A Brief History of A Brief History of Ambient Vols 1-4

Various, A Brief History of Ambient Volume 1: 152 Minutes, 33 Seconds (1993)

---, A Brief History of Ambient Volume 2: Imaginary Landscapes (1994)

---, Ambient 4: Isolationism (1994)

I.

The closest record store to my college was named the Wall: a chain of mall record stores owned by Camelot Music, which used the brand name the Wall for stores in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast. The Wall was famous for the above guarantee: if you affixed a blue "lifetime" sticker to the case, you'll get a replacement tape or CD absolutely free. Although I've lost them all now, for a long time I owned many CDs with Wall stickers. Whenever I would run across one of them I would chuckle about the "lifetime guarantee" I would never be able to take advantage of since every Wall location closed in 1998. The Wall and its guarantee might be the peak of physical media hubris. Not even at the height of vinyl sales in the 1970s did record stores guarantee that they would give you a brand new copy of that Journey record you scratched or ruined by doing too much coke off of the vinyl. But the Wall promised, no matter how long that CD copy of Queen's Greatest Hits has been wedged in the center console of your car (https://theonion.com/report-80-of-queen-s-greatest-hits-cds-lodged-in-ce-1819577290/ ) the Wall will give you a brand spankin' new copy. 

These are the foolish actions of a music retailer who thought the business was impervious to change. That people were always going to want to purchase $8.99 cassettes and $16.99 CDs. That once you had them in there to exchange their scratched R.E.M. CDs, who knows what you could get them to additionally purchase? We were less than a decade away from Napster and more than a decade away from streaming music. Maybe a newer, shinier, better format might replace the cassette or CD, but those formats, like the vinyl (vinyl was no longer sold in mall stores at this point) and 8-tracks before them, will be sold in the Wall as well. 

There are three CDs I can remember buying at the Wall: the Orb's Orbvs Terrarvm, Massive Attack v the Mad Professor's No Protection and A Brief History of Ambient Vol 2: Imaginary Landscapes. Like a lot of people in the mid-90s, I migrated from listening to alternative/indie-rock to electronic music. I had generally liked electronic music in the early 90s during which time I actually attended a rave in Connecticut and would occasionally tune into the late night house/techno shows on WZBC. It wasn't until one of my favorite labels at the time, Too Pure (the original label on which PJ Harvey and Stereolab released their music to a wider audience), signed two electronic bands (Seefeel and Mouse On Mars) that I started to seriously listen to and seek out electronic music. 

The event that suggested I might not be the only person moving in this direction came shortly after Rolling Stone magazine published two reviews side-by-side Pavement's Wowee Zowee and Aphex Twin's I Care Because You Do.... in April 1995. Rolling Stone had clearly been looking to stay relevant as the boomer rock icons of the 1960s and 70s upon which the magazine made its bread and butter were appearing less and less appealing to the younger demographic. For example, the cover star of the April 6, 1995 is Eddie Van Halen, Van Hagar at that point being a successful, if not entirely relevant, arena rock band. But Rolling Stone had to acknowledge the existence of alternative and indie rock after the success of Nirvana, and had given Pavement's pervious record a four star rave review. Meanwhile, Rolling Stone had little interest in electronic music before their Aphex Twin review, but it was a sign of things to come: electronic music was about to get big. 

With this new found popularity there was an explosion in compilations that surveyed the genres and sub-genres of electronic music. Here's the first electronic comp I bought long before my full conversion: 

But there were hundreds, maybe thousands of identical-looking compilations offering the best in House, Techno, Jungle, Gabba, Intelligent Dance Music and, of course, lots and lots of Ambient compilations. What's fascinating to me is that the first three volumes of the Virgin Ambient series look indistinguishable from the most generic ambient compilation then on the market. Indeed, at the Wall the second volume of The History of Ambient was sandwiched between multiple other generic looking ambient compilations, housed in a plastic CD security apparatus. Looking over the track listing, I'm not sure what made me decide to pick that one up. There's a lot of Eno on it, so, perhaps, I was trying to find as much Eno as I could (it wasn't so easy to always find his music in those days). 

