New England Loops

DOWNLOAD HERE(the above image is the alternate album art for the EP. It is quite different from the art included in the .zip download but if you like it more, feel free to use it)

It was only after I felt like I truly understood what Steve Reich meant when he talked about "gradual process" music that I began to delve into ambient music. Or maybe it was only after working on some ambient music of my own that I began to understand how important gradual processes are in creating ambient soundscapes.

Like most people, I'm sure, who consider their music "ambient," Brian Eno has had a major influence on how I have come to auralize (made-up word; visualizing with your ears) the genre, with other key musicians and artists being Sigur Ros, Bjork, and Mum, all coming from a strong Icelandic tradition which places a heavy emphasis on ambient, evolving textures. Yet Eno has always amazed me, as you can tell from reading previous blog posts, with his ability to specialize in multiple specialties; popular music producer, "classical" musician, philosopher. He even has his own website which contains VERY awesome and deep blogs and articles about interesting philosophical and musical topics. I guess I have been inspired by Eno in more ways than I really know right now, and I think that is what he would want out of any of his students.

Unfortunately, a lot of ambient composers tend to fall into a very typical mold which can best be described as soothing and secure, using software synthesizers that any middle school with any experience at garageband could recognize. A more important lesson is found in the way Eno approached his ambient compositions, the key concept here being that of gradual process. If we can understand how gradual process manifests itself across various compositional environments, we stop restricting ourselves to-what have become-typical ways of structuring our music. For Steve Reich, gradual process was very goal-oriented, the actual process manifesting itself (generally) in the melodic content of the piece (as is the case in most of his chamber music pieces, Eight Lines in particular, Music for 18 Musicians...) , or the physical content of what creates the process (Pendulum Music, Come Out, It's Gonna Rain). In this method, the process is very obviously audible to the listener, as Reich has noted as his intention. For Brian Eno, the result was much more indeterminate, as we can hear in "Music For Airports," where various tape loops of unequal lengths are juxtaposed. Aside from liberating the musical result from any obviously perceptible rhythm or meter, it also prevented the result from ever being decided completely by Eno himself. While he created the single fragments of musical material, the juxtapositions could never possibly be realized fully, especially when taking into account the length of his loops being just under an hour.

This is the route I took in creating the four tracks on "New England Loops," and I was very happy with the result. Other influences, such as Aphex Twin's collection of Ambient Works (Vol. 1 and 2) got me thinking of how the typical term ambient music could manifest itself across musical genres, particularly in the realm of IDM, hardcore techno, and breakcore. The use of TR-808 samples in many of the New England Loops is partly an attempt to fuse hip-hop and ambient music, but was more likely used because the 808 is the most dope drum machine EVER.

I know these tracks are kind of long and somewhat difficult to sit through at points, but I hope you enjoy them. I made them just after graduating college, returning home for the summer and thinking about how much I love New England. STRAIGHT UP.