Brian Eno is sick in bed. Just out of reach, a record is playing so low that the rain outside the hospital window is louder. The leaves on the room’s tasteful plant, as they flutter in the slight breeze, make more of an impression. As Eno drifts into cognizance after yet another ill nap, he thinks, for the tenth time, “This gives me an idea….”
The origin story for Eno’s Another Green World, widely considered the cornerstone of modern ambient music, has been told so many times that even the man doubts its truth. The anecdote lives on regardless of whether or not it’s true, simply because it provides such a vivid, laconic description of what makes ambient music alluring. It’s music that only barely exists, tenuous by its very nature. Though constructed with intense care to sonic structure, it doesn’t allow for the lengthy analysis that people associate with prog or modal jazz. This is music with as little reference to actual music as possible.
I consider ambient music the most enjoyable form of post-modern art, an idea which, as with any sentence that includes the term ‘post-modern’, needs a bit of unpacking. Post-modern is a vague categorization that has about as much meaning and worth for art in general as the word ‘alternative’ has for music. It’s even more overused than the term ‘modern’, which is itself pretty much bereft of any real meaning. Both words have been diluted beyond use.
So let’s make some quick definitions for use here. I consider modern art to be anything that acknowledges its own medium, either tailoring itself specifically and deliberately toward it or referring to itself within the art. The classic example, for me at least, would be Duck Amuck, a Looney Tunes short that drives Daffy Duck to the brink of madness by twisting the animated short around his neck and pulling. It’s art that explores itself. The musical equivalent is anything that acknowledges the playback medium; techniques that announce the artist’s awareness of their own medium. Examples would be effects like hard panning, the fade-out/fade-in at the end of “Strawberry Fields Forever” (which also gives an example of hard panning at the beginning), the sound of a needle dropping onto vinyl, or something as simple as the artist good-naturedly acknowledging and greeting his audience.
Post-modernism is the more daring version of modernism, where the artist uses their knowledge of audience expectations about the medium in order to challenge them. Such art is attempting to force the viewer to analyze art on a new level by preventing them from full immersion into the work, but more often than not (to me anyway) it seems like someone offering you a seat in a chair with a tack on it. It often comes across as a mean-spirited assault, which, I suspect, is exactly what some artists are shooting for. Should a brutal tale like the notorious Irreversible be made in a palatable, visually appealing way? Would that improve the film, or take something away from it? I wouldn’t know, as I have no interest in watching a movie that makes an effort to offend. What little curiosity I have I keep well and stifled.
What makes post-modern art difficult to make is that it must be offensive or somehow off-putting in an appealing way. A movie like The Human Centipede is certainly offensive to the senses, but that doesn’t make it a work of art, it just makes it a shitty movie (pun intended). Ditto with the recent sub-genre of horror that’s affectionately known as torture porn; I doubt directors like Eli Roth or James Wan were trying to make art with their movies, they were just trying to be shocking. It’s not post-modernism unless the piece is trying to express something with its violations of custom or if it somehow shows that its aesthetic poverty is on purpose.
So what’s the equivalent of post-modern art for music? Aside from ambient music, which I’ll get to in a moment, I would argue that most post-punk at least strives for the title. Music like “Raping A Slave” certainly isn’t shooting for pop, and is admirable in how well it inspires a vague sense of nausea with little more than oddly recorded drums. Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music also gets brought up in this context, as does The Beatles’ “Revolution 9” (side-note: I think I’m going to be able to bring The Beatles up every single week, no matter what I’m talking about) and early Nine Inch Nails. Aside from Metal Machine Music, which no one wants to (nor should) defend, the above songs work as music, but only fleetingly. The juxtaposition of snippets of melody with noise is what makes it both post-modern and bearable (“Revolution 9” is actually one my favorite Beatles songs. Yes, I am ‘that guy’).
That idea of juxtaposition is what, in my opinion, makes ambient music, particularly this week’s album, examples of post-modernism. Ambient music is similar to minimalism in that it strips a medium down to its bare essentials, serving as a kind of atomic level view of art. What makes that post-modernist, to me, is that doing so to a musical piece often involves stripping the music down to a point where it’s barely recognizable as a song.
A song is made up of melody and rhythm, both of which can be completely absent from ambient music for great swaths of time. Nicholas Jaar can clearly make songs; two of the tracks on this album, “Too Many Kids Finding Rain In The Dust” and “Space Is Only Noise If You Can See”, wouldn’t be particularly out of place in a playlist of trip-hop songs. These songs serve to illustrate that the lack of conventional musical sense on the rest of the album is a deliberate choice, rather than pointless atmosphere.
That kind of proof of concept is essential to post-modernism, especially when your album kicks off with the sound of water and deliberately obfuscated spoken-word poetry. Throw some French and minor key synth in there and you have the entirety of this album’s first track. Compare that to one of the songs I mentioned before; if presented side by side one may be hard pressed to figure out that they’re from the same artist, let alone the same album.
Much like last week’s album, Space Is Only Noise is clearly meant to be listened to in one sitting, from tracks one through fourteen. The linking is even more deliberate here, with the song transitions happening completely seamlessly. Aside from the two aforementioned ‘singles’ the album is difficult to break down, a daring decision considering almost music sales these days are based on individual songs. Thanks to iTunes and the file-sharing programs of the olden glory days, the album is quickly fading as an artistic piece, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it fade into a brief obscurity within the next few years.
Aside from the lack of traditional musical characteristics, what makes ambient music part of the post-modern scene is how it challenges your attention. Ambient music is designed to be slip out of your attention, forcing you to focus all the more if you want to look at it closely. Like all good post-modern art, a good ambient song will reward that redoubled concentration with small details that would otherwise go unnoticed. It’s music that rewards, but does not demand your attention, making it the polar opposite of pop music, which grabs your focus with catchy hooks but rarely offers anything underneath that well-polished surface shine.
Whether or not you agree with me on the nature of post-modernism and ambient music’s place in that class, Space Is Only Noise remains well worth your focus. As I alluded to earlier, I don’t particularly enjoy post-modernism, and I honestly don’t really care for much ambient music either. Nicholas Jaar has managed to make music that can draw close attention at a speed close to a sleeping man’s heart-rate. Music that rewards you for your time rather than greedily demand it is a welcome thing, especially when those rewards are as great as the ones found here.
Cheers all. Good night.
No comments:
Post a Comment