LAST DAY OF WORK 2005!!!!

To celebrate this occasion I've tried to remember what my favourite albums of the year have been.

Jamie Lidell - Multiply
Sufjan Stevens - C’mon Feel the Illinoise!
Fennesz - Venice
LCD Soundsystem
Dungen – Ta Det Lungt
Kompakt Pop Ambient compile 2005
Boards of Canada – Campfire Headphase
Erlend Oye – DJ Kicks
Electrelane - Axes
Art Brut – Bang Bang Rock and Roll
Stereolab – Oscillons from the Anti-Sun
Broadcast – Tender Buttons

With the late favourite (I have only heard it once but it will be December's pick) Serena Maneesh's self titled monster. Norwegian bliss-rock.

Gigs of the year for me were Whatismusic? at the Metro with Pan Sonic, Residents, Chicks on Speed, Sir Richard Bishop and the incomprehensible Black Dice.
Tortoise and Kid606 put in great shows at the Becks Bar early in the year.
The Shins at the Metro put on a purler AGAIN.
Local Sydney-ites Skull Squadron down at the Mandarin club made all the electronic casino upstairs shake in a profound and beautiful way.
Ken Stringfellow was sublime and lovely at the Annandale.

All in all a good year for rock.

Explanations and apologies will follow soon.

Last night I dreamed of a horse jumping out of a tree.

It had large hooves and was a beige colour, male I think. It landed quite hard but didn't break any bones. It was twilight, in my old neighborhood (neigh!! boom boom) in the hills. The dream was in colour. How was I feeling? Nervous that this horse had to land its jump, glad when it did. Then it was on its way.

Dream analysis welcome!

Currently listening to: Andrew Peckler's Here Comes the Night and Station to Station releases.

Why Ambient? Why not get bent?

Ambient music in Brian Eno’s terms is designed to be music which can sit at a pleasant level in your environment and not presume to intrude. Music which is perhaps humble enough to complement the occasional passing car or plane, kettle whistle, or dog bark.

Music for Airports, one of Eno’s early works, should be. And train stations, shopping malls, places where stress and hurry don’t help the situation you’re in. After Roxy Music’s excess and glamour, one of Eno’s faces was the altogether gentler and accommodating ambient genre, which he named and pretty much created.

It’s not musak, which is often kitsch and highly irritating, adding to the stress of said environs. I think the design of that was to pass the time quicker for those with a casual musical ear, who could hum along to the faux-brass version of their favourite Beatles/Bacharach/Bolan. Which actually has the reverse effect on me, as I listen to each musakal key-change and super-cheesy imposition on the original with fists clenching tighter. Time slows to the point where I can imagine the arranger, and studio musos with nothing more to prove.

It’s not noise, which can nonetheless complement living surrounds at times. Noise is also usually more appropriate at louder volumes I find.

It’s not pop, unless it’s a pop song with its colour and intensity stretched into 28 minutes of gentle deliberation.

It may very well be music therapy. Different frequencies of sound have corresponding effects on the metabolism. A particular Brown Note can cause large intestines in most people to wobble and resonate uncomfortably, which may very well be used as en masse as a weapon or very large joke, as Southpark’s creators have imagined. But this has upsides, too, and if music has positive effects on plant growth, I’m sure it has effects on humans too. Pleasant sound can help the brain’s thought processes and calm one into a meditative state, without so much as an om mani padme hum. I think it happens because the brain hears the sound and kind-of replicates what is coming up next. This is probably why you get songs stuck in your head, and also why when a song stops you can pretty much carry on with what is coming next from your imagination. (Try it, stop the song you’re hearing right there and see how you go.)

It should also bear close listening. The same way that you think you know what the night, cloudless sky looks like, the more you stare, the more stars become apparent.

I’ve always been into instrumental music, from back in the days when I was forced by my parents only to listen to instrumental music when studying for school because “vocal music is too distracting” or something. So I made a few tapes of purely instrumental favourites, from Jean Michel Jarre’s

Here are a few of my favourite ambient releases and why. However I don’t think I have even scratched the surface of the monolithic iceberg of work out there and am happy to take recommendations.


Jean Michel Jarre: Oxygene

This was the first piece of transcendent electronic music I ever heard and is missing from my collection today. Its warmth and imagination are astounding, the rooms full of analog equipment Jarre had be overflowing. This was one of the first records I used to be obsessed with and I still love the journey it takes me on. Today each time I go into the record shop there are reworkings of the old material, live stuff, dvd’s, none of which I think are as good as Oxygene on cassette tape!

Eno: Thursday Afternoon

The man invented the genre. Classic, egoless, as natural as machines ever got.

Aphex Twin: SAW I & II

Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works volume I was not always ambient. Check the mind-melting alien strip-joint freakout soundtrack that is Green Calx. However there are so many gorgeous moments of calming warmth, and many songs which have grown on me even more over the years.
SAWII is truly ambient – he once famously said this record was like taking acid in a nuclear power plant, and the minimal soundscapes he carved out in lucid dreams on this record (true!) are weird and slightly menacing. The purity and ambient essence is here in spades, though, on this triple CD.

DJ Olive: Buoy

The newest release here, this has come out on Qld’s Room 40 label run by electronic explorer Lawrence English. One complete track, with very little happening, this release is designed to be listened to as quietly as possible. It’s sleep inducing at that level, and emulates a buoy’s motion up and down on swells in the sea. Constant and calm. He made this disk to help his friends in NY get to sleep after September 2001. Lovely gesture.

John Cage: In A Landscape

Each note counts. That is a bit of a secret to ambient music I feel, and Cage was onto it. The gentle piano landscapes hold you by the hand and lead you around meadows and well-lit woods, it’s honestly a great journey to take.

Kompact Pop Ambient 2005

This compilation of Kompact upstarts chilling out and subtracting the unn-tss from their work is gorgeous listening. It’s actually the reason I’m writing this entry because it’s really got me back into the genre. Awesome release with thrilling (yes, am associating that word with ambient) tracks by Markus Guentner, Thomas Fehlmann, DJ Koze, Andrew Thomas and others. It seems to move at an elephant’s pace, but if you listen in close you realise the elephant is surrounded by hundreds of tiny multicoloured wasps, persistent little crackers they are too… These songs could be reworked into pop gems, as the title implies, and they do get in early – Pop Ambient 2006 has already been released. It’s just as great. Very modern ambient, very timely for our stressed world, if you can trust these tracks they are like gentle ear cleaners.

Pan American: 360 business – 360 bypass
Ulrich Schnauss – Far Away Trains Passing By
Deadbeat – Wild Life Documentaries

Well, these three are not strictly ambient releases really, but they are all so damn relaxing, stylish musics that I had to mention them.
All are gorgeous, downtempo, informed by dub and ambient, and pop in Ulrich Schnauss’ case.
So easy to drift into summer with these releases. I must work out how to put links to some of the tracks off these releases so you can hear what I’m raving about…

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off for a long cool G and T.