Disquiet

It will not be surprising that sometimes the most enticing ambient music is made with the most minimal elements. No phalanx of gear and patch cables, no state-of-the-art computer running multiple programs in unison, no battery of controllers offering gestural interfaces to the musician. Just a combination of tape loop and a small number of effects — that is all it takes for Fahmi Mursyid, of Bandung, Indonesia, to usher the listener into a lush, artfully circumspect zone of sonic density.

“I discovered that the most interesting music of all was made by simply lining the loops in unison, and letting them slowly shift out of phase with other” — that quote from the minimalist composer Steve Reich introduces the video on YouTube, where Mursyid has posted a live recording of the track’s performance, simply titled “Ambient / Drone : Tape Loops Experiment.” In it, a looper allows Mursyid to layer segments of the tape, though never so much that the desolate quietude of its opening instance is ever fully lost.

This is the latest video I’ve added to my YouTube playlist of recommended live performances of ambient music. Video originally posted at Mursyid’s YouTube channel back in October 2017. More from Fahmi Mursyid at ideologikal.bandcamp.com.

Don’t take Alan Dear’s working title for this live performance as a requirement for expert ears, or for music-technology expertise, for that matter. The piece may be titled (“reuma – ambient eurorack w/mutable instruments rings, morphagene and Bastl microgranny”) primarily after the technology employed to make it, but the deluge of that information has no parallel to the sheer, evocative simplicity of what transpires in the track’s duration. It measures just under six minutes, but the time is also meaningless, because you’re almost certainly going to want to set it on loop.

What transpires is sonic dust, frayed bits of noise, all petal crunches and mote sways. It’s expressly gentle, a choreography for shadows and silhouettes. The video itself is a document of automation. What happens is the result of communication between devices. Toward the end, the camera cuts in close to focus the eye, but there is no human present, except behind the lens, and in advance of the performance. Someone set these sounds in motion. Someone — Alan Dear, of course — set the clocks for the filters and effects. Someone foresaw the interaction between elements. But at some point, that someone let go, and let the machines do their thing.

This is the latest video I’ve added to my YouTube playlist of recommended live performances of ambient music. Video originally posted at youtube.com. More from Alan Dear at instagram.com/dearalanmusic and, soon, one hopes, at dearalan.bandcamp.com, where Dear’s debut album is due to appear. The YouTube video’s accompanying note says “late 2018” for the album’s release.

This 30-minute segment of Nicklas Lundberg shows the musician milking noise from a sizable, jam-packed metal suitcase, opened like the maw of a giant mechanical fish and filled to both its mirror-twin brims with all manner of CD players, keyboards, cellphones, controllers, and countless other gadgets, many of which aren’t immediately associated – and this is sort of the point — with the production of sound. The music those things are summoned to produce is a rolling churn of glittering murk, of vibrating flotsam, random tools recycled into a semi-portable one-person orchestra. It’s a bit like a sonic equivalent to the dappled video projection that washes over Lundberg for the majority of the performance, except at several times the speed. Where the visual dappling is placid, serene, the sonic dappling is madcap, a chaotic flux that has no core pattern and yet provides a sense of continuity in its constant motion.

Video originally posted to the YouTube channel of Powcademy, more from which at instagram.com/powcademy.tv.