Ambient - what is it? Features of the style of music ambient

In music there are several fundamental genres, consisting of many sub-genres. One of them is ambient. What is it, how it sounds and where it is used? Such questions often arise in new listeners. In order to find out, it is necessary to get acquainted with the music industry of the 1970s.

The emergence of the genre

Any list that lists performers in the ambient style, necessarily includes Brian Eno. It was this musician who became the founder of the genre and the author of the term itself. Career Brian began in the band Roxy Music, where he was a keyboard player. However, in the mid-70's he decided to move away from rock and started his own solo projects, the characteristic feature of which was a lot of experiments with sound.

The term ambient is translated from English as "enveloping". It was Eno who was the first to achieve such a musical effect. Inspiration for him became street noise, to which he listened, lying once at home with a fracture. The composer decided himself to reproduce something similar to the household sound palette and record the result on the record. To do this, he had to go to several technical tricks.

The concept of Brian Eno

Brian Ino's first full-length solo ambient album is Discreet Music, released in 1975. It was then that the musician formulated the concept of a new genre, the basis of which was the idea of the French composer-reformer Erik Sati about "furniture music".

The essence of both directions is that they mean unobtrusive melodies, which the listener can listen to and ignore equally. Furnishing music is performed in shops, banks and other public institutions to create a cozy background. A similar in nature ambient Bryan Eno in album booklets is meant for meditation and meditation. His music is defocused, it is scattered and spilled. And this is what human ears perceive.

Duo Ino and Fripp

Some of the ideas inherent in Ino's experimental compositions were not developed by him, but served as inspiration for future performers who tried to rethink what ambient is in their work. In the music of the founding father of the genre, for example, the first attempts to record gloomy "streaming" songs are traced. Especially noticeable is the trend in the album Evening Star. The record was recorded in 1975. It is noteworthy that Brian Ino was then helped by another cult musician Robert Fripp, much more known as the coryphaeus of progressive rock. The results of their joint work on the Evening Star became the forerunner of dark ambient.

The result of the first collaboration between Fripp and Ino was their No Pussyfooting album, released in 1973. For its time, this record was a unique experiment. The musicians used the innovative technique of recording on a magnetic cassette. They used the loop effect (the English term loop). Fripp and Ino took a certain short musical fragment and with the help of technique artificially repeated it several times. As a result, a specific echo and vibration effect was obtained. In the future, this technique was developed both by the founding fathers and their followers.

Technical features

Electronic music - that's what ambient music is. And Brian Eno's early experiments, and more modern subgenres, refer to this huge genre category. The effect of enveloping sound is achieved precisely with the help of electronics and all sorts of synthesizers. The original signal is passed through the graphic equalizer and falls into two microphones. The sound in them is reproduced at a small interval. With the help of this technical manipulation musicians 70-ies. First created, and then developed ambient.

The meaning of the word fully corresponds to the nature of the genre. A similar sound envelops and is perceived by the listener as an environment. Ino Ino compared ambient with rain and scattered light. In addition to furnishing music, he was influenced by drone songs, especially the work of La Monte Young.

Ambient House

Key musical genres are very versatile, they consist of many subgenres. The ambient is not an exception. What it is? This is a ramified system, within which various concepts coexist. For 40 years the genre has become extremely blurred. Sometimes the term "ambient" is used as a prefix for describing the border style existing at the junction of two different schools. Such two-faced genres began to appear in the 80-90's.

A vivid example of such a merger is the ambient house. This phenomenon belongs to electronic music used in discotheques. The founder of the genre was the British band Orbital, which existed in 1987-2004 and 2009-2014. Her music was considered a club, but at the same time she was still too peculiar for youth discos. Compositions Orbital differed emphasis on the atmospheric, which gave her ambient. The style of the music of the English has been developed by several other groups of their generation: The Orb, Future Sound of London and KLF.

Ambient Techno

As a dance direction ambient in the early 1990's. Evolved into ambient techno. Distinctive features of this genre are the average tempo of compositions, enveloping sound and the use of a new drum machine Roland TR-808. Performers ambient-techno mixed in their work elements of three music pillars: ambient, trance and house.

A classic example of the direction is the album Selected Ambient Works 85-92, released by Aphex Twin (the pseudonym of Richard D. James) in 1992. On this album, the musician combined his work experience with a DJ and his passion for ambient music.

Ambient industrial

At the turn of the 80-90's. Representatives of each musical culture tried in their own way to answer the question about what is ambient music. The techniques of Brian Eno turned out to be used by various experimenters. Basically they did in the underground and did not look back at the trends of the music industry. The composers who worked within the industrial genre were the same. In 1984, the group of this direction Throbbing Gristle recorded the album In the Shadow of the Sun, created under the great influence of ambient.

The meeting of two independent genres gave birth to a new plane that interested many young musicians. In the 1980s. Ambient industrial has become the leitmotif of the work of Lustmord and Coil. Their music was dark, and in some cases occult. Later it was the basis of ritual ambient.

