why is ambient so popular now

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
You could make a case of the original new age being a mirror to the eastern influenced avant classical origins of ambient, Cage, Riley, Young etc

I would go further, I think they're all on a single spectrum, with people like Joanna Brouk, Deuter, Ariel Kalma, etc somewhere in the middle. It depends what you count as new age.

personally I'm definitely into the freeform, improv, psychedelic side. stuff like Iasos, not so much

stuff like this
 

droid

Well-known member
I would go further, I think they're all on a single spectrum, with people like Joanna Brouk, Deuter, Ariel Kalma, etc somewhere in the middle. It depends what you count as new age.

Yeah, arguably, thought the difference might be that the avant took eastern ideas about tonality and sonics and the new agers took their ideas about spirituality and musical function.
 

luka

Well-known member
This will sound like a cheeky question but really I'm posing it to tease out some discussion points - I wonder how is it you distinguish between good and bad, worthy and worthless when it comes to ambient music?

IT ALL SOUNDS LIKE MASSAGE MUSIC TO ME M8

this is what i was saying. it's almost impossible to make 'bad' drone which devalues the whole project to some degree.
 

droid

Well-known member
this is what i was saying. it's almost impossible to make 'bad' drone which devalues the whole project to some degree.

I dont think thats true. Ive heard plenty of bad drone. It just sometimes takes a while to figure out exactly how bad it is.
 

luka

Well-known member
i was at a william basinski thing with my sister on sunday just to loop the thread back to it's beginning.
 

droid

Well-known member
The thing about bad drone is, its flat - there's no textural depth, no envelopment, no overtones, no ganzfeld effect.

Bad drones actually become fairly apparent after a while because there is nothing extraneous to distract you from the drone. The purity makes it a very difficult thing to fake.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
it's almost impossible to make 'bad' drone which devalues the whole project to some degree

yes + no. it is harder to make "bad" drone than to make actively bad rock but it's also much, much harder to make drone that stands out.

I think this is true to some degree for all abstract art.

it's like looking at Kazimir Malevich or whatever + saying anyone could do that. well, yes. but no, they can't.

good and bad are kind of meaningless terms, true, but not in a non-falsifiable way

revision: rather than it's hard to make bad drone I think it would be better to say that listeners without a lot of experience have a much harder time distinguishing between higher and lower quality drone than they do with rock or disco or whatever. this is also why I never really understood the massive popularity of mnml outside of trendiness (+drugs. probably mainly drugs)
 
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padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
that is interesting about the sonics of bad drone. this is why it helps to have a producer around.

it reinforces the point that drone is a quality, not a genre. or that drone the quality is different from drone the genre.
 

droid

Well-known member
that is interesting about the sonics of bad drone. this is why it helps to have a producer around.

it reinforces the point that drone is a quality, not a genre. or that drone the quality is different from drone the genre.

Ahem, failed producer.

I hate to betray my inarticulacy, but to make a visual comparison; anyone can get out the acrylics and paint a dark red square on some cartridge paper, but that doesnt make you Rothko.
 

droid

Well-known member
Lovely Eliane.

Drone/Ambient is blessed with a surfeit of female originators. More so than any other electronic genre. Radigue, Oliveros, Oram, Spiegel, Amacher... tons of prominent female artists too, new age full of them also.
 

luka

Well-known member
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