Various Artists – ‘Kinetic Void’ (Unexplained Sounds Group)
It’s generally accepted, at least in modern terms, that Brian Eno’s ‘Music for Airports’ marked the first ambient album. That was 1979, which feels recent until you remember it’s almost half a century ago. Even then, calling it the starting pistol for ambient music is a very broad‑brushed approach, because you’re ignoring centuries of classical music and aeons of Eastern and Western secular music that were already exploring repetition, atmosphere, meditation, ritual, drone, space, and the idea of sound as environment. You’re ignoring whole traditions that treated music as something that didn’t need a verse or a chorus or a hook to justify its existence. You’re ignoring instruments that were designed to fill a room with a single note for minutes at a time. You’re ignoring devotional practices that used sound to alter consciousness long before anyone thought to call it ambient.
Modern ambient, as we talk about it now, tends to begin with Eno, and that’s fine as long as you remember the lineage behind it. In the time since, the idea of what ambient is has been pulled apart, stretched, questioned and rebuilt by artists who treat atmosphere as something more active than passive. The genre has become a field of experiments in texture, pressure and presence, and those experiments condense into this album, which looks at ambient as being a construction of sound and, if you like, noise, but still in a hypnotic sense, something that can seep into your brain and belong comfortably without upsetting you.
Richard Bégin’s ‘Ubik’ feels like an interpretation of Philip K. Dick’s idea that God, or whatever passes for a higher presence, can exist in something as mundane as an aerosol. The track has that sense of permeation, of something diffused through the air, always present even when you’re not consciously attending to it. The repetition of three simple notes evokes the ‘Close Encounters’ communication motif: basic to our ears only because we’re the ones lacking the sophistication to understand what’s actually being expressed. It’s that tension between our limited perception and the possibility of something vastly more advanced trying to reach through. The piece carries this idea that a presence – call it God, call it truth, call it whatever you want – can survive the noise and chaos of daily human life. The volume dips, the signal wavers, but the permanence of it remains. Long after all our squabbling and accidental chaos, something honest persists. The track feels like a reminder that whatever is eternal doesn’t need to shout; it just keeps existing, quietly, through everything.
Ambient music often gets saddled with the misconception that it’s always futuristic, all robots and chrome and machine over flesh. Certainly, you can listen to Nihil Impvlse‘s ‘Malignant Accretion’ that way. It has that cosmic churn, that sense of a supernova or black hole pulling everything into an ever‑expanding vortex. But the way I heard it was far more internal, far more biological. This track feels like the body reminding you who’s really in charge. It’s that moment when you’re lying in bed with a stomachache, telling yourself you can ride it out. The ache comes in waves; you focus on the gaps where it doesn’t hurt, thinking you can out‑meditate your own chemistry. Then it returns, stronger, as if to say you’re not in control of this machinery you live inside. You’re a passenger in a fleshy, bony shell that has its own logic.
The malignant accretion could be some supersonic cosmic entity, but it could just as easily be a boil rising under the skin – something you can’t stop without chemicals and medicine. Like many tracks on this compilation, it’s about the illusion of control. You can try to steer life as it flows around you, but ultimately you’re carried by it. The pain might only last a day or two, but the belief that you can beat it is like man insisting he can cheat at life, and life always bites you on the arse when you play that game.
I absolutely love Gianluca Becuzzi‘s ‘Liturgy of Void’, partly because that extremely loud, all‑consuming, deafening drone is something I get a huge amount out of, and it’s a smart addition to this compilation because ambient music splinters into so many sub‑departments and sub‑genres, all of which I genuinely enjoy hearing about. Whether it’s hauntology or dark ambient or whatever -wave someone wants to invent, it all feels valid, and it all sits nicely under the ambient umbrella. This track asks, or maybe answers, the question of whether ambient music has to sit at a certain volume or follow the form that Brian Eno’s early work often did: that image of bobbing on an inflatable in the Indian Ocean with the waves lapping at the side, drifting you into a slumber before propelling you to a desert island.
It doesn’t. It can match the confusion and chaos of the outside world, meet it at full volume, even go louder, and still take you to a calm plane of being that lets you think more clearly than complete silence ever could. And inevitably it brings to mind artists like Earth and Sunn O))), and the fact that people who love music from those bands aren’t just revelling in the sheer volume or the artistry of the musicians. They’re drawn to the place it takes you to, the way it refuses to give you all the answers, the way it doesn’t necessarily hand you lyrics to latch onto so you can build the picture the artist wants you to see. It takes you to the end of a path somewhere and leaves the choice to you: jump, go left, go right, stand still, whatever feels right. That’s something ambient music continues to do for us, and this track is a perfect reminder of that freedom.
