Disquiet

This is the [second one-chord piece](https://disquiet.com/2016/05/02/a-chord-made-of-cassette-tape/) of music this week on Disquiet.com, the third and counting if you include [the week’s Junto project](https://disquiet.com/2016/05/05/disquiet0227/). What’s going on in this orchestrally grand, yet intimately performed piece, is that guitarist Andy Othling is passing a single chord — as identified in the title, “Sketch #44 – Drone in B Major (05.05.16)” — through an array of effects and in the process producing a gorgeous, shimmery dawn-break flood of atmospheric splendor. What’s great about a performance video like this one is you can observe the thinking process, the gestures that lead to the exaggerated sound, the manner in which small touches yield vast expanses. In the video, long stretches pass during which Othling barely touches his guitar at all, and he probably touches the guitar and his effects in equal amounts. He is, in a manner, as much the audience for the work as he is the producer of the work.

Video originally published at [youtube.com](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTbnc9xRWDQ&app=desktop). It’s the latest piece I’ve added to my ongoing YouTube playlist of fine [“Ambient Performances.”](https://disquiet.com/2016/04/30/a-youtube-playlist-of-ambient-performances/) More from Othling, who is based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, at [music.lowercasenoises.com](http://music.lowercasenoises.com/).

This weekend I introduced a new playlist on YouTube. Titled [“Ambient Performances,”](https://disquiet.com/2016/04/30/a-youtube-playlist-of-ambient-performances/) it’s slowly amassing a collection of videos of people playing ambient music live. There’s an interesting tension there — several tensions, really. The main one, perhaps, is that ambient music often supposes stasis, while performance suggests activity. The videos I’m focusing the playlist on explore the activity required to achieve a semblance of stasis — the motion necessary to give the effect of immobility, you might say. Now, all music takes place over time, so it’s false to suggest ambient music is truly still. What ambient music is is more still than other forms of sonic expression.

This piece, by the Austin, Texas”“based Amulets, is a great example of what the “Ambient Performances” playlist is all about. To begin with, it adheres to the two main rules of the playlist:

>Rule #1: I’m only including recordings I’d listen to without video.
>
>Rule #2: I’m only including recordings where the video gives some sense of a correlation between what the musician is doing and what the listener is hearing.

What Amulets is up to in the piece is engaging, even as the music being produced provides a sense of disengagement. As described in the brief text accompanying the video, what Amulets has done is record four notes that make up a chord, each note assigned to a different track on the four-track recorder. He then effects change on each of those notes separately as the tape plays. The result is, as he puts it, “a droning, evolving, ambient soundscape.” I recommend using the [listenonrepeat.com](https://listenonrepeat.com/?v=XJe44XCrvyE#TASCAM_4_TRACK_CASSETTE_RECORDER_-_AMBIENT_TAPE_LOOP_DRONE_IN_E) service to, indeed, play it on repeat.

Video originally posted at [youtube.com](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJe44XCrvyE). More from Amulets, aka Randall Taylor of Austin, Texas, at [amulets.bandcamp.com](https://amulets.bandcamp.com/), [synthhacker.blogspot.com](http://synthhacker.blogspot.com/2014/02/cassette-tape-loop.html), and [soundcloud.com/amulets](https://soundcloud.com/amulets).