Ambient Music Blog

Links, discussion, commentary, and reviews of Ambient music.


WSJ.com Interview w/ Fennesz

Posted on | January 30, 2009 | No Comments

Mixing Melody With Noise
“The lines are too obvious and too much on a stage. I like things which are more hidden and not so easy to find.”

Read the full interview at WSJ.com

Christian Fennesz Interview

Posted on | December 31, 2008 | No Comments

fennesz

“I still find a wall of distorted guitar sounds extremely interesting, and that’s why I’m still using it.”

A really nice interview with Christian Fennesz just before the release of his recent Black Sea album.

eMusic Q&A: William Basinski

Posted on | December 30, 2008 | No Comments

“And then I moved to San Francisco in 1978 and heard Brian Eno’s Music for Airports playing in my friend’s art studio, and that just totally blew my mind and took me to this melancholic place where I felt like, this is what I want to go after.”

eMusic Q&A: William Basinski

Grab 25 free downloads from eMusic if you don’t already have an account!

The Solaris Project Discusses Their Work

Posted on | December 24, 2008 | No Comments

Interesting video of Igor Abuladze and Travis Metcalf talking about their The Solaris Project record. Passed along by the always helpful Andy (no relation) Boyd.

Fennesz Interview at Last.fm

Posted on | December 18, 2008 | No Comments

Eno – The Studio As Compositional Tool

Posted on | October 30, 2008 | No Comments

Which puts me in mind of the first piece on Music For Airports (Editions EG). I had four musicians in the studio, and we were doing some improvising exercises that I’d suggested. I couldn’t hear the musicians very well at the time, and I’m sure they couldn’t hear each other, but listening back, later, I found this very short section of tape where two pianos, unbeknownst to each other, played melodic lines that interlocked in an interesting way. To make a piece of music out of it, I cut that part out, made a stereo loop on the 24-track, then I discovered I liked it best at half speed, so the instruments sounded very soft, and the whole movement was very slow. I didn’t want the bass and guitar – they weren’t necessary for the piece – but there was a bit of Fred Frith’s guitar breaking through the acoustic piano mic, a kind of scrape I couldn’t get rid of. Usually I like Fred’s scrapes a lot, but this wasn’t in keeping, so I had to find a way of dealing with that scrape, and I had the idea of putting in variable orchestration each time the loop repeated. You only hear Fred’s scrape the first time the loop goes around.

from Downbeat, 1979

Interview with Drew Sullivan of Slow Dancing Society

Posted on | August 11, 2008 | No Comments

I’ve always loved the idea of music that has a function or purpose.

Depending on what you mean by “purpose”, I can’t say I disagree. According to one of my favorite literary theory professors from undergrad, this places Mr. Sullivan firmly on the Augustine side of the great Kant vs. Augustine divide.

Me, I like to slide around depending on, oh, I don’t know. Never really figured it out.

This post courtesy of Ambient Music Blog’s number one, long time reader Dave P. Yo, Dave!

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