13 :: ambient structures ::
[posted 12/01/00]
He is listening to the Toral disc that he bought last week. The TCM-454VK sits on the table in front of him. Next to a selection of stones. He holds an Evidence legal pad filled with jottings, flips through, looking for the notes on Toral that he's taken before. He listens. Like the other Cyclorama Lift pieces, this one is made from feedback. As Toral himself has explained it: It's performed with an empty circuit, basically a feedback loop using as main instruments two 8-second delays and a 4-band parametric equalizer. There's no input, the loop is constantly nourishing and digesting itself. The circulating sound is electronic resonance. The tones buzz and hum. —Hum, he says into the TCM-454VK.
He's planning to review this record for his website. He's maintained a drone music site for about a year now—it's simple, really, mostly just a collection of reviews of new drone albums, links to the websites of the labels that release those recordings. Janine taught him most of the HTML he needed in a single day. Stretching, she ran her hands up the back of her neck, lifting her black hair for a moment before letting it drop back. A quiet polygon of pale skin.
He shakes his head and returns to the listening. He thinks about Portugal, where Toral is from. What is it about Portugal that would make someone produce this kind of music? All music is cultural; he believes that. You can see this if you examine the music that has evolved in isolated cultures, music produced by the inhabitants of islands, like Japan. Where his parents were born. (He tries for a moment to imagine them there: he has never been there himself, so he has to place them into the Japanese environments that American media has provided him with. A room with ricepaper walls. Tokyo's blistering electronic landscape. Neither of these seem right, and he abandons the experiment.)
But he knows Portugal is no island, even though he's not exactly sure where in Europe it is. He flips through the pad's pages: somewhere in there are felt-tipped pen maps of the continents of the world: he traced them from an atlas, wanting to follow the movements of music around the globe. So: why Portugal?
Perhaps it has something to do with planes. Toral has gone on record as saying he loves planes, and Thomas knows that a plane is a droning device, acoustically-speaking. He suddenly wants data on the flightpaths over Portugal; he wonders if the Web can help him with that. But this album, Cyclorama Lift, does not sound like a plane. This piece— part three —is different from parts two and four; when those other parts were released he had wondered why this one was skipped and now he sees: this one sounds more organic, wetter: at points it sounds like holding your ear to a drain as water travels through it.
—More bloopy, he says into the TCM-454VK.
He thinks momentarily about his college roommate, Derek, the guy who first introduced him to weird music: he remembers getting stoned and listening to the Talking Heads, Remain In Light, with its strange narratives about shifting faces and losing yourself in the new formations of the world around you. Together that they discovered the albums of Brian Eno, and those albums— documents of self-generating ambient structures —led Thomas to discover the music he listens to today. Derek is now married, he works for a consulting company down in the Loop: they still get together every once in a while, but it has been a long time since Thomas and his friend have sat down and listened to something and asked together: what could make this music?
And you may ask yourself : what is that beautiful house?
Thomas listens, and he remembers something he read somewhere: a story told by the synthesizer player Keith Emerson. He claimed that Jimi Hendrix once told him that the two of them both played the same instrument: the speaker.
Cyclorama Lift does not sound like a plane, it sounds like a stereo.
The smooth stones are arranged on the table. The TCM-454VK records everything. SONY. Clear Voice.
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