polygon window - surfing on sine waves

polygon window - surfing on sine waves

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ambient-acid techno landmark recorded by richard james aka aphex twin in the early nineties.

intuitive, dissonant, the minimal-psychedelic visions of a rare talent who possesses real creative foresight and a mozartian inclination for melodies seemingly written on nature's own treble clef. techno is alive, it breathes, it hypnotizes and terrorizes.

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the experiment does not care about you. experimental media is not interested in entertainment. it does not concern itself with repeating back to you the world as you believe you understand it. electronic music attracts those with an experimental temperment, because technology invites tinkering. a world of technology is governed by exploration, by blind discovery. It's a world of complete control, but also a complete lack of control. Increased technology means increased mastery over the manipulation of sensible information, like sounds and images, but it also means the possibility of withdrawing control, of finding new ways to allow the processes of manipulation to act upon and transfigure the world. 

it's often said that techno music is future music. the simple way to appreciate this is to hear techno sounds as being direct indices of future existence, soundtracks to digital life, with cyborgs and jet packs. the more nuanced way to appreciate this is to understand the future not as a pre-planned fate, the stuff of fifties flying-car advertisements, but a world that can never take place. 

The future as such can never happen. But concentrated slivers of it can explode into the grey calm of the present. Techno is not the future, but through its most experimental moments, it can point to the future. Its experimental instances, like 'surfing on sine waves,' point to the future by incarnating a new musical possibility. When a new possibility is incarnated, it repeats forms and elements that are already familiar, yet at the same time it projects an utterly strange and foreign sensibility. 'surfing on sine waves' sounds like early nineties acid techno on Warp records, but at the same time it sounds like nothing else. James is the quintessential mad-scientist of techno, a onetime engineering student whose machine obsession has long since mutated into an exploratory drive for the inner cosmos of electronic sounds, a haunting, unsettling realm, an inverted mirror world, a phantom space of black-box circuitry and artificial intelligence.

gem hunter presents: crystal bliss

///gem hunter - crystal bliss

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findings from the AC research archive unearthed in preparation

for the upcoming vena cava fashion show on Valentine's Day. 

sounds of glowing souls, white winds, angels & demons at play.

///file under: interstellar elevator music, the crystallarium

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andreas vollenweider - caverna magica
amorphous androgynous - mountain goat
harold budd - flowered knife shadows
brian eno - an ending (ascent)
linda perhacs - chimacum rain
claire hamill - sleep
cocteau twins - donimo
laurie anderson - big science
phil collins - droned
andy summers & robert fripp - bewitched
david bowie - warsawa
tangerine dream - exit
ash ra tempel - ocean of tenderness
vangelis - alpha
deuter - crystal pearls crystal

Carl Craig & Moritz von Oswald: Recomposed 3

It's a shame this isn't getting released domestically. It would be a shame if you didn't hear this. It would be a shame not to share it.

Craig & Oswald - Recomposed 3 (Ravel & Mussorgsky)

A Brief History of Ambient

A Brief History of Ambient Vol 1 - Disc One
A Brief History of Ambient Vol 2 - Disc Two

A bloody stomper of a comp. A comp stomper.

There is a well-known graffiti homage to Joe Strummer in the East Village, which you have undoubtedly passed by in a state of mild distraction, during one of your many boozy, late night perambulations, the sort that ends with the impromptu ingestion of fried dough and a gnawing predilection for dialing individuals with whom, all things considered, it is probably best you maintain no further contact. You probably should just go ahead and delete their number now, while you read this, presumably at your office, and presumably sober, during one of your daily cookie breaks. [Pret a Manger is good]. Further contact, you know in the back of your mind, will lead only to further sorrow, and quite possibly a trip to the men's health clinic.

The image depicts the Clash singer wearing sunglasses, his jacket thrown over his shoulder, accentuated only with a phrase which became one of the band's many unofficial slogans, "The Future Is Unwritten."




This shouldn't be understood to say that this is a property belonging only to the time of what has not yet taken place. Because the past is also unwritten: the steady, inexorable course of present time, in all of history's incalculable twists and inversions, is constantly rewriting the past, making the hidden sonics of its concealed treasures echo in a new key.

Re-engagement with the past is especially fun in the sort of proto-time that we love to go on about at AC, in those heady, experimental open-ended periods of artistic intensity which only retroactively become parts of a movement or can be understood as contributing a genre.

Brian Eno, as every schoolchild knows, is widely credited with coining the term 'ambient music,' and the apocryphal account of the genre's inception involves Eno in an incapacitated state, lying in bed with a broken bone of some sort, listening to a record which had been put on but at an improperly low volume, such that its sonic contents were experienced at the threshold of audibility, wavering in and out of range of the human ear. Like any good materialist, Eno saw this as a new potential to be explored. The musical revolution that followed was a fulfillment as well of Erik Satie's desire to make music "to mingle with the sounds of forks and knives at dinner," rather than something to be consciously, attentively devoured by the audience. Music became wallpaper, became sculpture, became practical, became that most deliciously minor layer of stimulation that cushions you from the harsh opacity of empirical reality.

All your usual suspects are here on this comp, Mr. Fripp, Mr. Eno, Mr. Harold Budd, Mr. Tangerine Dream. Fripp & Eno's acknowledged classic "Evening Star" is here, evidence alone of Mr. Fripp's status as the Eric Clapton of Boring Music. The whole thing is just an epic list of early ethereal compositions and bugged-out melodic drift. Get with it, it wears a beard. Homeless wizards listen to it while doing yoga. Also Harold Budd's piano playing is just sick.

BTW supposedly Eno was as well influenced by a Miles Davis track called "He Loved Him Madly," which is supposed to be some epic ambient jazz dirge tribute to Duke Ellington. Does anyone have this?

Here's a ridiculously cool interview with Eno where he explains the principles behind his "Music for Airports", in which he explains the need for having music tailored for public spaces, how it should be composed so it doesn't interfere with other sounds (human communication, announcements), and so on. Subtitled in Dutch, thank God.