“A step into the brainspace of those kooks and weirdos of times past, the active choice of taking two hours plus to enjoy this preposterous, untethered loveliness, feels like a genuinely subversive musical act.”
It’s hard for me not to get over excited about the current increasing interest in immersive, beat-free music – because ambient was my punk rock. I’m not even joking: I was 15, and nicely stoned, when I heard the first Orb Peel Session on the radio, and it was one of those rare moments in life when all the rules changed. Just as with punk, it felt like everything was up for grabs, and music could be made however you wanted it to be. And throughout my life, whether it was laying sparked out on a beanbag in Megatripolis at Heaven with a brain machine clamped to my face (yeah and what?), or pinned to my seat in the Barbican by the fractal sublime of Wolfgang Voigt’s Gas audiovisual show, ambient music has provided the most intense and stimulating musical moments of my life. Yes, stimulating. There’s a qualitative difference in experience in listening to music that’s incredibly slow.
Originally published by FACT.Read the full review on FACT