Biography
A sorrowing sun-shaded vessel falls upward
and elevenward in the secret all-night of space,
waiting hushed and expectation-less over the far-below rings, spinning motionless and vacuum silent.
An Ambient Boy.
I was born in Bremen, Germany in 1972. While I
have been writing and performing music since the late 80's, I only
started writing ambient music seriously around 2000, after spending
years earning a living in various conventional rock bands. If I think
back to my childhood, I notice, in retrospect, that I was very
preoccupied with ambient sounds and moments. This is probably what led
to my later love affair with this style of music. The sort of sounds I
had always been attacted to were: unclear far-away sounds such as
planes passing overhead, hearing trains speeding by in the night while
I was safe in bed, far-away traffic, distant and simultaneous instances
of music (such as what you might hear at exhibitions and showgrounds),
lawn mowers churning in the distance on a Saturday morning, orchestras
tuning up, building workplaces, with the sound of hammering and drills.
All of these sounds, you may have noticed, are
indistinct, and hearing them would often trap me in a day dream. That
place you go when you stare into the middle distance.
Visually, I was obsessed with deserts, plains
and deep space.... Isolated places, where I was completely alone. I
wanted to disappear into these places and to explore them. When I
wrote music, I always wanted to enter that zone, and I would
continually try to write something that contained that dreamy, detached
and lonely feeling. Why? Well, I believe that the first time that I
appreciated this feeling was when I was at home in our little farmhouse
in Germany one summer in the late 70's. I must have been around the
age of 5. It was a perfect warm summer day, and I was lying on my
back, in the yard behind our house. A small plane approached from the
distance, and eventually passed over head, flying quite low....and I
slipped into a waking dream.....the sound of the plane seemed to last
forever. This moment was so vivid yet dreamlike that it's still
completely illuminated in my mind, where most of my other memories have
gone green and brown at the edges, or have faded away altogether. I
think I experienced a moment of perfect happiness, and I guess my only
link today to this memory of perfect happiness is the sound of that
drone....the propeller churning away, and the detuning effect as the
plane passed away into nothingness.
I had recorded a few ambient pieces in the
early 1990's without realising it, and loved soaking up this recurring
atmospheric feel. I would lapse into this state whilst playing this
music, and also while listening to it, so it was a very process
oriented thing for me to do. The only real references I had at this
stage were new age artists, which were usually cliche ridden and
saccharine, yet still shared some of the dreamy aspect of what I longed
for. These best of these artists, George Winston, and his
Windham hill associates, formed a very strong influence on me. In
addition to this, I remember getting a new effect rack for my guitar, a
quadraverb, which had this patch in which the reverb would go forever,
and everything you played with this sound sounded like a dream or
memory. Another important step, later, when I went to Uni, was when I
discoverd the french composer Claude Debussy, whose music was
wonderfully dreamy, using whole-tone scales, gamelan influenced sounds,
and wonderfully vague harmony. I devoured his music, and wrote similar
music for guitar, orchestra and piano.
After this, thanks to my friend Cameron, I heard a little known belgian ambient composer called Vidna Obmana,
and was completely blown away by his 1994
release, "River of Appearance". The music consisted of sublime slow
motion instrumental washes: stretched out fabrics of synthetic colours,
nebulous harmony, creating imaginary sensations akin to floating around
inside an aquarium. Subtle atmospheric melodies, beams of melodic
sunlight, illuminating a secret garden in an underwater grotto. Wow.
I was blown away. This was what I had been trying to do. It also
turns out that Cameron had a ton of these records already, and he
kindly set me on to a few more artists. Then I discovered that quite a
few other people had been doing this sort of music for a long time,
going back to Brian Eno
in the mid 70's.
I learned that this music was called Ambient, yet I already knew that
it was called this, for some reason. It was what I had already named my
initial ambient experiments, going back to when I recorded on my 4
track tape machine, and recorded guitars playing softly in several
keys, with massive washes of reverb.
