From the album ‘New York’ (1989)
It seemed like a good idea at the time. I’d just started the blogging thing, but I didn’t do Facebook (and never will), so maybe Twitter would be a salubrious method of attaining an audience?
Okay, so I didn’t know what I was doing or what I was getting myself into to, as per usual.
And this brings us to another problem – okay, I’ve got lots of them – that I originally and mistakenly viewed Twitter, in the deepest depths of delusion’s grandeur I might add, as a resourceful tool, rather than for what it is: a social media site designed by tools for tools to be used blithely when you’ve got a spare half-hour to kill or you just can’t be arsed at work. In truth (most) folk don’t use it to surf the net, now a euphemism for ‘finding shit’, because it’s a completely ineffective and therefore frustrating method of doing so.
So I’ve learned the hard way that Twitter isn’t the forum of choice for the brightest, best and funniest to dwell or where they intend to produce their best content. They’ll use Twitter to link to better content elsewhere, but that means your potential audience has to be trawling through the mediocrity of Twitter in the first place, and that makes you wonder whether reach or quality of audience is considered to be more important.
Nor is Twitter a constructive use of my time. I realise this now that I don’t have any spare time to kill, but frustratingly, and having invested a certain amount of time fomenting a fatuous Twitter persona, I’m inured to it. Now every daily trawl through my timeline feels like wasted time, it’s the same tropes, mopes and jokes as Twitter’s punitive character limit limits its users into several distinct categories and modes of conversation:
And that last example provides us Twitter’s best and worst facet, and it’s the same thing – that it exposes people for who and what they are. There’s that maxim – there are things you can think but shouldn’t say. Twitter is ideal mechanism for betraying that common sense as the unseemly elements of our nature and beliefs, which many people normally have the restraint to suppress, are invariably liberated when the (relative) safety of physical detachment provided by social media is spliced with the parameters of condensing a thought into a hundred and forty characters. A character limit invariably strangles nuance, or in my case betrays several attempts at petty sarcasm.
Trying to have a discussion or argument on Twitter is the equivalent of trying to reason with a pissed up dickhead with a chip on their shoulder – sluggish, fractured, frustrating ultimately futile – you’re wrong, no I’m right, I’ll tell you why, but it’ll take me two, three or four tweets to explain why, and god forbid someone else should get involved and do the same thing. Then if you lose or can simply no longer be bothered, you can just block the other person or persons or they you.
Twitter does have its moments. On the rare occasion your timeline isn’t cluttered with junk it can be a good source of comedic interludes and news. It was at its best during the recent general election. Rumours of results and resignations spread quickly across it, adding another layer of intrigue and at times comedy to unfolding events – the schadenfreude of watching Labourites go from denial to rage to dejection in real-time was, in particular, glorious. Watching last summer’s World Cup was another example – the bitchfest during the penalty shootout between Costa Rica and the Netherlands was a highlight – though live sport, especially football, and Twitter are a tougher juxtaposition as the whole point is to be watching the game, not typing or reading a timeline about it.
These events that make daily participation on Twitter worthwhile are too few to keep me engaged regularly, but they’re stopping me from leaving altogether. From now on I’ll only use Twitter to post links to the articles I write, which is appropriate, as I’ll be using Twitter with the same frequency as my blog is viewed – not often.
From the album ‘Nothing Can Stop Us’ (1982)
From the album ‘Journey In Satchidananda’ (1971)
The Pop Ambient series on the Cologne label Kompakt has been running since 2001, and in well over a decade one release from that series stands alone: 2002, but why?
The simple and short answer is that not all albums are created equal. Just as Exile On Main St. is better than Beggars Banquet and The White Album is better than Revolver, so Pop Ambient 2002 is better than say Pop Ambient 2005. The only theoretical logic I can glean from this is that 2002’s proximity to the inception of the series meant there was a distinct focus on establishing it, whatever ‘it’ means? The brand? The style? The idea? The concept? There’s a consensus that Pop Ambient 2003, another early edition, is the best, so as a theory it’s as good as any.
But that theory is a bit of a cliché, and it’s appropriate because Ambient music is viewed with so many, and as such is still (relatively speaking) a niche genre. Many people’s aversion to ambient music is due to what it lacks – narrative. In conventional songs this is typically provided by lyrics and they’re imbued and or mirrored by changes in compositional structure and sequencing.
Most ambient tracks require the application of an external narrative, and all those that appear on 2002 are no exceptions to this. They’re composed of a locked groove, synths or a diluted or distorted string arrangement, which is then married with repetitive glitches or a set or sets of additional sequences that resolve and or bleed into the resumption of the overarching pattern.