The history of Ambient promised by the first three (possibly four) volumes of their Virgin AMBT imprint already comes with the caveat that Simon Hopkins, compiler of the first three double CD sets, could only draw from the Virgin records catalogue. On the plus side, Virgin had been on the vanguard of what could be understood as ambient music and had just acquired the rights to Brian Eno's back catalogue, so if you were to create something like a "History of Ambient," you could do worse than Virgin Records. It also meant that the definition of ambient could be as broad as possible, since the compiler wouldn't be able to cherry pick tracks from various labels that would perhaps more "correctly" present the history of ambient music. To that end, tracks by very un-ambient artists like Hawkwind, Prince Far I and Faust sit along side the usual suspects found in ambient compilations. 

As a history of ambient, I'm not sure these compilations offer that per se. The first volume's liner notes give what is referred to as a "brief" history of ambient (which it is) in reverse chronological order. I'm not sure why Hopkins choses to move backwards, although the entire package screams of early 90s "alternative" culture and a reverse chronology would be the appropriately "skewed" way to present this history. As for the history itself, it's pretty biased towards its own recent past, although Eno and Cage are mentioned. The title of the first volume, in fact, is an homage to Cage's 4'33", which Hopkins cites as the "first" ambient piece. I would argue that 4'33" isn't an ambient piece because nothing in the piece is blending in with the background. The piece is the background. Cage's piece is only the "first" ambient piece if you believe that "ambient" is less a genre of music and more a type of listening. Ambient is more than a type of listening, it is a type of music itself, no more so than in the early 90s as ambient compilations flourished. 

It's this final aspect of ambient that makes it so tricky to define as well as write a history thereof. A genre of music that is purposely written and recorded to be ignored can no longer be such when it is placed front and center on any number of physical releases. Ambient music can be as present and intrusive as any other kind of music when played loud enough. And thinking about ambient as a subject of a history itself presents conceptual problems: while it's easy to construct a history of proper names which gave rise and shape to the genre (Eric Satie, Terry Riley, Göttsching), it's harder to map out a "listening practice" historically. When did people start listening to music which inadvertently blended with the sound environment until the two became imperceptible is a much harding thing to historically map. 

Perhaps this is why Hopkins takes a different approach on Imaginary Landscapes. More likely, as Hopkins points out in the liner notes, people got pissed that many of the artists he mentions in his history of ambient aren't actually on the double CD set. He then decides that the concept of history itself is too hegemonic a concept for something like ambient: 

As for the title of this series...it is simply a joke [...] The images thrown up by cosmology have been part of the current ambient scene and the influence goes much further back than that. Let rock music deal--however elegantly or crassly--with the everyday. Ambient music has often sought--successfully and often not--to look beyond.

Ambient music cannot be corralled into a history, not because we don't have the copyright to some of the essential artists the author mentioned in his original history of ambient, but because ambient as a genre transcends the merely historical. The writing of history is for rock critics, we, the few who venture to understand the cosmologically complex world of ambient can only leave chronology behind. It's appropriate that this series of CDs would be closely aligned with the prog rock heyday of the mid-1970s given Virgin's involvement since, as the liner notes prove, there's a similar level of pretension. 

There's an added irony to this insofar as this stuff is being compiled, curated and released on physical media. There's a great blog entry on these CDs written in 2013 that cites the phrase "Landfill Indie" to eventually discuss the Brief History of Ambient CDs https://women-and-dreams.blogspot.com/2013/11/a-brief-history-of-ambient-vols-1-4.html As a fan and longtime shopper at Landfill Records in St. Paul, MN (RIP), I've always been fascinated by which music literally gets relegated to the dustbin of history. Thinking about music that wishes to transcend the material only to return as early 90s detritus is almost too on the nose. Sometimes when you set the controls for the heart of the sun you fall back into the everyday (actually, what's more ambient than the lives lived anonymously everyday in office buildings across the globe--this is the Muzak (TM) aspect of ambient that the cosmologists don't like to recognize). 

