ambient

Album of the Week: Bruce Langhorne’s The Hired Hand (1971)

May 8, 2023 — Leave a comment

In 1971, the actor Peter Fonda, to whom [Bruce] Langhorne was introduced by [Hugh] Masekela, invited Mr. Langhorne to compose the music for his movie “The Hired Hand,” an austere soundtrack that featured banjo, fiddle and acoustic guitar… Not suited to the pace of Hollywood, to which he relocated from New York in the late ’60s, Mr. Langhorne moved to Hawaii in 1980 to farm macadamia nuts. He returned to Los Angeles in 1985 and, in 1992, learned that he had Type 2 diabetes. His diagnosis inspired him to create Brother Bru-Bru’s Hot Sauce, an organic, low-sodium salsa. -New York Times obituary, 2017

Two years before his directorial debut The Hired Hand, Peter Fonda starred in the classic road-trip film Easy Rider (Fonda was also credited as a screenwriter). Easy Rider looked to the future with its psychedelic narrative, unconventional style and countercultural themes. I haven’t seen The Hired Hand, but its soundtrack by Bruce Langhorne is similarly forward-thinking.

Though the obit above suggests that he was a man of many talents, Langhorne is probably best known as a session player for Bob Dylan, appearing on multiple classic Dylan albums. However, The Hired Hand soundtrack bears little resemblance to Dylan’s music. Langhorne’s guitar on “Opening” is repetitive and hypnotic, as violins provide a cheery accompaniment. Percussion is quite sparse on this track, including a very lightly played dulcimer, lending the song an ambient quality. “Riding Thru the Rain” is ominous, with a piano that sounds as dusty as the untamed West depicted in Fonda’s cowboy movie.

The sound on the recording as a whole has an old-school reel-to-reel quality that is gorgeous, yet the music is not dissimilar to what 21st century artists in the cross-section of ambient and country (Scott Tuma and William Tyler come to mind) make. According to boomkat, “Langhorne assembled each piece alongside his girlfriend Natalie Mucyn, who with no prior mixing or editing experience multitracked the recording via some distinctly lo-fi tape dubbing.”

“Ending”, the album’s longest track, has a middle-section with flutes that is stunning. It’s a lovely finish to a strange, moving and all too brief album from an unheralded artist.

Listen to The Hired Hand here.

Album of the Week: Burial’s Young Death / Nightmarket (2016)

November 21, 2022 — Leave a comment

So, like most things Burial, this isn’t actually an album. By my count, Burial has released 20 singles and EPs since 2007’s full-length Untrue. Some of these releases are collaborative, most are solo. Some are one track, most are 2-4. There’s a lot of gems in the group, but this one stands out to me.

Side A’s “Young Death” has a heartbeat and ghostly vocal samples, at least for its first 3-and-a-half minutes (this section would fit well on Untrue). After that, things slow down to a crawl as thunder, breathing and a perfectly placed Skull Kid laugh create the track’s atmosphere. This section feels to me like a precursor to the B-side.

On “Nightmarket”, Burial flips an esoteric Mike Oldfield sample, and the result is like a rave frozen in time, or the biggest moment in trance suspended in amber. To me, it’s sort of like the spacey portion of “Born Slippy” in its epic reach. This sample recurs several times in the first 3 minutes of the track, and I spent countless nights in college with this addictive moment soundtracking nighttime wanderings about campus. The rest of “Nightmarket” (outside of its open space and vinyl hiss) diverges with a slew of video game-y prog-electro. Unlike “Young Death”, there is no backbeat on the track. Its Burial at his most mysterious.

Listen to “Young Death / Nightmarket” here.

Album of the Week: Steve Hillage’s Rainbow Dome Musick (1979)

November 7, 2022 — Leave a comment

Yer tellin’ me you never heard of rainbow dome musick?? Well, big Steve Hillage was quite productive between the years of 1969-1979. At 17, he played lead guitar in Arzachel (previously Uriel, later known as Egg) and joined Gong shortly thereafter. By 1979 he had released 4 studio albums with Gong and 4 solo albums. Most of these fall in the psychedelic rock/Canterbury scene category, but Rainbow Dome Musick exists in its own ambient plane.

I found some info about the Rainbow Dome on this website, which includes the poster I repasted below. As you can see, the dome was advertised as part of the 3rd Festival for Mind Body + Spirit, which took place at London’s Olympia exhibition space/music venue in ’79. Billed as “The show about you & me”, the festival featured such new age-y attractions as astrology, “Earth mysteries”, and “sports”. Hillage and his wife, the musician Miquette Giraudy, made the music for the Rainbow Dome. I’m guessing this was some sort of psychedelic 3D art piece you could venture inside and space out in, like a Turrell space.

