlit nights making my rounds, listening, and gazing at the stars through the skylights. What a job… what an artist
Sustained chords and notes with slow change arrive late upon the fracticious transition of high-speed mechanical processes into higher-order speed digital electronics clock frequencies. That’s why the come off as “haunting.” The subject has already died.
So how to retroactively, for the next generation, remedy the inherited trauma of transitions of processes into mechanical/electrical speeds which defy cogitation?
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