Great Ambient Music (one)
Some music stays with you forever.
Evening Star is a work of aching beauty at times. Using their own techniques of recording, Robert Fripp and Brian Eno, cooled the tone after ‘No Pussyfooting’ which was an altogether spikier affair. This time they embraced the fullness of ambience and allowed the music to guide itself with cynicism kept at bay enabling pastoral, very English pieces to emerge.
Using Frippertronics, (an early form of looping using a looping length of recording tape on which the sound decayed over repeated playing enabling an ever evolving soundscape) along with Eno’s synthesisers, the backgrounds were created with solos played by eno on ‘Wind on Wind’ and Fripp on ‘Evening Star’ for example.
I recently came across this absolute gem of small group of classical musicians performing the title track using Cellos to replicate the lead parts and although the film is poor quality, the sound is good and it’s just gorgeous – link
What are we up to?
Bev and Me have been toying with these ambient music ideas for several years now. It’s about time we acted upon them. We are both in the band Shadow Factory and enjoy ourselves hugely within the Jazz/Rock framework. But we also want to investigate a more relaxed, chilled style. A playing of music where soundscapes are generated without agenda, other than to just ‘be’.
As a form of explanation,
I have been a follower of ambient music since the 1970’s and fell asleep to Frippertronics, Satie, Tangerine Dream, Bill Nelson and others many many times. The requirement to pay absolute attention is removed and the opportunity to rest or to follow one’s own thoughts take over. The rough live sample tracks currently on our home page are slightly ‘lively’ but we are trying to sell ourselves after all. We sat down and played to a zoom hand recorder and just played a few tracks – so it should give an idea of what we sound like.
Future Music
There will be more to come and three or four properly recorded songs are nearly ready at which point we will make them available to download from this new site.