History of Ambient

Sitting, listening, chilling. Music for background or foreground. Music for tripping, for
relaxing, or for making us uneasy and challenging us with a new perspective. At the start of
the third millennium music to chill-out to makes perfect sense. As the Western world
becomes faster, more complex, more rife with nervous energy, the joy of listening to
instrumental music that expresses both our external environment (both man-made and
natural) and our inner spaces (both emotional and mental) is now more popular than at
any other time in the history of recorded sound.

Such music has many names: ambient, new age, contemporary instrumental, experimental,
spacerock, chillout, ambient techno, ambient trance, mood music, world music, new
acoustic music. The protests of some musicians and A&R people notwithstanding, I believe
one of these names in particular - ambient - is a perfectly useful signpost for the
phenomenon. It points to music across a hugely diverse spectrum: from the gorgeous solo
guitar of John Fahey to the environmental techno of Biosphere; from the minimal avant-
pop of The Penguin Cafe Orchestra to the chilled-out Celtic ambience of Enya and her
clones.

It was English musician, sound designer and conceptualist Brian Eno who first officially
coined the phrase “ambient”. In the sleeve notes to his 1978 opus Ambient 1: Music For
Airports he defines it as music "designed to induce calm and space to think". Eno's concept
of ambience is music that can be either actively listened to or used as background,
depending on whether the listener chooses to pay attention or not. It’s been a highly
influential if not entirely original idea; at best informing the resurgence of electronic
ambient via the dance world, at worst being taken to its passive extreme by many new age
composers.

Still, ambient is perhaps the slipperiest of all musical genres we ever dared give a name.
Certainly instrumental music to chill-out to had been around for a long time before Eno
chose to define it, in forms as diverse as Gregorian chants from the middle ages to certain
forms of psychedelic rock from the late 60's. Some people complain that any definition is
limiting, and beyond a point I would have to agree. So in this guide I haven't devoted long
tracts to drawing lines in the sand and saying: "This is ambient". I do believe, however, it
is worth spending some time giving the music some context by tracing a number of the
sources that have informed eclectic ambient sound in the second half of the 20th Century
and beyond.

One of ambient music's prime sources is the classical avant-garde. Among the pioneers
were two late-19th Century composers, Claude Debussy and Erik Satie. Satie's concept of
"furniture music" for solo piano or small ensembles now seems surprisingly congruous
with Eno's concept of ambience: creating a sound environment that complimented the
surrounds rather than intruded upon it. More musically direct but just as subtle and
suggestive was the work of Debussy, who's wandering, impressionistic tone poems like
"Prelude To The Afternoon Of The Fawn" (1894) heralded a new openness in Western
music and broke all kinds of rules in structure and linear composition.
By the middle of the 20th Century the American composer John Cage had blown stuffy
notions of "proper" music right out of the water. He pre-empted world music with pieces
that evoked the sounds of Africa, India and Indonesia; he invented and composed for the
'prepared piano' with objects stuck in piano wires to create Asian-like tones and percussive
textures; and he outraged and perplexed his audiences with collisions of randomly created
noise and, most infamously, his piece "4'33" which challenged listeners to consider silence
as a perfectly valid form of musical expression.

After Cage, the floodgates opened. The 1960's saw the rise of a school of American
composers with classical backgrounds who became known as the minimalists. They took
the idea of repetition and explored it over long distances, whether with orchestras, electric
instruments or non-Western instrumental combinations. In turn minimalism was to inform
music as diverse as techno dance and new age relaxation music. It was also during the 60's
that non-Western sounds and modes of composition seeped into classical, jazz and popular
music to an unprecedented degree. And German composer Karl Stockhausen further
explored Cage's tape experiments with his radical tape collages, a precursor to modern
digital sampling.

This was also a time of absorption of avant-garde ideas into rock music. In the late 1960's
rock was enriched enormously by a combination of electronic music technology,
psychedelic drugs, ideas from the classical avant-garde and the innovations of jazzmen like
Miles Davis. The Beatles showed what could be done in recording studio within a pop
framework; art rock bands like Pink Floyd and Tangerine Dream then took the next step by
downplaying pop's emphasis on lyrics and taking audiences into totally new spaces. The
tracks were instrumental, often improvised, spacey and long. Rock was undergoing its own
avant-garde and the open-ended sound of one instrument in particular - the analogue
synthesiser and its digital successors - has become such an important tool of expression
that much dance, ambient and experimental music that's been released since simply
wouldn't exist without it.

In popular music one of the names most crucial to the evolution of synthesiser technology -
and thus to most of the electronic music that followed - is German band Kraftwerk. They
developed drum pads and used synthesiers in an explicitly rhythmic way to create a
minimal style of pop that was purely electronic in origin. Consequently they shook the rock
world out of its mid-1970's complacency and set music off in all kinds of unexpected
directions. As Kraftwerk's Ralf Hutter told Billboard in a 1977 interview: "Electronics is
beyond nations and colours...with electronics everything is possible. The only limit is with
the composer". We may nowadays take synthesiers for granted, but to challenge such a
guitar-dominated culture at the time was revolutionary. Kraftwerk's vision was urban,
technological, post-industrial. Their futurist ideas combined with their equally futuristic
sound was enormously influential, particularly on UK synth pop and on the black
musicians of Detroit from whom modern techno emerged in the 1980's. And in turn, that
legacy reaches into the various ambient and downbeat spin-offs of electronic dance music
that have emerged since.