And it is this aspect of the Virgin Ambient Series that places it within the general theme of this particular blog: you can't actually listen to any of these compilations on streaming services. People have made playlists of the individual tracks available, but no one has recreated the individual edits and sequences Simon Hopkins here and others elsewhere will contribute to this series. As much as streaming promises that all which is solid will melt into cloud, the experience of hearing what each compiler intended to highlight with these selections and their placement on the compact disc is lost in the era of streaming. 

Full disclosure time: I do not own, nor have I listened to, the third volume in the series, nor do I own a physical copy of the fourth volume Isolationism. So whatever analysis of the music I make is within these limitations. As for the music contained within these CDs themselves the most interesting aspect is the inclusion of what Virgin and other labels had defined as "World Music" around this time. Speaking of detritus, one year after the famous C86 cassette was affixed to copies of the New Musical Express gave away a compilation curated by the biggest "world music" labels to showcase their artists https://www.discogs.com/release/1058220-Various-The-World-At-One Some of the very same artists on that compilation appear on the History of Ambient CDs as well. 

Curiously, Volume 2 was the first place I ever heard dub reggae. Prince Far I's "Bendel Dub" on disc two blew my mind when I first heard it and made me an instant dub fan. However, I don't think it belongs to the genre at all. And the tension I hear in Prince Far I's inclusion on an ambient compilation, a similar tension I hear with the categorization of so many 70's prog and electronic musicians featured here, is the "earthiness" and "analogue" sounds that ground so much of this music to a material history more than to a cosmological great beyond. I also think that the future guiding principle of the AMBT label writ large will be to create music micro-genres that investigate a similar kind of tension. 

II. 

After purchasing Imaginary Landscapes from the Wall, I eagerly awaited the arrival of any follow up releases that might come from the series. I started reading the Wire magazine around this time and read about the next volume in the series after Volume 3. It was called Isolationism and was curated by musician Kevin Martin. Due to the Wire and various compilations (this is all taking place in a mostly pre-internet world) I knew a little about Martin's musical group God at the time. The group also included Justin Broadrick, as a hard-core curious suburban youth I had liked Napalm Death, and collaborated with John Zorn (whose group Naked City introduced me to a bunch of shit that would shape a lot of my musical tastes). God's releases seem to be lost to time, but it's safe to say that their recordings are the opposite of whatever ambient might be: (https://youtu.be/KDqqAAbaW_Y?si=GkrT3FmpRP6eMdCI). So the choice of Martin to curate an ambient CD seemed odd. 

Indeed, if the first volume of Virgin's Brief History of Ambient series begins in the summer of 1993 asking pretentiously "what has ambient, the song of our surroundings, become?" before cataloging the successes found by the Orb and Sven Väth in ambient music, then Martin's liner notes begin in, to recall Hopkin's florid rhetorical question, the winter of our discontent: 

The proliferation of sanitized chill-out zones in the clubs of 1994 stands as both a testament to and indictment of Ambient's current resurrection. The New Age ideals, Eastern mysticism and mood-enhancing explorations of Ash Ra Temple, Terry Riley, Cluster et al, are now being eagerly recycled by Silicon age hippies on the quest for eternal highs. Sadly, though, this selective revisionism negates.

Martin understands that ambient is being reified and commodified as a useful tool in the increasing digital instrumentalization of life in late capitalism. Going back to the origins of ambient music as music that "could mingle with the forks and knives at dinner" had been translated into music that would make you want to go to the restaurant of your choice and spend money to have that same dinner. Again, this is the Muzak element of ambient that has always been there since Eno wrote his liner notes to Music for Airports. 