I don't know, but when I heard that other
artists were recording similar albums that featured these far away,
blurry, dreamy sounds, I fell in love, and consumed just about all of
the ambient music I could get my hands on. I discovered Steve Roach,
who is most prolific in this genre, and was not suprised to find out
that he was concerned with similar things as I was: deserts, and
space. "Desert Solitaire" and "The Magnificent Void" were like a
friend you'd never met waving at you going: "Hey! Over here! There are
more of us!". There were thousands of us, all over the world. Online
radio stations like "Star's end", which fostered an international
community of star-gazing desert-heads, "SEB: Sleep Environmental
Broadcast" were all obsessed with this same thing. Then I discovered Stars of the
Lid, a brilliant American ambient act who combined ambient sounds
with traditional washed out instruments, bringing a slightly classical
feel to the genre. To top it off, I became aware of "Dronezone", on Somafm, which played ambient music 24/7!!
I then discovered an interesting parallel to
this ambient music, and that was the post-rave chillout music- while I
was never into raves or even dance, I found that composers like Peter
Namlook, Gas, and Aphex Twin came out of this scene, responding to the
same need as the Eno school- the need to daydream, the need to lose
focus, the need for isolation, and the need for an inner world or as DJ
Spooky puts it, a new inner 'final frontier' in his brilliant article
on ambient music.
The thing that makes me smile is that most
people don't even notice this music. They assume it's the sound of a
dishwasher or a plane passing by. I'm happy to think that some people
are obsessed with it, and some are completely indifferent to it. I
think there are some strong commercial possibilities for this sort of
music- it creates a state...a consistent feel, and would be idea for
say, a hotel foyer, to stream constant ambient music- it would get rid
of muzak, and there's one very good thing. Having said that, I'm
certainly not interested in pursuing the selling of this sort of music,
I'm too busy enjoying it.
Friends of mine still look at me in a strange
way,
unable to understand what is so special about this largely featureless
music- with no distinct melodies and no strong key. One of my
friends, Davin, who is a soundtrack composer, jokingly calls it "Air
music" and teases me constantly about the idea of one chord sustained
for
what seems an eternity. I try to explain, which usually results in
more jokes. When I recently went to the Kranky label site, to which Stars of the Lid are
signed, I realised why this music is so important. We need beauty, and
conventional music, including classical, rarely delivers it in the
concentrated, object-like way that ambient does. Ambient music is
obsessed with beauty. It doesn't offer a narrative, it just offers
itself as the object. CD covers of
ambient albums are adorned with beautiful images of natures and
internal expressionistic states. And now, computer recording and
multitrack home recording is allowing
us to capture these inner places: away from the pressured professional
studio, we can let this music unfold at its own pace in our own space
now, with all the mod cons of the modern studio. Pristine reverbs,
unlimited voicings,
arrays of stereo effects, piled on top of one another can create these
imaginary location and states. Programs like
Absynth can bring to life the invisible frontier, to soothe our worn,
existential ears, in a gentle, subtle way. Music which illuminates the
unseen
cathedral hovering over the drab, polluted skyline- music which finds
the 'flower' inside the machine, inside us.
Someone said that the orchestra can create sounds that are meant to represent space. Holts' The Planets, Charles Ives' space themed symphonies, or Richard Strauss's
Also Sprach Zarathustra fullfil this desire to a great
degree, but a single synthesiser can capture the isolation of space in
a way that no orchestra ever can. Listen to Steve Roach's "Structures
from Silence" and you will know this to be true. Almost no untreated
acoustic instrument can really achieve this. Convential instruments
can 'sing' about space, but electronic music becomes space.
It seems that the computer/keyboard can therefore express something the
orchestra cannot, and the computer in front of me right now contains an
entire orchestra of keyboards.
Another friend of mine, writer Paul Brandon,
says: you either get it or you don't. To add to this, and to finish,
let me quote somebody who I have forgotten, who said something not
regarding ambient music: To those who do understand, there's no need to explain, to those who don't understand, there's no way of explaining.