If you’re familiar with Mario Party 3, there’s some sparkly SFX that you hear for about 10 seconds when the players first enter a level (you can hear this at the 6:55 mark here). About 5 minutes into Rainbow Dome Musick, a very similar sequencer sound appears, creating the background for the rest of the track. Shit gets super gnarly about 12 minutes in when Hillage, gently at first, starts ripping on guitar. By 15 minutes in the music has become transcendent.

That’s “Garden of Paradise”, which takes up the A side. The other half is “Four Ever Rainbow”, which to me is somewhat evocative of Ashra’s New Age of Earth meditations. Less ecstatic than “Garden of Paradise”, but quite mellow. The guitar here is more rhythmic, and the synth sounds great.

I really like this comment on the above blog from one Julian Guffogg – “I went then – and met Steve Hillage in the dome!” It appears the event founder Graham Wilson commented as well.

Listen to Rainbow Dome Musick here.

Album of the Week: Music by William Eaton (1978)

April 4, 2022 — Leave a comment

Driving drifting through the lonesome sandstone canyons as the sun slanted away, west. You, too, were on your way.

–YouTube comment

Private press albums can be hidden gems or unremarkable projects. William Eaton’s debut of improvised instrumental guitar passages definitely falls into the former category. As soon as I heard the first track here I knew this was absolutely golden. After a bit of a warmup, Eaton reaches a brilliant harmonic theme that recalls the storied greatness of John Fahey – who was, I suppose, a contemporary of Eaton’s!

Eaton came from a family of bankers in Lincoln, Nebraska, but after attending Stanford headed to Arizona and ended up, according to Ultravillage, “living out of his car, roaming the desert and eating mesquite pods and cactus fruit.” He began designing his own guitars, including a 26 string and double neck quadraphonic electric guitar.

from Wisdom Tree Institute

Given the open and wandering, almost ascetic lifestyle Eaton led, it’s not surprising that this album is full of ambient space and warm, gentle tones. It’s become my recent comfort album, and resonates as a night-time listening companion the way Scott Tuma’s Hard Again (2001) did for me in 2020 (when, god knows, I needed it).

Track 7B was sampled to great effect by DJ Shadow on 2002’s “Fixed Income”, so props to him for knowing about this one 20 years ago, before it was even reissued. I mean, the guy made Endtroducing after all, so that checks out. Eaton continued to record and release music, though I haven’t yet heard other work of his that captures the same subtle beauty as Music. He co-founded a luthiery (guitar construction) school in Phoenix, Arizona that he now directs.

Listen to Music of William Eaton on Bandcamp or Spotify.

You can see some of Eaton’s incredible self-designed guitars here.

Album of the Week: Clear Horizon (2003)

September 27, 2021 — Leave a comment

I’ve not delved into much music by the British band Flying Saucer Attack, but I tend to trust anything released by Kranky, the superb American label that delivered masterpieces by Stars of the Lid, Labradford, Windy & Carl and so on.

Clear Horizon was the collaborative project of Flying Saucer Attack’s David Pearce and Kranky recording artist Jessica Bailiff. By all accounts, the artists created the project by sending each other tapes across the Atlantic in the early 2000s, without recording in the same room.

For me, this is one of those albums where the first track is the best. “Watching the Sea” is some ascension type shit, all blissed-out guitar and sweet singing. I love this song.

“I wonder why you haven’t seen the light for days,” Bailiff sings on “For Days”. And there is a hermitic vibe to this album, everything cavernous, moving at a slow pace. The song structure fades into feedback, transitioning into ambient washes that sound more like Fennesz than any singer-songwriter project.

“Sunrise Drift” is the first song to float along with no rhythmic guitar strumming, just vocals and chimes in an ether of white noise. It’s meditative music. This stuff requires patience to be appreciated, and a more critical ear might deride this album for lack of direction. And it’s not all brilliant, of course. “Death’s Dance” in particular seems more unpleasant than enjoyable. But mostly, Clear Horizon is gorgeous and relaxing, and a forgotten gem.

Listen to Clear Horizon here.

Album of the Week: Julianna Barwick’s The Magic Place (2011)

April 19, 2021 — Leave a comment

“I feel big, you know what I mean? Like, not big in the sense of weight, like, gaining weight or nothin’ like that. Like colossal.”

