The Sound of Embodied Security

While writing this book, I was living close to Shuto Route 3, one of the elevated highways crisscrossing Tokyo. Route 3 begins in Shibuya and runs to the southwest through Setagaya Ward, forming the first leg of the road to Nagoya. The highway was built around the time of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics to bring traffic quickly in and out of the city.1 The location was convenient, but walking on the street underneath the raised highway was far from pleasant. Despite the noise-dampening sidewalls, the sounds of heavy traffic above readily bounced off the tall buildings on either side of the highway, blending with the engine sounds of the equally busy road down below (Figure 3). To be under Route 3 was to be sunk into a flood of traffic noise. This automobile roar masked the presence of both myself and others. It was difficult to hear oncoming bicycles, nearby conversation, and even the sound of my own footsteps. While these elements of the soundscape usually play an important role in helping to situate the self in relation to the surrounding space and the other people in it, under the weight of the highway noise this acoustic horizon was effectively obliterated.2

When I first moved to the area, this massive roar of noise from above felt heavy and oppressive. When walking in the neighborhood, I took side streets to avoid Route 3 as much as possible, although since many of the major train stations and facilities in the area were along the main road this was not always feasible. Then, one day, I happened to walk down the busy street while listening to ambient music on a pair of headphones. I had the music turned low so as not to be completely oblivious to the sounds around me, including the frequent bicyclists swerving around pedestrians on the sidewalk. After about forty minutes of walking, I was surprised to discover I had arrived at Shibuya faster than expected and without the usual fatigue from spending time on the noisy road.

What had happened? I realized the music, even at low volume, had effectively transformed my relation to the existing environment, regularizing its rhythms and softening its contours by sifting it through the music streaming at low volume through my headphones. As John-Paul Thibaud writes in his ethnography of the Walkman, headphone listening in urban space serves to filter other parts of the soundscape: “The walking listener uses it not only to protect himself from the sonic aggressions of the city but also to filter and enhance events. . . . The sound volume of the Walkman is used in order to listen to or mask conversations, bells ringing, children’s screams, traffic noise, and so forth.” With the help of the music, listeners can selectively ignore particular parts of the existing soundscape, shifting foreground elements into the background.3

Under the music’s influence, I could hear the highway not as an endless roar of combustion engines and scraping tires but as something closer to the relaxing sound of waves breaking on the seashore—a sound acoustically similar to the indirect echoes of the raised highway but with emotional associations far more calming in effect. The ambient mediation eased my habitual antipathy toward the traffic noise, turning it instead into something almost peaceful. Paired with ambient music, my walks under the raised highway were almost—almost but not quite—enjoyable.

An earlier generation of acoustic ecologists would argue I was merely coping with the stresses of living in a too-noisy city, placating myself with an artificial sonic supplement rather than confronting the unlivable aspects of urban space.4 I understand these concerns, but at the same time, it is misleading to make a firm distinction between the “real” soundscape existing outside the body and the personal soundscapes unfolding in a more circumscribed space between the ears. Sounds generated by engines and reflecting off nearby walls are not necessarily more meaningful than sounds generated by small speakers vibrating as instructed by an electronic device. Seemingly more situated environmental sounds like the engine noise and the highway architecture are also the products of design, after all. There are some elements in the soundscape, however, with more immediate personal relevance: that oncoming bicyclist I need to dodge, for example, or someone yelling to get my attention before a billboard falls on my head. The music might keep me from noticing these things before it is too late. It might also, though, put me in the right frame of mind to stay observant and give me the rhythm to not lose my footing as I step out of the way.

Whereas the next chapter focuses on how ambient media modulates the rhythms of the city, this chapter focuses on a more basic process of ontological attunement: how ambient media provide imaginary sensory landscapes to filter, unify, and stabilize existing environments, much in the way I experienced while walking down Route 3. Following Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I suggest one of the key functions of ambient media is to provide an absolute background, or a unified, coherent, and stable sensory surround. The absolute background provides people with a ready-made framework for grounding their sense of ontological security. This ground is more stable than most precisely because it rests in the background of awareness, often just below the level of conscious attention. As this chapter traces, the aesthetic form of these imaginary landscapes has shifted over time, becoming gradually more abstracted as part of an ongoing struggle to remain unmarked and unnoticed.

