The best quiet music has an inherent tension built on sublimation, on patience, and on a meditative state.

Those matters of introspection may appear all surface but, as the cliche goes, they run deep.

Three stars or four, Alphabet 1968 reflects a level of attention to compositional detail that I, at least, have found rewarding on repeated listenings.

Poppycock. There’s no ideological agenda here. Although, in any case, it seems to me you’ve misunderstood the use of the word “ideological”. A class analysis of aesthetics is COUNTER-ideological, insofar as it brings to light the underlying ideologies and class value systems of the means of production and presentation.

One might also point out that such a misunderstanding isn’t exactly unusual, betraying as it does certain class interests. One also notes in passing the idea that consensus is better than objective analysis, and that name-calling against an analysis is better than actually engaging with it and dealing with the material. Psy no attention to the man behind the curtain! You don’t get a lot more middle-class than that.

But in any case, who’s saying that all middle class music is bad? It’s just that there are particular weaknesses in bourgeois art, in that it tends towards the tasteful, and tastefulness is the enemy of beauty; and for that matter, a consistent repurposing of ideas into something dumber, less spicy, and easier to swallow.

And in the case of Alphabet 1968, the music is a classic example of bad middle class music that fails to be either listening music OR background because it’s reaching for the empty aesthetic of taste; and aping other people’s work which it hasn’t bothered to fully understand either in the way the elements interact materially or in the social meaning of its means of production.

Whether it’s the White Stripes or this record, we’re looking at best at children playing dress up in Mummy and Daddy’s clothes. But of course the alienation of the style from its cultural context, simply to make something pretty but meaningless, is the essence of the bourgeois aesthetic. I’m all for recontextualization, but if the juxtaposition doesn’t wind up having something to say (as, say, John Oswald does) then it’s just wallpaper, as empty a piece of genre hackery as a fill-in issue of The Amazing Spiderman.

Fairly obviously, there’s plenty of ambient music that does manage to transcend the wallpaper genre.
Right at the moment, I’m listening to Fennesz’s Venice, which is a GOOD example of middle class music (you don’t get much more bourgeois than a David Sylvian appearance). And there, each of the pieces is rigourously inventive instead of just nicking other people’s ideas and doing nothing very much new with them. The material, and the instrumentation, are developed from what they actually are in themselves; not just lazily and ham-fistedly jammed together because it seemed like a good idea at the time.

The bottom line is that Alphabet 1968 is a three star album; on the one hand there’s the interesting idea of trying to create these 10 different soundspaces by looking at the way particular historical styles might inflect a single chord (or perhaps, rather, deconstruct a single note into its constituent parts), but on the other hand, its a curate’s egg of undigested source material that doesn’t feel it’s way through the way that each of these styles has its own internal processes and meanings beyond just cutting and pasting them into place.

So it’s a good idea for a project that’s for the most part undercut in its execution by a lazy lack of imagination and an unwillingness to engage with the internal processes of the source material.

My motto: if you can’t do something new with the source material that makes it better, better leave it alone.

Soothing “with its almost too beautiful loops” (what Alan nicely characterises as its “ambiguously elegiac grainy lo-fi orchestralism” & Lauren as “an enticing piece of ambient psychedelia — dreamy, with a muffled theremin popping up in the background”) & exiting to “the same found voices with which the album began”.

Maybe its chimes are a bit glib, too much of a shorthand for the sublime. I’d certainly be tempted to do without them (& guess this is the sort of thing both Joshua & Paul were caveating) – or substitute an element of harder-won, more Xenakisian beauty.

But to these ears the mood is well judged nonetheless – melancholy more than mournful, somewhat cinematic both through the obvious resonances of the strings & the sense of summing-up & fading out: a ‘real’ end to this picture-show…

Of course, I realise that it’s impossible for a text to remain ‘innocent,’ that any art work is ripe for investing with meaning by this or that reader. I guess I’d want to say that Paul’s comments are just that, though – a *reading*, and as such represent an *opinion* (and, from reading around the writings relating to this album, it’s not even remotely a consensual one at that). To criticise this piece of music for being merely ‘middle class’ background music for people to distract themselves with, for being insufficiently rigorous or risk-taking, may be tenable from a certain ideological position, but if such a position were to be consistently applied, it would write off a whole swathe of the kind of contemporary electronic music presented on disquiet (esp. in the Ambient genre – a soft target for its ambiguous disengagement, from the vantage point of Paul’s Class War) and other like-minded sites as works for the idle pleasure-seeking listener to soundtrack his/her decadent middle class lives.

In re: ambient, I know it’s only middle class background music, but I like it…

There’s a gap between the specificity, the meaning, of words (even mine at my most overly poetic and associative) and the unformed sounds (even at their most rhythmically succinct).

For me, writing about the abstraction is an expression of its beauty. And when it falls short, when it isn’t beautiful, it’s an expression of frustration with contrivance, or disappointment about lack of follow-through.

Don’t hesitate to focus on what is pleasurable. To discuss it here is to share those impressions in writing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwV5Sqlhlgc

- and later here -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMITpOaKQHc

- with nary an oversized rabbit (but plenty of tight pants and kick drums) to be found on stage. Not that Richter is up to punk any more than he and his merry band of players are taking their Karlheinz straight, without at least a Czukay-Schmidt or a Hutter-Schneider chaser (and I think a grain or more of salt), but I cannot help thinking that he is having some fun with us, as I certainly am with his lovely little record. I remain convinced, as was Jimmy Stewart, that the only thing to do when the big rabbit appears is to have a few drinks with him.

Plus, it always seems to me that the issue with appraisal is first to figure out what sort of a something something is, and then to see whether it’s a good version of that something.

Even then, if we want to say that we want music to simply be decorative, then that already gives the game away, and we’re already in the territory of middle class background music, which is almost always marked by the triumph of taste over risk-taking.

Which is fine, if that’s what you like; but when we’re appraising a work, I’m going to be comfy marking down anything that’s just middle class background music (as opposed to, say, the working class background music of club classics, which we might also mark down if it doesn’t transcend its place in the world).

Although for me, your middle class thingie is usually going to be less interesting, because its goal is to reassure rather than challenge; and that’s exactly what I feel with Alphabet 1968 (which, like I say, is a title that has a whiff of dangerous rigor about it that it fails to live up to).

The other thing is that I felt that, regardless of the sensuous pleasure of parts of the record, I’d exhausted the ideas in the record the first time I paid real attention to it. Again, I found it straddling the uncomfortable space between listening music and ambient, and not really living up to either mode.

A bit like Dead Cities by Future Sound, then.