***

I guess I can believe it’s been 10 years, especially because the last one has felt so long. Still, Julianna Barwick’s debut feels big, which is all the more impressive considering how little equipment went into its recording. Here, it’s just her multi-tracked vocals and one or two instruments added in.

With hardly any discernible lyrics and a consistent, tried-and-true approach, Barwick’s music can be difficult to write about. Wyndham Wallace of The Quietus admitted as much, writing that “Critics have fallen over themselves to conjure up grand metaphors that encapsulate the experience” of her music. There have been comparisons to Enya, Eno, Cocteau Twins, and any other classic music so often described as “ethereal”. But really, it’s not that deep. Barwick described herself as “a pretty happy, easy-going person who is really excited about life.”

By her own account, Barwick always loved to sing. And so, by simply improvising vocal lines and layering the .wav files in GarageBand, she made her breakthrough album. There’s a good video from the Magic Place era that shows her doing it:

It’s not hard to reason why Barwick has named her albums The Magic Place, Nepenthe (“that which chases away sorrow”), or Healing Is a Miracle. There is peace in her music. “White Flag” was always my favorite, and it’s kind of hard to describe without sounding corny (like the gates of heaven opening?) I will say that early 2011 was not a particularly great time in my life and this was music like I’d never heard before, simultaneously calming and exhilarating. Back then, Asthmatic Kitty wrote that “Bob in Your Gait” “sounds the way humans should treat one another.” In a much more recent interview, Julianna said, “I’ve heard from a lot of people that The Magic Place in particular has gotten a lot of people through some dark times in their life, so I’m really glad for that. That makes me feel really good…” You can add me to that list!

I like everything she’s done, and the extended versions of Healing Is a Miracle from last year really blew me away. But it’s hard for me to find any faults in The Magic Place. Even its sequencing is flawless. “Envelop” starts the record off by doing just that, drawing the listener in. “Flown” is a perfect conclusion, like lying down in bed at the end of a gratifying day. I’ve been a fan since this release and Julianna Barwick’s music is a treasure. Hopefully someday I’ll be able to see her perform live.

Check out The Magic Place on Spotify.

Album of the Week: Roy Montgomery & Grouper’s Split EP (AKA Vessel) (2009)

January 25, 2021 — Leave a comment

In 2009, veteran New Zealand psych-guitarist Roy Montgomery (of Dadamah and Hash Jar Tempo, among other things) and Liz Harris’ Grouper released this magnificent split 12″ on Harris’ Yellow Electric label as well as ambient artist Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s now defunct Root Strata label.

Montgomery’s side is dedicated to Sandy Bull. Bull was a groundbreaking folk-guitarist who became a staple performer in the Greenwich Village scene of the early 60s and pushed boundaries on his albums, mixing international instruments, sounds and genres. His “Blend” is presumably the inspiration for Montgomery’s “Fantasia on a Theme by Sandy Bull (Slight Return)”. Like “Blend”, “Fantasia” is a roughly 20-minute piece of marvelous acoustic guitar work, with multiple changes in tempo and melody. A significant difference is that on “Blend”, Bull was accompanied by jazz drummer Billy Higgins (of Ornette Coleman’s band, among others), where Montgomery’s “Fantasia” has no drums. This is made up for by the reverb on Montgomery’s guitar, which gives the effect of the artist accompanying himself. It’s a brilliant psychedelic piece to get lost in.

Grouper’s side comes from one of the strongest periods of her consistent career: between the releases of Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill and AIA, arguably her two best full-lengths. If you’re a fan of Grouper you know what to expect: music that is hazy, delicate and touching. There are four songs, the standout being “Vessel”, which recalls (to me) the melody of “The Star-Spangled Banner”. “Pulse”, the instrumental closer, features some prominent dog-barking (presumably from the one pictured here).

Harris and Cantu-Ledesma would later collaborate as Raum on 2013’s Event of Your Leaving, and Harris featured on Roy Montgomery’s 2018 album Suffuse.

This split is not on Spotify. Check out Grouper’s side on Youtube, below.

Album of the Week: Raul Lovisoni & Francesco Messina’s Prati bagnati del monte Analogo (1979)

December 14, 2020 — Leave a comment

Whew, that title is a mouthful. Okay, ever seen Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain? Well, it’s partially inspired by French writer René Daumal’s surrealist novel Mount Analogue, in which the titular mountain is either imaginary or inaccessible. Daumal died before the book was finished, and the first track of this album acts as a sort of companion piece envisioning what the mountain contains – the title translating to Wet Meadows of Mount Analogue. I’m using some conjecture here – the album contains no lyrics and I cannot find an English translation to the Italian LP insert. The music, though, is sure to please fans of ambient and minimalist music.

