HELP WANTED

getting into pretentious music: noise, ambient, and classical

Okay, The Cure series is going to get finished, I promise, I'm just... writing about other things right now, all right? I'm not sure how popular the series on The Cure was to begin with, but it does feel somewhat unfinished without covering their final four albums. That being said, I am still a bit Cured Out, which will happen when you listen to nothing but The Cure for about two months straight. Following that up with about three weeks of nothing but Alkaline Trio--which didn't quite burn me out on that band, but threatened to do so--resulted mostly in me wanting to re-diversify my listening habits.

And while I've definitely still been listening to rap and heavy shit--I've really been into ICECOLDBISHOP and Anti-God Hand lately--I also, as longtime readers know, struggle with finding time to listen to abrasive music because so much of the time that would have previously been assigned to music is spent on the clock at a public-facing portion of my job, and there's only so many times I can go back to the reliable standbys like Loveless, The Meadowlands, Endtroducing..., Kind of Blue, If You're Feeling Sinister, Aphex Twin, the Twin Peaks score, and various video game soundtracks. (Listen, it's either these, whatever "lo-fi cozy rainy cafe" word salad 10-hour loop my coworkers find on YouTube, or the radio, which nobody wants.)

This was part of the driving reason for my attempting to get into ambient. Another part of it is that ambient (and to an even greater extent, noise, and in a different form factor, classical) have always felt like my biggest barriers against becoming a Real Music Appreciator. I've long had a chip on my shoulder about these genres in general, and noise in particular, because of my inability to access what made them compelling.

The disconnect here is, I think, a fundamental misunderstanding of what the purpose of this music is. I generally listen to music that feels, for lack of a better word, eventful. I like when things happen in the songs I listen to, when things build and coalesce towards a sonic goal, or at least feel like there is an aspect of catharsis. Hell, I like songs, not necessarily "movements" or "pieces." ("Compositions" is debatable.) Ambient and noise... aren't about that. They're primarily about texture and they're not necessarily built to "pay attention to," and as a severely ADHD person, it was difficult for me to "figure out" a genre that wasn't trying to actively overstimulate me. (You could argue noise is all about overstimulation, but I honestly disagree.) Maybe it's the lack of a traditional rhythm section or percussion--it deprives me of something to hold on to. I desperately tried to get into the early Eno masterpieces, but to no avail.

But! Against all odds, it ssssort of feels like I have been succeeding lately. As I mentioned in my UFOm writeup last month, there's been a few on-ramps that have made a big dent for me. I've heard arguments as to whether or not Aphex Twin and Autechre count as ambient. I'm really not sure, but I do love both artists quite a bit, particularly Autechre, whose alien soundscapes provide a very comfy background for typing. For my purposes, I'm going to say "no" today, but I can't deny that they helped lay the groundwork. But for me the patient zero was, appropriately, Blood Incantation's Timewave Zero, which I listened to while walking in between my two work offices, and its cinematic, controlled, purposeful qualities really captured me.

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-xoxo, Ellie