Martin's compilation is not only an attempt at a musical revolution within the genre of ambient, he understands it as a consumptive revolution as well. If ambient has become a reified musical object to sooth the dissatisfied consumer on holiday, the only way to remove ambient from that cultural and musical dead end is to re-imagine what ambient could be. Here's a rather long quotation from Martin's liner notes: 

Ambient's historical obsession with the outer as inner metaphor is now becoming imbalanced, as the cliches of birdsong, whale calls or running water rob the imagination, in its attempt to localize Utopian dreams. Dropping inwards instead of reaching out, this compilation's furtive music sounds as paranoic as it does panoramic, and is in direct contrast to its mellow relative. Where New Ambient seeks to avoid discomfort, this Isolationist strain uses the studio as a monastic retreat to encourage self-confrontation.

Ambient has been stretched to its limits in Martin's use of the term (I also think the whale calls mention is funny since Toop will put whale calls on the first Ocean of Sound compilation) from Eno's original imagining of ambient is music becoming an almost imperceptible part of the environment. On Discreet Music, Eno describes literally have almost no input in the recording process, beginning his lifelong interest in generative music with little human input. Martin's ambient is a confrontation with the self, and while that doesn't negate the possibility that confrontations with the self cannot be established through generative music, the aesthetic impulse Martin describes in the liner notes echoes the language and aesthetics ambient (and electronic music in general) moved away from in the 1970s. In other words, this is ambient reimagined as punk. 

I apologize for quoting so much from Martin's liner notes, but he uses his linter notes as a manifesto for what I think would become the overriding mission of the Virgin Ambient label as a whole. After the first three volumes, the label moved away from genre histories into both newer music and a genealogy of what the new understanding of ambient might sound like. 

Now the music and listening environment merge into an increasingly uneasy co-existence, thus infiltrating popular consciousness whilst declaring war on the song's tyrannical methodology; this convenient coalition may be succeeding where previous musical subversives did not, by ensuring their revolt knows when to remain silent.

Ambient will be more punk than punk because it can incorporate silence into its musical revolt. What's funny to me is that we've been here before: in the wake of punk rock, post-punk emerged as an attempt to go beyond punk's aesthetic by being even more confrontational than punk had been with its major groups. This Heat, just to take one example, used "the studio as virtual environment" on all of their records. Wire, whose first record in 1977 already started experimenting with the sound of punk recordings, went fully into the avant garde by the end of the decade. Not to mention Public Image Limited, early Human League and the mighty Throbbing Gristle, whose earliest recordings pre-date punk. Indeed, if you take this counter-example to its logical conclusion you end up back at Hopkin's Brief History of Ambient: even progressive rock had moments of revolt that knew when to remain silent. 

I suspect that Martin already understands this criticism insofar as he populates Isolationism with musical veterans like AMM and Paul Schütze as well as newcomers like Labradford and SeeFeel. He even got a genuine superstar to appear in the form of Aphex Twin's track "Aphex Airlines," a piece of music which surprisingly might be the most abrasive thing on the collection (and that's saying something). And, given that we'll be discussing Kevin Martin a lot in future posts, Isolationism seems like a beginning manifesto of something that he will develop further on our next object of study, the Macro Dub Infection series.  

Alas, Isolationism never came to the Wall. In fact, it became something of a holy grail for me. Whenever I moved to a new town, for a while, I would check out the ever growing collection of used electronic CDs from the mid-90s to see if I could find it. I did score a number of the CDs from the Virgin Ambient series this way, but never Isolationism. I had, of course, heard most of the artists featured as time went by but it wasn't until I was torrenting albums in the 2000s that I finally got to hear it. Given the fact that Isolationism wasn't birthed, well, in isolation, the "dark ambient" or "illbient" (cringe) movements that the compilation sort of kicked off were well known genres that I had just sort of shrugged off by the late 90s. I like a lot of the music on Isolationism but I don't think it's particularly revolutionary. 

The truth is that the first four volumes of the Virgin Ambient series are the volumes to probably come back to the least. From the packaging to the selections, all four volumes feel very much a part of their time (both the celebration of ambient culture, as well as the reaction against) and dated as a result. Yet, what these four volumes established as a new definition of what "ambient" music might mean. This would guide the series moving forward.