(June 2009) If Kompakt’s annual new-year gift, the Pop Ambient compilation, is intended to act as a State-of-the-Art of Ambient review, then 2009’s installment signals more of a sea change than ever in Ambient’s usually calm waters. You’ll know more or less what to expect if you’ve been around here before. The Pop Ambient ethos is not one of pop or ambient – except in the sense of a kind of suture of popular classical in ambient (cf. in dub). But this paradigm is certainly tilted here. See it in the inclusion of some new non-Kompakt artists (hello, Tim Hecker, Sylvain Chauveau, The Fun Years), and a clearout of the old guard (b’bye, Markus Guentner, Ulf Lohmann). Hear it in the overall shift in mood/tone colour. Sure, Kompakt’s comps have never sought the insipid dolphin-dalliances and crystal-communings associated with commodified Ambient, but PA2009 seems even more inimical to blithe relaxation, more steeped in a kind of blue than ever before.
The blue keynote is sounded by the “True Enemies and False Friends” of enduring Pop-Ambienteer, Klimek, with a colour-drained micro-symphony, who washes grandiloquent orchestral loops and basstones in a faded mercury of sulky horns. Equally downbeat is Kompakt curator, Wolfgang Voigt, turning, GAS-bored, to his MINT, a guise under which he re-constitutes some ghostly Paul Hindemith timbres, like some Satie seeping, creaking, through pitch-shifted tremors of woodwind-wooze, and spectral swoops. The twinkling of JÃ1/4rgen Paape’s “Ausklang” is draped, dewy-eyed, in yesterday’s tinsel by Burger/Voigt. Their own “Frieden” is even better – aqueous pads oozing through echo-spaces teeming with Brownian textur[e]motion. Vying for the robes left by Markus Guentner and Ulf Lohmann are late pretenders, Popnoname and Andrew Thomas. The former douses “Nightliner” in a gorgeous stretched out haze of synth-twinkle, an opiate headswim lent weight by a deliberate four-note bass figure, while The Fearsome Jeweller spools out “A Dream Of A Spider,” a beguilingly ambiguous mood piece of submerged piano and droning keys tilted this way and that, buffeted by strange low-end thrummings. Another lately Kompakted entrant, Marsen Jules, channels hypnagogue pads from his ever-twilit virtual orchestra, crackling strings wafting like frayed gossamer through the crepuscular caverns of “It’s Only Castles Burning.”
Among the new recruits, everybody’s favourite ambient-noise-postrock peripatetic, Tim Hecker, checks in briefly with a glacial episode of abrasive bitcrushed post-Kosmische; “Shosts in Silver” lets fragments of piano recital drift into soft squalls, slowly swelling into waves breaking over scarred terrain. Debutantes, The Fun Years, inject new flavours with “I Am Speaking Through Barbara,” making the most of the recursion of a gruzzy post-rock guitar figure, sweeping it back and forth, ramping and mussing it up with distortion and delay, fragments of voice and captured audio-detritus. A somewhat redundant addition, though, is Type-ist, Sylvain Chauveau, who contributes two pieces already aired on his Nuage full-length – “Fly Like a Horse” and “Nuage III” being equal parts ho-hum classical chamberism and humdrum laptop-folk pensiveness.
Finally, Klimek turns up to bring proceedings to a suitably symmetrical close, “The Godfather (For William Basinski and Snoop Dogg)” all threads of resonating guitar, chiming and reverberating in granular glory, gesturing to Dark Ambient, while shunning its gloomy embrace. This and other stand-out tracks here remind that the most compelling aspect of ambient is a sort of suggestive ambiguity – an internal duality, arising from the blurring of binaries, the dark playing at the edges of a plane of light, and PA2009 seems more about those edges. Not so much Near Dark as The Big Uneasy.
Pop Ambient 2009 is out now on Kompakt. [Purchase
