Metronomica.blog
taylor deupree’s ‘ash’ is pretty stunning
I’ll admit — while I certainly traffic in ambient music, I don’t always listen to it. Or, I don’t listen to a lot of it, at once. My brain simply too fractured to sit still and luxuriate in the intricacies of a drone, or gently looping guitar line. My attention span is broken just enough. I need to be listening to music while doing something else, and then wait for the music to force me to focus.
This isn’t, like, good, but I’ll work on it some other time. In the meantime, I’ll work on some auxiliary hobby (researching how to improve my candles’ hot throw? Sure!) while some ultra-emotional blackgaze crescendos in the background.
Or I’ll listen to Taylor Deupree’s “Ash”, which came out today. It’s an ambient EP; the third in a trilogy (following “Eev and”Aer.”) It’s stunning in a way that forces me to pay attention.
You hear the EP’s namesake early and often. “Ash,” as I hear it, is the noise that forms the basis of each track, falling quietly to the earth like snow. While pianos plink around in the background, comforting layers of aleatoric sound foreground themselves. Have you ever appreciated the fact that the air conditioner was blasting, creating a bed of low-level volume, pushing away the creepy quiet? This is like that.
It’s been a while since I listened to ambient with such a beautiful sense of place and purpose. The album cover features a cabin in the snow, I think, but it’s obscured by grays and specks of dirt on the lens. It feels foggy and half-remembered, and so does the music. Without the ever-present noise, ebbing and flowing but always around, this is the kind of ambient I’d probably make, honestly. Keys and electronic blips entering and exiting at pseudo-random. It’d be nice. But there wouldn’t be any ash.
// tags: listening