Lets get ambient…

An intense week heading into the holidays. Time for the year in review maybe or maybe not.

It’s been a trip of  a year  this year. I put on a suit for the first time in over 35 years. This was at the request of my mother and meant I had to go buy one, M&S sufficed to provide me with a passable semblance of respectability and a long period of thought about the conventions we are forced to conform to. At times I looked around to see people wearing clothes they were not comfortable in to honor another person. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why we do it other than that’s what we always do.

I’ve been pretty much standing still since June in many ways. Rolling around on my tractor, mowing the dreaded blackberries and just hanging out in the country. Me and the dog have walked every inch of the property we can get to over the last couple of months and even made it out to the mythical logging road beyond the boundary. Signs of coyote and other critters around, mainly seen by their poop.

I was going to do one of those end of year lists but this year more than others has been a meander through things old and new without a sense of direction and I really am not good at those lists.

So I flew back to get my mum to come hang out for Christmas with her grandchildren and to meet her first great grandchild, This has bee a joyous thing to see.

I basically flew to the UK with Brian Eno’s Ambient albums in my ears for the 12,000 miles or so round trip. I am thinking that the constantly shifting and repeating and ever changing music on the 4 Ambient albums are a perfect representation of where I am at right now. Sitting still and yet forever shifting and changing and reconfiguring to meet the needs of the day, afternoon, moment. I am particularly attracted to Ambient 4 On Land, this is perhaps the darkest of the ambient albums and for that reason the most contemplative, mixing natural and found sounds, synthesizers and conventional instruments. It is often as if the melody or overtone is in conflict with what is going on under the surface of the music, maybe this is what is drawing me in right now.