Pop Ambient 2010
Like Christmas, the Pop Ambient series from the Cologne-based label Kompakt label comes around once a year. And, like Christmas, the joy and warm sentiment one feels from its arrival is more than enough to make up for any ill-thought-out or repeat gifts. It’s just nice being with music that loves you.
The 10th installment in the series is a merry lot indeed. There’s a very high quality ratio here, which is all the more impressive given that the cast of characters are a host of familiar (and also rapidly aging) faces. Thomas Fehlmann, The Orb, and Pop Ambient demiurge/Kompakt co-founder Wolfgang Voigt have all been making music for well on 20 years now, but it is Voigt whose shadow much of the work in the series seems to be standing in the shadow of. Voigt’s 2000 album as Gas, titled Pop, sought to seek a bridge across the lacuna formed between ambient, which had disintegrated by that point into near obsolescence through its disintegration of all form and tonal color, and pop. In a sense, the Pop Ambient discs are an extension of that project, as well as a catalogue of trends and approaches from within the ambient scene.
Yet, Pop Ambient 2010 offers only one newcomer into the fold, the rightly celebrated Brock Van Wey (also known as Bvdub), whose two superb releases from 2009, White Clouds Drift On and On and We Were the Sun were among the year’s very best. Van Wey has a style that can only justly be described as Sirkian. He is unafraid of powerful emotional melodrama rendered in lushly washed-out strings and ethereal sirenic chants, which places him in an uncomfortably close proximity to new age piddle. Yet, if there is chakra involved, it’s just a lighting effect. The yoga’s a breathing exercise to slow your heartbeat to Van Wey’s rhythms and the mandalas are so intensely gorgeous that you are utterly entranced for whatever ridiculous length of time any given tune is. Also, unlike new age and much ambient music, Van Wey’s music is not meant to soothe. Contra to this, it can actually be intense.
All 17 minutes of We Were the Sun’s "Will You Know Where to Find Me" feature at the end of Pop Ambient 2010 and, though it’s a replay of a prior work, it’s the album’s finest moment. This is not a condemnation though, because the track’s in good company. Voigt’s own "Zither Und Horn" is a highlight. Its uncharacteristically lazy pastoral strumming and warm atmospherics recall a combination of Cluster’s music box lyricism on Soweisoso and a drunken take on the aquatic country twang of Brian Eno’s "Deep Blue Day".
Though Voigt’s influence is immeasurable, a surprise stimulus recurs in the form of Slowdive’s 15-year-old Pygmalion, whose vital alterity and droney dubless aerations can be traced in Bvdub’s "Lest We Forget", Mikkel Metal’s "Blue Items", and, shockingly enough, The Orb’s "Glen Coe". The rest of the tracks do well embracing their own bright flutters and twitchy hums, all while fitting into the album’s gelatinous anti-arch.
Perhaps, the least successful are those tracks which reject the Bvdub recipe of art therapy gushing. Frequent Pop Ambient contributor Marsen Jules opens the album with a series of unpredictable textural experiments glued together into a single track, which feel a bit too arcane to be a proper lead in for Bvdub’s "Lest We Forget". Dettinger’s first major release in 10 years rides a simple gentle scuttle, but its change-ups are so subtle that one may not feel it’s going anywhere at all. It’s almost like Dettinger, a major player in Kompakt’s early years, got stuck in this loop in 2000 and is just now working his way out. These are not bad tracks, mind you. They’re just feel either a bit out-of-place, or maybe too permanently fixated in their place.
The promise of the gradual crescendo of Bvdub’s epic "Will You Know Where to Find Me," though, assures that ambient, even in 2010, is going places. A subject is only in stasis when it could potentially move at any point, when the restriction of momentum carries with it the possibility of violent alteration or expansion. The reason Van Wey’s music is so important to the genre is that it fulfills what the regular stasis of the music alludes to, but seems reluctant to branch towards a future. It may never be something you’ll hear next to Lady Gaga, but it does sound somewhat like a distant latent dream of pop.
Did I forget to mention how achingly beautiful it is too?
by Various Artists
Label: Kompakt Germany. Release Date: February 2, 2010. Price: $16.98. ASIN: B00307BEZ0
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