The Graveyard in Matrix - January 2007

The Graveyard - by Scott W. Gray
January 2007

I recently began re-reading A Year with Swollen Appendices – Brian Eno’s diary from the year 1995. The end of the book, the appendices, in fact, features a few of Eno’s essays – most notably ‘Ambient Music’, written in 1996 as an explanation of the thought process behind his seminal album Music for Airports. In ‘Ambient Music’, Eno suggests that a viable music for the future would offer a soundtrack, of sorts, for every situation.

His idea was for a music designed to incorporate the sounds of the environment it is played in, blurring the line between accidental, ambient noise and recorded sound design. It was what he said would be an ideal music, one that offered “a place, a feeling, an all-around tint to the sonic environment”. His inspiration came while standing in the Cologne airport, and he envisioned compositions that played throughout the building, but that left room for the tempo and frequency range of the human voice to allow for airport announcements to filter into the immersive music.

The development of technology and advent of the portable music player (whether cassette, CD or MP3) has brought this immersive soundtrack idea to a really individual level, as we all know. One of the clearest memories I have involved a long taxi ride from the airport through a rainstorm, while listening to Vangelis’ Bladerunner soundtrack. I kept the volume low so I could still hear the engine noise, the traffic in the rain, and random bursts of cabbie-speak from the CB radio, between the synth-swells. It was an exercise that established a noir, futuristic mood for me (strangely also connected to airports) that carried over into apartment. I felt like I should have been slipping into a modular sci-fi bubblehome with sleek plastic surfaces and rounded corners, but instead I was just flopping into a rather grotty three-and-a-half in a neighbourhood full of junkies and meth addicts. I have since moved, but the personal soundtrack idea stays with me.

These days I’ve been making playlists on the iPod to dovetail with my Metro ride to work and around town. Which playlist gets chosen usually depends on the mood I am in or the mood I am trying to create. On these wintry mornings, the most affecting stuff is minimalist, sparse instrumental music that blends the ambient noise of the Metro (such as the train sounds, but also the wind, conversations between commuters, and station announcements) or the city (crowds, kids, traffic, announcements from stores) into the music. Most fitting, I have found lately, is the work of Mexican electronic musician Murcof, and US artist EdIT.

Murcof (Tijuana native, Fernando Corona) creates sparse but engaging glitch-based compositions that often sample from 20th century composers such as Arvo Part and Henryk Gorecki. The result is decidedly downtempo, but has enough texture to remain stimulating. His music offers orchestral samples that pull against silence and microtextural elements – landscapes of near-silences that fall outside the usual musical categories such as melody or rhythm, and yet infuse the music with sounds that become invaluable to the finished piece. I find myself making onomatopoeic gurgles in syncopation with the tracks, picking up on the small details. These are often the elements that blend most seamlessly with the context I am in while listening; I lose track of where the subway or city sounds end and song structures begin. I enjoy the peculiar confusion of not knowing how much of what I am hearing is built into the pieces and how much is environmental. The Murcof material that I have is out on the Leaf Label, and albums like 2005’s Remembranza put some smarts back into the much-maligned ambient electronic art form.

Along the same lines, but certainly busier, is Los Angeles’ EdIT (aka Edward Ma). I sort of stumbled across his 2004 album Crying Over Pros for No Reason one day by searching online and spiralling into the seemingly endless micro-genres of electronic music, where individual artists (and sometimes just tracks), apparently warrant genre names of their own. The sub-category that brought EdIT to my attention is the unfortunately named ‘glitch hop’ (alternately known as ‘blip hop’) which pairs hip hop’s head-bobbing tempos and thick bass with glitch-based electronic music’s polyrhythmic snaps and whirs. It’s an engaging combination, and one that EdIT excels at. Similar in construction to other instrumental hip hop such as Alias or Boom Bip, EdIT puts the rhythm first but employs a cinematic approach, sampling in layers of gritty sediment and aural detritus to complement a kick-snare, kick-SNARE combination. It’s smart without being chin-stroking. Between the thick kicks and grainy snares, there are a lot of stretched notes and quick cuts that are reminiscent of Aphex Twin, without the maliciousness.

Despite the density in texture EdIT is adept at allowing acoustic sounds and warmth to spread, showing that his music is not all bombast and breaks, and implying that below the busyness of our city life, there lurks a spacious green space if we choose to look for it. I find that listening to EdIT at low volumes while walking through wintry parks can add a crunching snow and breaking branch steadiness to the mix, and yet there’s enough bounce to his music to really influence the listener’s outlook. Immersive music is interesting most in its simplicity: music constantly renews itself when blended with and informed by an ever-changing environment. We often don’t hear the sounds we are surrounded by on a daily basis simply because of familiarity, but immersive music changes the context and the impact of these sounds. The idea of turning down the music so the real world seeps in is a profound one, because it seems counter-intuitive. Like most commuters I usually turn the music up to drown out the Metro or city noises, thus making my own little bubble. But by keeping the music (or for an even richer experience, field recordings) at a lower level, it offers the opportunity for a more complete sonic experience.

Creating immersive soundtracks change how you see things, and how you exist in the city, the Metro, and international airports. To read more about artists like these, or random music stuffs, check out the blog - Urban Camouflage: http://urbancamouflage.blogspot.com/. See you in the Graveyard, next time.