Dark ambient

By the 1990's. The ambient-industrial has finally evolved into dark ambient. The most notable groups in addition to the already mentioned Lustmord and Coil in this niche were Endura, Nocturnal Emissions and Zoviet France. In their music, they used natural sounds (noise of forest, animals, water and birds) and industrial sounds (noise of workshops and working machines, metal bells). Minimalistichnost - another feature that distinguishes dark ambient. What it is? This is the characteristic monotony of music, its repeatability and the absence of noticeable details. It uses looped samples of the clatter of claps and other effects that create tension. Such a kaleidoscope creates a hypnotic atmosphere.

Being the heir of industrial, dark ambient is rarely ideologized. The lyrics of musicians of this direction seldom refer to social and political topics. What is ambient according to the lyrics? This is an attempt by the authors to rethink the religious, mystical and moral aspects of human life. In this genre there are many instrumental compositions in which there are no texts at all, and the attention of listeners is focused exclusively on music. Background to the emergence of dark ambient were laid not only in industrial experiments and the work of Brian Eno, but also in the albums of David Bowie Low and Heroes, as well as on the plastic Tangerine Dream Zeit.

Drow-ambient

In the late 1990s. By the merger of ambient and drone, a genre of droun-ambient appeared. It is characterized by vibrations, frequent changes in tempo, buzzing at low frequencies, resonances and other non-standard technical methods of sound recording.

Drow-ambient compositions (just like dark ambient) almost always contradict the classical structure of songs (a series of verses and choruses). They correspond only to the author's idea of the beautiful and therefore often become abstract and excessively long. In drone ambient, in addition to classical ambient instruments, electric guitars are also used, the parts of which are skipped through a variety of synthesizers and equalizers.

Dangen-synth

A separate phenomenon in ambient is denzhen-synth. This genre was formed in the 1990's. As a result of experiments of black metal musicians from Norway. For example, the creator of the cult project Burzum, Varg Vikernes, abandoned the heavy guitar sound and recorded several albums based on synthesizer harmonies. Most of the developed genre was similar to dark ambient, but there is a fundamental difference between these two concepts.

Dzhenzhen-synt by definition differs by intentional poor quality of recording. This was due to several reasons: the use of cheap tape recorders, the desire to protest against the mass music industry, the commitment of performers to a deep underground. Norwegian musicians often turned to the folklore themes of their native country and used atmospheric experiments suitable for atmospheric experiments to immerse the listener.

What it is? In addition to Burzum, the formations Mortiis, Wongraven, etc. can be classified as denzeng-synth. Some of them were created as side-projects. In other words, these were additional groups, which in their concept differed from the first-priority metal band of the performer.

To the cinema

Because of their stylistic features, ambient songs are often used in movie soundtracks. Such background music is great for giving a special atmosphere to cinematic scenes. For directors and composers, it is another language through which the spectator is conveyed the mood conceived in the picture.

Fashion for ambient in the movie appeared thanks to the world classic Stanley Kubrick. "Streaming" music has become an integral part of his films "Space Odyssey 2001" and "Shining". Another such ambient propagandist on the big screen was David Lynch ("Eraser Head", "Mulholland Drive").

In music and advertising

As in the cinema, developers of computer shooters, strategies and other virtual entertainment try to demonstrate in their own way to the audience what the ambient is. In games, audio tracks perform the same function - they bring the player closer to the fictional environment in which the action of the next novelty takes place. Especially popular ambient in space simulators.

If in the ambient relationship with movies and games everything is quite obvious, then what is ambient in advertising? Such music is often used in various videos, but this is not all. In the professional industry, there is the term ambient media, which refers to the use of the environment for advertising purposes (it is an outdoor advertisement near places of large crowds).

Lecture hall

Ambient did not become a commercially successful genre. Critics of the genre reproach and reproach him for excessive boredom and intellectuality. The direction of ordinary listeners is frightened off by excessively long compositions, the lack of familiar melodic structures and vocal performance.

Since its inception, ambient has occupied a certain small niche in the music industry and has remained within it for more than 40 years. Without becoming a massively popular genre, he acquired modest in size, but very loyal audiences, the size of which never depended on the conjuncture and fashion. Approximately the same way goes any other style, which has become cultic in fairly narrow circles.

According to the studies of musicologists, the target audience of the genre is people from 16 to 33 years old. They listen to ambient music. What does this statistic mean? That such music is most often fond of students and youth. The community of ambient music fans has greatly increased after the advent of the Internet. Thanks to the free download of new releases and the communication of like-minded people, interest in the genre spread throughout the world. A good indicator in this sense is the number of groups and solo performers playing ambient. Most of them in Australia, Germany, Canada, Britain and the USA. There are relic regional scenes, as the above-described Norwegian.