‘Ordinary’ does exactly what it says on the tin. It takes the sounds of clanking, plumbing, water running down the plughole after you’ve washed up, and while I’m sure Soloi Sounds was aiming for something slightly deeper than that, that’s what it sounds like, and what it does is point straight at the environment around us and ask whether we even need to listen to music in the first place. There’s so much emphasis on the ritual of listening, that moment when someone says they’re going to put some music on and they have to perform a task, put a record on, slide a CD into a machine, open their favoured streaming service, type a search into YouTube, whatever it is.
But you can just sit back and listen to whatever background noise is already happening in your life. It might be incredibly quiet; it might be the blood rushing in your ears, it might be your heartbeat, it might be some sound you can’t place at all, something that makes you wonder where it’s coming from. Or it could be traffic outside, birds, a lawnmower, anything. That becomes a self‑made orchestra, even though it isn’t purposeful, and ambient music often points out how these sounds, even though you filter them out, are still being taken in by your mind.
You might think you haven’t heard anything in the last ten minutes while you were typing or thinking at work, but your brain has been noting everything. How you feel in that moment might not be obvious, but at some point in the future, the sound of a pen dropping on the floor might take you straight back to a time you thought was long lost and meant nothing, but it clearly became part of your world. Ambient doesn’t tell you how to feel; it doesn’t come with an instruction book, and it’s entirely yours to work out. That’s why ambient continues to be a springboard to other genres and keeps reinventing itself, because it’s often word‑free, often built around opaque titles or completely invented words, and that gives you somewhere to go when you need to recharge and reboot your brain.
Browning Mummery provides the next piece, ‘Persistence in Absence’, and dispels another misconception about ambient music, which is that percussion needs to wait in the hall. Percussion can absolutely be a part of ambient music, and here, even though it feels initially quite angular, it becomes obvious quite soon that it’s very controlled. Predictable isn’t the right word. It’s metronomic, in the same way three repeated notes of melody can be. It’s satisfying. It’s part of the experience. Again, it would be easy to think of the percussion here as being quite industrial or quite cold and mechanical, but that’s to say that your stomach, when it rumbles, is behaving like a machine. It’s actually very therapeutic to listen to, and very comforting. Almost sheltering.
The measured way in which it’s used gives some sort of sense to the disorder of the world. However beguiling the swirling, spinning noises, the electronic noises that Mummery uses on this track, the percussion grounds it and says, just hang on to me, and you’ll be all right. I think all of us want that security in life. Whatever bad is happening, we just hang on. Everything will come round to how it was. And if you can’t hang on, life’s going to continue anyway. Don’t be a martyr. You’re going to have to try and fit in somehow.
Mario Lino Stancati uses a sort of repetition in ‘The Short Distance Between Two Deserts’, and it feels like one of the most modern interpretations we’ve heard so far. It’s not a piece of music that feels like it has a lot of hope at the end of the tunnel. That’s not to say it’s absolutely imbued with dread, which is something that modern ambience maybe does a little too often. It’s about taking you to a place and leaving you there to stew. I enjoy that as much as the next man, but when we were talking about floating on an inflatable in the Indian Ocean earlier, sometimes that’s all right. You can do that. It’s alright to write a happy song sometimes. I know that we are talking about songs here, but I mean in life generally. Is it easier to write a love song than it is to write a song about a breakup? Probably not.
This track falls in the middle. It certainly isn’t a happy piece of music, and I don’t think it’s trying to be happy or unhappy or really play on your emotions so much as allow you to take whichever path you want. You could take this as almost like a wordless hymn and start your day or end your day with that feeling of inner peace, or you could take it as being a sort of watching sentinel rather than a god, just cold and unfeeling, watching and documenting but doing nothing to help you on your way. Ambient music can do that. It doesn’t have to be really overt. It can be absolutely open to interpretation and can just be a melange of sounds that work well with each other and create a feeling of space that you can do with what thou wilt.