Indeed the most celebrated ambient music is able to transcend the ‘limitations’ of this precept by being provided a pre-packaged meaning, either in its genesis or its branding. If you didn’t know that William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops series was inspired by its aftermath, would you associate it with the 11th of September attacks? How about Brian Eno’s (probably) sarcastically titled “Music For Airports”? Clearly this album is retrospectively and fairly celebrated as Eno was in the vanguard, and its title was making a statement that in an era filled with derided but popular genres such as Punk and Disco, ambient music was and should be considered, like, proper music too.
Pop Ambient 2002, and all of the releases in the series, takes a different approach – making the music the focal point and allowing each track to retain a thematic malleability. This starts with accessibility; the album cover is a flower, and the title “Pop Ambient”. This is still narrative driven branding of course, though here ‘Pop’ is used as a misappropriation, a feint attempt to entice an audience who may have an aversion to the ambient genre. Plus calling it just, just “ambient” seems haughty. The insertion of the Pop prefix could double as a passive aggressive retaliation to how pretentious (careful now) ambient music can be and how precious its makers can be in defending its worth.
Facts are thin on the ground for some of the tracks and who they’re by. ‘Tal ’90’ by Tal is an exception as it is a pseudonym of Wolfgang Voigt, one of the founders of Kompakt. Voigt’s regular use of aliases is surely an attempt to prevent lazy and insignificant comparisons with works under other his monikers, such as his rougher dub oriented work as ‘Gas’. In a culture obsessed with contextualisation and a desire to apply it wherever possible, it’s welcome that Voigt’s focus on accessibility through employing degrees of anonymity makes the music impenetrably arcane and somewhat immune from the cliquish evangelical snobbery that pervades music criticism.
‘Tal 90’ is good choice to open the album. Its ten minute melancholic synth loops gently, replete with subdued static. It could easily be the soundtrack to a image only Terence Davies-esque documentary of Stasi activity in 1970’s industrial Dresden during a harsh winter, or it could be a soothing ambiance you can get stoned to whilst staring at the ceiling. There’s no right answer or hidden meaning to be deciphered here.
‘Sommersonnenschein’ (which in English means ‘Summer Sunshine’) by Novisad, follows a similar formula to ‘Tal 90’, albeit with its layers fusing with frenetic frequency. Strip away its other elements and the string arrangement could underpin a Joni Mitchell or CSN song. It has an engrossing distorted glitch that’s sped up so it sounds awfully similar to torrential rain hitting the windows on a conservatory roof. The soothing wooing of an (almost) fluty melody, a simile of light even, cuts through the drone’s gloom and marries perfectly with the strings. Does it make me think of summer sunshine? Nope, and having translated the title it still doesn’t.
On repeated listens elements within each track reveal an affinity with one another, such as the hazy strings of ‘Sommersonnenschein’ appearing on ‘AG Penthouse’ by Triola. ‘Java’ shares the verbosity of ‘Tal 90’, but diverges structurally, relying upon a bed of subtly elongated classical instrumentals that are mildly distorted and elongated. The unobtrusively stunted and blunted chiming effect on ‘Java’ becomes fulfilled over cushioned beats on ‘Donaunebel’. ‘Grount’ by Dettinger, a spaciously minimalist effort, also features chiming, but this is used as the main melody and is punctuated with distortions of small animal like cries that dissipate softly amid a circulating squeaking noise that shouldn’t be satisfying but somehow is.
Splitting the tracks up into efforts that evoke an elevating or melancholic mood doesn’t work, as each track contains quantities of both. Eventually they’ll be matched to the moods and surroundings you feel they’re synonymous with. However, with the Pop Ambient series being compilations, it’s appropriate that there are attempts made at showcasing the variations of the genre. ‘DD Rhodes’ by Jz-arkh (which could easily be an emcee from Brooklyn) heads towards the easier, lighter scale of the spectrum. It borrows the Basic Channel build – with the gaps between the slow vibratos eventually being filled by a shimmering sequence that reveals more with each repetition. ‘Dry Retch’ by Donacha Costello has a morose artifice in the utilisation of sinister base chords that agonisingly navigate their way amid a series of stock accents. During the crescendo these are infused with higher pitched watery inflections and further embellished with an intermittent popping hiss, akin to pressure building in your central heating pipes. It’s the album’s most austere track, but in the right circumstances just as calming.
Upon purchasing an album some folk tend to listen to the last track first. This never made sense to me. I mean, imagine skipping straight to the last five minutes of The Usual Suspects? But as a broken clock is right twice a day so those numpties would be right here, as ‘Alles fliesst nichts bleibt’ by All is a real tour de force. It merges the orchestral glide of ‘Donuabel’, the richness of ‘Tal 90’, the repetitive glitching of ‘Java’, that subtle chiming found on ‘Grount’, and Sommersonnenschein’s strings for seven minutes of soothing bliss. In the unrelenting media driven age that implores us to consume as much of its information as possible and tempts us be as ubiquitous and competitively vocal through its mediums, ‘Alles fliesst nichts bleibt’ and the other tracks on Pop Ambient 2002 has become a great antidote.
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