ambient>birth>ambient/life>death>ambient

A basic premise: the only right that nature in any way grants every human is sovereignty over the internal experience, the imagination, your inner life. Ambient music and chillout culture is one of the first to build directly on this typically overlooked foundation. The grip of politics, religions, dominating cultures, all the usual narcissistic horseshit we've yet to fully evolve beyond, all loosen their grip with repeated exposure to the undifferentiated states evoked in these environments. A typical criticism of ambient is that it is anti-social, self-absorbed, and unconstructive, as opposed to the lemming activities marketed to us. In actuality, it is one of the only opportunities to experience ourselves fully, without restriction. The collective experience of these ongoing exposures is as powerful a civilizing force as I've encountered, and it doesn't even require any dogma or administrators.

Many of the folks active in the ambient scene gradually and privately came to remarkably similar realizations. Ego and self has come to be seen as rather a dead end, though what is to come after is not yet fully known. Much of this has been unarticulated and is still rather young in us; we are trying to bring it all into better focus however we can. Our parties reflect this: no spotlight on the DJ, installations and different stuff all over the place, everybody participating: no altar.

Rock and Roll is extinct: the wailing white boy in front of a microphone is a worthless phenomenon, go find a barrier to pose against and complain about. Hip-hop was some of the finest experimental music when it first came out, all edge and no center, total cut-up collage, but has become a sorry stupid caricature of its most easily-commodfied elements, adamantly non-progressive, baseless arrogance, what a total waste. Jazz has long been an academic soporific with minimal blood or passion, elevator music, nice with pasta. Classical has its head up its ass; there is no essential recognition of right and wrong to be found anywhere in nature, and the whole vacuous high culture game is so played. Vibrant exceptions to these generalizations, from all periods of history, will always be available, but they are far outnumbered by supporting examples.

Exceptional ambient (as opposed to the pretty stuff, which is closer to New Age, and nearly useless to me) is distinguishable from almost any other music that has come before, in that "music" is typically about some central place or truth, given form via a model of "expression" of "meaning"- the presence of the author or the performer is inescapable, and the song refers mostly to itself and its vocabulary, and as such serves to confirm and reiterate existing ways of seeing, to the exclusion of other possibilities. Ambient (by ambient I refer to so many things, including deep dub, slamming acid techno, better jungle, and extreme noise, anything meant to seduce or slam you into a weird trip) is purely itself, raw sounds and texures, referring to no other thing, and as such paradoxically creates a strong velocity away from itself, by refusing to suck the listener into a defined set of meanings.

If human culture is to advance to the next level, which step may be the most significant paradigm shift in many generations, these ideas must become commonplace. Much other development has been imposed from without, based on either current understandings of material science or political/religious media chicanery. This next phase of growth, if it comes, will be the first that comes consciously and deliberately.

Tuning into your own senses is a powerful political act.

some more remarks on ambient, from around 95