Robert Thurman‘s ‘Convergence’ sees vile insects scrabbling around guitar pegs, plucking disgustingly and creating a sort of locust Morse code, before breaking out into an oily storm cloud filled with unbridled energy. Insects behave as ambient music in their strange, very mathematical way of moving and creating sound, and little could be more ambient than the sound of the elements. Doesn’t that come with its own harmonics and acoustics? Does that take us out of the moment when we’re thinking about life, shopping and what’s on TV that evening? It’s definitely challenging. It certainly initially drags you out of whatever zone you’re in, but very quickly it becomes your environment. It becomes, in inverted commas, normal.
That’s a question that this compilation poses. What is background sound? What is the nature of music and sound that can be considered ambient? What are we saying ambient is? I’ve given my thoughts as to what it is at the beginning, but to different people it’s different things. With so much neurodivergence still being understood, what is the noise inside someone’s head at any given moment? I think this asks that question and asks, quite rightly, what is normal. What is standard? What is the noise in our heads at any given moment? For any two people sat right next to each other, it could be wildly different.
Onto Rumore and the track, ‘Mustang SOMA’, steers us towards the conversation we were having at the beginning about religious music and how it’s easy to say Brian Eno is the godfather of all this. You’re discounting centuries of people who would raise an eyebrow at that comment.
It reiterates the same point, but with a really clever twist. It has a three-note kind of Gnostic chant – a mantra that you might say to yourself to bring yourself into a meditative plane. But the track’s called ‘Mustang SOMA’, and you think, you know what this reminds me of – it reminds me of that really satisfying feeling you get when you’re on a long drive and you shift into a different gear. The sound of the engine is like a really subtle key change, and it’s enormously satisfying, and if you weren’t driving you might be able to fall asleep to it. Best not to fall asleep while driving on the motorway, I find. But again, you’ve got this lovely juxtaposition of ancient chants and religious music and the sound of a modern car’s engine, and is there much difference? Well, of course there is, at least ethically and morally, but in terms of guttural punch to the stomach, what it makes you feel, and the emotion and endorphin release that it evokes… less so.
Onto the penultimate track on the album by William St Hugh. ‘Andromeda’ is another one of my favourite pieces on the album, and it brings to the fore one of the ologies, one of the notorious or celebrated ologies of recent times, hauntology, which is certainly a direction ambient music has taken. Although this doesn’t lean too much on that sort of crackly old 78s and TV programmes echoing slightly in the background, it has more of a sort of church organ interspersed with delicate chiming and a feeling of the ominous but without ever revealing its cards, and that’s something ambient music has learned to do very well. It doesn’t spell everything out for you; it lets you come to your own judgements, to fill in the gaps in the music with your own intelligence, to build your own worlds, your own stories and your own happy or unhappy endings.
That’s what keeps ambient alive and fresh and relevant. Despite the ancient base upon which it’s built, it acknowledges that everyone is different, that everybody thinks in a different way, that what one person finds chilling, others might find magical. The space in between is what ambient music is. It gives you time to think, to breathe, to take a moment and to reconsider. It’s a really nice place for the album to start coming to a conclusion, because if that’s the conclusion we’re meant to come to, then I think this kind of music still has a really important place to play, an important part to play in the musical firmament. There’s no need to sneer at what’s on Radio One. That’s perfect for a certain kind of person and allows them to carry out their day in a certain mood, in a certain kind of positivity, or to take something from it. Just as validly, this kind of music is the bedrock for a lot of people. It gives them the stillness and the questioning that they need in their lives.
The final track by Autistici, ‘Recoverse’, is the only one that very obviously brings in field recordings, which I suppose is a good place to end. Again, just asking us to consider the sounds around us every day and how they make us feel and that imprint, the way that they force themselves into our memory and remind us of certain events or times without us ever realising at the time that they had that power. It’s that great reset that ambient gives you: what is music, what is sound, how does it make me feel, how do I want it to make me feel?
Ambient music is still a great springboard to discover new music, new ways of listening to music, new styles that you’d never considered listening to, or even driving you back to listen to something that you used to listen to when you were little, because it’s that feeling that you want to experience again. Often, it’s the strangest moments that evoke that very visceral return to when you were young. This is an album that asks us to consider what ambient is, but it’s an album that also asks us to consider what music itself is, why we enjoy what we enjoy. Sometimes it’s okay to listen to something that doesn’t initially make a lot of sense, because if you give it the time it needs, it might end up telling you something you didn’t realise you needed to hear.
Daz Lawrence
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