But there are other kinds of visions expressed through electronic instruments that have also
touched a nerve. The concept of spacemusic is one tied up inexorably with the synthesiser.
In the late 1960’s terms like spacerock and cosmic rock were coined by listeners and
reviewers to describe the atmospheric, electronic-laden music of progressive rock bands
like the Floyd and Tangerine Dream. And this wasn't just the drugs talking. It is no
coincidence that at the time of the first moon landing, the Floyd was transfixing audiences
with pieces like “Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun”. These bands were playing
the soundtrack to a new era and the spacious, cosmic feel that purveyed much of their early
work continues to inform a significant amount of ambient music to this day.

In fact, I find spacemusic the most fascinating of all ambient sub-genres. Its a style of
music that was first made possible in the 1960's by a new music technology that appeared
at exactly the right historical moment: the decade that human beings first left the Earth.
Somehow, electronic sound can evoke a cosmic mood with a depth rarely achieved in an
acoustic setting. The late 60's music of Pink Floyd, for instance, achieves that mood far
better than a weighty classical work like Gustav Holst's "The Planets", a symphony which
isn't really about space at all. With the advent of the space age, it seems, has
simultaneously come the perfect technology - synthesisers and electronics - for musicians
to express their feelings about it. The implications have not been lost on Brian Eno. In the
sleeve notes to his sublime album of electronic tone poems Apollo (1983) of his fascination
with producing film music expressing a mixture of feelings that, until recently, had never
before been experienced by humans.

Certainly, much new age music would be unthinkable without the synthesiser. The origins
of new age date back to the 1970's on America's west coast, a kind of cottage industry
supported by lifestyle fairs and alternative bookshops. The lightweight "healing" music of
composers like therapist Doctor Steve Halpern and Iasos has since become hugely
popular. But new age is as much a religious movement as it is a musical style, and therein
lies its limitations. During the 80's new age unfortunately became a marketing tool for all
kinds of instrumental music, regardless of whether or not it was associated with the
lifestyle and its pot porri of psychology, theology, charlatans and money-making
opportunists.

In the 1990's new age music mutated into the more generic relaxation. This insidious
marketing ploy was particularly prevalent in Australia. Fans of quality ambient were no
doubt aghast as, via post offices and bookshops, the market was flooded with extremely
suspect nature-themed recordings. These recordings sold very well and made some very
mediocre musicians lots of money. Tourists loved it, too, with the slickly packaged images
of Australia's natural heritage proving very attractive. But far from Eno's vision of
ambient, this music was not "simultaneously relaxing and engaging". Most of it was just
plain awful. Perhaps knowing this fact all along, many of the perpetrators simply took the
money and ran as the music's popularity inevitably waned. Others survived by flogging
their wares overseas.

The new age/relaxation issue is worth further discussion, because it is the tag that has
become most commonly associated with the kinds of music we might call ambient. The
underlying priorities of such music are always the same; i.e. therapy before music, function
before substance. Because of this, its intrinsic qualities as music often suffer badly.
Whatever its benefits to our health (often misrepresented anyway), new age/relaxation and
its various bland jazz-pop offshoots have made only a limited contribution to the
development of ambient sound. Much of it simply borrows gestures from more substantial
sources and waters it down into musical equivalent an anesthetic: all senses numbed, all
real engagement removed. New age has, as Tangerine Dream biographer Paul Stump so
succinctly observed, "...hemoginised and homogenized the nice bits of Rubycon".

There is no question that the new age tag has an unhealthy effect on the public's concept of
ambient. Therefore, a debunking of the new age music myth is crucial.

Yes, ambient styles of music generally ARE relaxing, and therein lies its appeal for a
substantial number of people. Obviously, you are free to use music for whatever purpose
you wish. But whether you "use" such music for healing disease, aligning charkas or
babbling with whales is irrelevant. Every album album I've recommended within these
pages is music that can be enjoyed for music’s sake. Whatever else its uses, at least it's
multi-functional. Good ambient invites listeners to take a journey through some of modern
music’s subtler, stranger or less-chartered waters, a journey that can be disarming and
beautiful, or uneasy and disturbing. It's a journey in which the listener can choose to be an
active participant, not simply the passive recipient that new age music suggests. Besides,
by the 1990's ambient music had found a much more credible champion.

If new age nearly killed ambient, it wouldn't be too far fetched to suggest that electronic
dance music rescued it. The extraordinary confluence of events and people that gave rise
to modern house, progressive, techno, trance/psy-trance, hip hop, breakbeat and
electronic dub music makes for a complicated history, far beyond the scope of this guide.
But towards the end of the 1980's, as dance music's first waves from Chicago, New York
and Detroit USA where rippling across the world, certain producers in England and
Europe who were aligned with clubland started producing sounds that were an explicit
antidote to the muscular, unrelenting beats of the dancefloor. Mixmaster Morris (aka
Irresistible Force), Alex Paterson (from The Orb), Geir Jensson (aka Biosphere) and Pete
Namlook's label Fax Records are among the many pioneers. Each of these artists, in their
own way, found a receptive audience among the dance underground with music that was
subtle, intelligent and often produced with the same technology that created the music
these audiences were dancing to at raves and clubs.

By the turn of the millennium the word chillout had come to encompass an extraordinary
variety of downtempo music associated with the electronic dance scene, and sometimes
even just downtempo pop or rock. Admittedly "chillout" sometimes suffers from tacky
excess and commercial blandness, as major record labels have jumped on the bandwagon
with compilation CD's that show they really haven't a clue what they are doing. But what's
important is that downtempo music produced partially or wholly by electronic means and
often never exposed on radio or though other mass media has now achieved amazingly
widespread acceptance, even if most of it remains outside the mainstream. Thanks to the
rave generation, from the beaches of Ibiza to the lounge bars of Berlin to the outdoor
psychedelic trance parties of Australia, ambient has found a glorious new lease of life.

Classical avant-garde...rock music...electronic pop...new age...electronic dance music. Just

a few key pieces of the ambient puzzle and, I admit, only the briefest of histories.