Ambient Chasers
They synthesize the ineffable, they're smarter than you, and they say 'neat' an awful lot

by Jay Horton

Above a disturbingly large sprawl of aged electrical cable, something like the web of a fridge-sized spider purchased from a 1972 Radio Shack, hand-welded consoles bump against flickering gadgets, unknowable instruments, and sufficient technological detritus to sculpt a terminator. Inside the smallish top apartment of an unassuming duplex of a frankly dull neighborhood, state-of-the-art sequencers and drum machines have been bio-engineered towards a wall of visibly handmade cabinets boasting untold bolts, wires, and purpose – a vaguely sinister aural laboratory most closely resembling a South American torture chamber run by Daniel Lanois.

Twin speakers, relatively small, spill forth an oddly familiar, utterly alien concerto. Shrugglingly martial drums support swooping flourishes of post-new-age fantasia. A lilting piano figure rises above the mist. "No, that's not it." Saul Stokes, composer of the music, architect of the studio, jumps toward the volume control, wherever that may be, and dims the compelling maelstrom. "That's just the foundation. It sounds too pretty."

The first artist to release an album on the young Hypnos label and a blossoming figure among the small, odd, beautiful world of Ambient Space, Saul Stokes built the ancient circuit boards and modular synthesizers by hand over four years. He wasn't joking about the music. It was too pretty.

To the uninitiated, Ambient music may be hard to explain. Repetitive but not rhythmic, minimal yet layered, casually gorgeous while pointedly avoiding any coherent harmonic structure – something like genius Yanni or free-form jazz performed by robots. But not quite like that, either.

Stokes explains it as "edgy Ambient not overly experimental or noisy. Melody and rhythms built around experimental sound sources." He'd written much of this material upon a traditional keyboard and replaced the piano line with his own eerily mechanized notes. Quickly enough, his practiced hands deftly trade wires and fly toward something that looks like a miniature air traffic controller screen, and the pretty turns yearning and dazedly macabre. "There," Stokes looks pleased. "Isn't that better?"

* * *

If most music seeks to entertain, to enrage, to enlighten, to actively focus the listeners' attention away from themselves, the intentions of Ambient aren't entirely opposite, but, you feel, the people responsible rather wish it was. In a sense, this is the inevitable consequence of DIY – music composed by, about, and, often, solely for an inarguably talented artist. Disregarding normal constraints of structure, popularity and ... well, instruments built by others, the medium allows a unique perspective and range. To express, purely and without artistic or technological concern, the inner harmonies of the spirit remains a noble ambition. Criticism, by the same standard, seems particularly inane. Distinctions between works are generally noticeable only to other artists and the relative handful of enlightened devotees.

 

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