The Ambient Emperor’s New Robes. Just Asking…
Take a listen to this audio. This won’t really make sense without it. You don’t have to finish before you keep reading; in fact you shouldn’t. Press play and continue on.
Q1: Do you like it? or Would you listen to it again? or Would you recommend it to anyone? or Would you pay money for it?
About two years ago, a very dear friend of mine sent me this track, called Cascade by a composer named William Basinski. It’s about forty minutes long, and sounds like this:
After that, I took a real interest in this kind of music. At the time, I didn’t really consider the term ambient. It was electronic, sort of. It was repetitive. It was the sort of music that I thought, “Hey, this would be nice to put on when _______.” So I bought it on CD.
Then, over the next few months, thanks to the lovely algorithms at bandcamp.com, I began discovering lots of similar music. Some of it was by William Basinski. Lots of it was by other groups. Groups like A Winged Victory for the Sullen and Bing & Ruth and The Caretaker and Eluvium. Here’s a really killer album by Bing & Ruth called No Home of the Mind:
Q2: Do you like it? or Would you listen to it again? or Would you recommend it to anyone? or Would you pay money for it?
For a long time, I considered this new style of music I was finding a guilty pleasure. It was simple, it was occasionally mindless, and it went against a lot of the ideas I’d been cooking up in my own mind of what I thought music had to be. It didn’t do much.
Eventually, I sort of clung to the label “Ambient” and started to really explore some of the best of the genre. I began listening to a lot of Brian Eno, a lot of Stars of the Lid, lots of Max Richter and even really digging the music of Robert Rich and Steve Roach. Lots of names you don’t know about unless you look at things like Pitchfork’s Top 50 Ambient Albums of All Time and start taking time out to give the albums a listen. Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports is pretty often a contender for the #1 spot:
Q3: Do you like it? or Would you listen to it again? or Would you recommend it to anyone? or Would you pay money for it?
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But then, as I started to expand the places I was willing to look for new albums in similar styles, I started coming across music that sounded like the track you (hopefully) heard at the beginning of this. I won’t link any, because I’m not looking to speak ill of other artists and a part of my problem with all of this is that I’m never sure how true what I’m about to say actually goes for any of these artists. So, we’ll just use that first track as the example here.
Q4: What if I told you that the first track you heard was made by me?
Q5: What if I told you it took me all of about six minutes to create?
Q5: What if I told you all I had to do was throw an old MP3 file of a rehearsal I recorded into Audacity, and take just about fifteen seconds of it and use a feature called Paulstretching to drag it out over fifteen minutes without sacrificing the audio quality? That creating that sound file took me all of about three and a half minutes to cook up?
It’s a pretty easy thing to do, and some examples turn out to be exceptionally popular (as seen below)
Getting back to the audio at the beginning:
Q6: Would any of that change your mind? Change how you felt about it?
Q7: What if the problem was that the music you began enjoying was really susceptible to this kind of deceit? Or would you even feel deceived?
Consider the story of the teens who left a pair of eyeglasses on the floor at an art exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Art.
Q8: How would you feel if that was you in the main picture, kneeling carefully with an expensive camera to capture of an image of something you saw profundity in? Would you feel foolish?
But then so what about those giant frames at the very same art exhibits of blank white canvases with a single black square? Do you ever feel skeptical of the very same thing?
Q9: Does it matter how long it took to create a piece of art? Does it matter if the creator put almost no effort into it? And, if no:
Q10: Does that not make those works of art which took immense amounts of time &/or effort equally unrelated to the quality? Should we not care if someone spent five years on a mural or a symphony or a film just on the grounds of the sheer devotion?
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My problem, at least, is that when the things I enjoy start coming close to wearing the emperor’s new robes, that is, that I can’t tell if there is any actual substance behind the thing, I get sort of skeptical. I become very judgmental and possibly dismiss good art because I’m afraid of playing the fool.
And then I think of a different piece of music I know, one which is exactly four minutes and thirty three seconds long, and I wonder if all it takes is enough people to claim to see the robes for them to really be there. So:
Q11: Does it matter?
Q12: Are you brave enough—braver than me—to believe in something without skepticism or hesitancy or fear of looking foolish? And so what if the track was created with really simple means and took the artist no time at all to make?
Q13: see question 11
Q14: Is it bad if you believe in art the artist themself doesn’t believe in? Gave no thought to? Churned out and moved on?
Q15: see question 13
Q16: Was the photographer foolish for finding beauty in the world? Should we shame him? Can art ever cease to be about the object itself and rather become our interaction with it? Is it okay if we find beauty where there wasn’t meant to be any? Is that bad?
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Last question: Do you find it as hard as me to stand behind the answer you know is correct? Do you also wonder what’s inside that makes it so hard? What it is that we’re afraid of?