Prati bagnati is composed of three tracks, the title track taking up the album’s first side and most of its running time. This is Messina’s side, and he adds synths to the piano playing of Michele Fedrigotti. The piano is delicate as a lullaby. At about the 14:45 mark, a synth melody slowly enters the mix – it sounds like what an ambulance siren would sound like if ambulances were calming instead of alarming. Then at 18 minutes we hear a couple stronger synth swaths that make me think of OPN’s maximalist soundtrack work.

Lovisoni’s b-side begins with “Hula Om”, a solo piece performed on harp, and ends with “Amon Ra”. “Amon Ra” features vocals by Juri Camisasca, who has appeared on several albums by Franco Battiato, who produced this record. Lots of Italian names, I know, but don’t worry I won’t quiz you. Both tracks continue the meditative vibe of the a-side, albeit to slightly less hypnotizing effect. But if you’re down with the 23-minute jam that opens the album, you’ll be into the rest. As a package, Prati bagnati is a heavenly slice of Milanese minimalism.

Listen to Prati bagnati del monte Analogo on Spotify.

Album of the Week: Ashra’s New Age of Earth (1976)

November 23, 2020 — 1 Comment

Look at the ARP Odyssey. It looks like 1976. At 23(!), Manuel Göttsching used it and an array of other synth equipment to create New Age of Earth. By ’76, the Ash Ra Tempel veteran had spent over 5 years with that group as a young guitarist and vocalist. Despite the Ashra moniker here, New Age of Earth is essentially Göttsching’s solo debut. Göttsching’s official website bio hilariously characterizes him as “Modest, quiet, [and] bad with self-promotion and with answering the phone”. He made all the music himself, and in falling with his modest and quiet character, there are no vocals to be found here, just 4 instrumental pieces.

“Sunrain” is propulsive, perhaps the least “ambient” piece here. It makes me want to sing along like the guy on Pat Metheny’s Still Life who goes “dadadada de DAdoo dayah” (maybe check that album out if you don’t know what I’m talking about).

“Ocean of Tenderness” is, as its title suggests, calm and soothing. Göttsching whips out the Gibson SG on the last 5 minutes for some dank noodling. “Deep Distance” is a whistling jam that some have likened to a proto-Aphex Twin track.

“Nightdust” takes up the whole B side, and it’s the trippiest piece on the record as well as my favorite. It fans out like a bellows before settling, appropriately, like cosmic dust. Along with the ambient pieces on NEU! 75, this is about as good as it gets for spacey Krautrock music. I recommend it to any fan of ambient or atmospheric synth and guitar work.

Listen to New Age of Earth on Spotify.

Album of the Week: Donato Dozzy Plays Bee Mask (2013)

August 17, 2020 — Leave a comment

Imagine a party outside, in Japan, on a mountain. Heavy rain falls as ambient techno plays late into the night. This isn’t a dream: this is Labyrinth, an annual music festival on Japan’s Mt. Naeba.

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Peter Van Hoesen #labyrinth #japan #techno

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An attendee’s view of Labyrinth

It was here at Labyrinth 2012 that Italian techno producer Donato Dozzy met Philadelphian ambient/experimental musician Chris Madak, AKA Bee Mask. Dozzy called the festival “Simply, the best thing I ever experienced in my life,” and connected with Madak in an environment ripe for both musicians. Initially commissioned for a single remix of Bee Mask’s “Vaporware” (note: not “vaporwave”) 12″, Dozzy produced an entire album of reimaginings of the source material. The result: Donato Dozzy Plays Bee Mask.

The original “Vaporware” is initially a jarring track, its bleeps and blips immediately scrambling the listener’s brain before gaining a rhythm. Plays Bee Mask brilliantly uses the source material to create a much more subtle and calming experience. Infused with raindrops, the opener “Vaporware 1” is ambient bliss, looping the bells of “Vaporware” to create a sonic dreamscape.

Elsewhere, “Vaporware 3” freezes what sounds like a vocal loop a la The Field, “Vaporware 4” finds a techno groove, and “Vaporware 7” is a mind-melting finale. What Dozzy accomplished with Plays Bee Mask is outstanding in both the ambient and techno genres, especially considering the amount of music released in both fields over the past 10 years. If you consider yourself a fan of either type of music, do yourself a favor and listen to this album.

Listen to Plays Bee Mask on Spotify.