Ambient music has never been popular among sufferers of Attention Deficit Disorder, save, perhaps, as a sonic Ritalin. Witness the seamless, hours-long consonance of such genre favorites as Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon and Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works. Then again, techy British DJ the Black Dog has never been one to play by the rules. His recent Music for Adverts (And Short Films) (Warp) is packed with two baker’s dozen worth of cuts (that’s 26), each a mere few minutes in length. Some are a bit rapid-fire and dynamic to count as ambient, but for the most part Adverts is a patchwork of temporary static fields, almost a swatch book for sonic decorators.
Originally published in epulse 2.30, date: September 6, 1996