THE GENRE PROJECT - January 15 - Ambient

Genre of the Day - Ambient

Album of the Day - Another Green World by Brian Eno (1975)

Today’s genre is our first overarching genre (i.e., one that has enough sub-genres for RYM to list it as a main genre type on its list), which is mostly going to be rare in this project. I considered not including these, as they’re so broad, but also this way by listening to the #1 album of an overarching genre, you’re listening to the best album out of thousands of one type. So, I can’t say it’s a bad thing that I've included them in the list. I’ve also never really exposed myself to much ambient music to begin with (although dub, our first genre on January 1, has many similar qualities to ambient music), so today’s listen was a particularly fun adventure.

Ambient music is generally characterized by foregoing traditional western music conventions to focus on accentuating music’s atmospheric and tonal qualities. This often begets music that is calm, meant to invite introspection, and sometimes—at least in its early years—involves soundscapes from nature. Brian Eno was the first to give a name to the movement as it was developing in the mid-1970s. Reading his quotes, he’s a supremely weird guy (he refers to his songs ‘treatments’ rather than, you know, records), but also quite brilliant. I’ve definitely heard of him, but didn’t really know how famous or important to music he was until today. On the genre, he said, “Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities.” It’s interesting, because it makes me reconsider what makes popular music a type of music and also confronts the listener with what one loses when sticking to the tried-and-true of music composition, and what one gains by stepping out of those boxes.

At its best, as this album demonstrates, working with ambience yields enchanting, otherworldly, almost mystical music. Across Another Green World’s 14 tracks, Eno’s ‘treatments’ transfix with a sense of musical calm infused with whimsy, like sitting in an unfamiliar park and observing the world around you. On St. Elmo’s Fire, he evokes the otherworldly lightning-like weather phenomenon with jumpy, excited electric guitar. On Little Fishes, delicate piano, otherworldly Moog, and soft chimes paint a picture of gleaming fish swimming through a still pond. The suite of Becalmed and Zawinul/Lava is genuinely some of the most beautiful, moving music I’ve ever been lucky to hear. 

While music as a whole is anything but still—actually, music could really be argued as the opposite of stillness—that there’s music that aims to use sound and make it feel still, calm, and atmospheric while maintaining its sense of beauty and capturing one’s mind is fascinating to me. As much as music can enchant and transport, Brian Eno’s thesis of ambient music demonstrates that it also has the power to bring us back to ourselves and our own constants, just like the story he based the title of the album off of.