In the chapter “The Smooth and the Striated” in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari describe ambience as an “encompassing element” rendering diverse environments homogenous: “an ambient space in which the multiplicity would be immersed and which would make distances invariant.”5 While ambience itself would seem at first to be on the side of the smooth and the flexible, in practice this slipperiness allows it to serve as a powerful mechanism for providing spatial cohesion, using atmosphere to provide a ubiquitous “interlinkage by immersion in an ambient milieu.” In other words, ambience, like neoliberalism more generally, creates a space striated at such a fine grain that it appears (and feels) smooth. Ambience ties everything together in a way that feels organic, and this feeling comes to serve as the absolute background against which all other points in space can be located:

The absolute is now the horizon or background, in other words the Encompassing Element without which nothing would be global or englobed. . . . The desert, sky, or sea, the Ocean, the Unlimited, first plays the role of an encompassing element, and tends to become a horizon: the earth is thus surrounded, globalized, “grounded” by this element, which holds it in immobile equilibrium and makes Form possible.6

This absolute background provides an organizing horizon all the more effective because it rests just outside conscious attention, providing the sense of cohesion without claiming it more directly. As Joe Milutis notes, the imagined location of this “Encompassing Element” has shifted over time, particularly as science has steadily eroded the mystery of what were once distant horizons. The frontier, the oceans, and eventually outer space all served as unknown horizons to bound more local territories, though as these too became colonized their utility as absolute backgrounds began to wane. Milutis traces a history of the gradual loss of this fantasy of a pristine frontier, leading humans to work ever harder to imagine an uncontaminated and secure horizon of cohesion still beyond their reach.7

In this chapter, I suggest one important role ambient media has played is as an aesthetic replacement for this absolute background, lending a sense of sensory cohesion to existing environments that might otherwise have little holding them together. At the same time, the history of ambient music’s imaginary landscapes also registers the ever-receding horizon of the unknown and unmarked. This chapter reads the shifting landscapes of ambient music’s sound and imagery as part of this ongoing quest for an absolute background to serve as a stable ground of embodied security.8

Entrainment

In Music in Everyday Life, Tia DeNora describes the various ways listeners use recorded music as an “entrainment” device. Not only can specific works call up particular memories and emotions within listeners, but music also provides a spatial and temporal framework for bodies to move through. Humans naturally align themselves to environmental rhythms, a practice going back to the alignment of the unborn child with its mother’s heartbeat. Developers of background music have long studied the impact of various rhythms on listening bodies, whether aimed at increased productivity or increased sales. In recent decades the practice has extended into more personal domains of self-care. DeNora describes a group aerobics class in which the rhythms provided by the steady pulse of electronic dance music aid exercisers in making it through the workout, the beats pulling their bodies into sync and buoying them through time. The book describes how contemporary listeners are increasingly turning to music for the affordances it offers in their daily lives—usually as a background stimulus to underlie an activity (exercise, study, work, relaxation) rather than as an isolated and focused listening experience.9

DeNora writes of the ways music can provide a sense of embodied security by mediating a person’s relationship with the surrounding world:

Bodily awareness of environmental properties would appear to be a pragmatic, semi-conscious, matter. It need not involve any reflection or articulation as propositional “knowledge,” though at times it also may do so. . . . The creaturely ability to locate and anticipate environmental features engenders a kind of corporeal or embodied security, by which I mean the “fitting in” or attunement with environmental patterns, fostered by a being’s embodied awareness of the materials and properties that characterize his or her environment. Embodied insecurity, by contrast, is what happens when one is unable to locate and appropriate such materials . . . unable to locate resources with or against which to “gather oneself” into some kind of organized and stable state. Embodied security involves one’s ability to fit in, or situate oneself, bodily, with an ergonomic environment.10

This perspective sees “bodily states and forms of embodied agency as produced through the body’s interaction with and abilities to appropriate environmental materials—materials that can perhaps best be understood as resources for the constitution of particular states over time and social space.”11 This mediated sensory interface between body and surrounding space emerges as a contested site in the quest for ontological security.

Evacuated Landscapes

As I experienced while using headphones on my walk under Route 3, ambient music can provide sonic landscapes for listeners to deploy as immersive environments of embodied security. References to landscape abound in writing and images surrounding the style.

Eno offers some hints about the relationship between landscape and ambient music in the liner notes to Ambient 4: On Land (1982), in which he begins using “landscape” as a figure for ambient music itself. In ambient music “the landscape has ceased to be a backdrop for something else to happen in front of; instead, everything that happens is a part of the landscape. There is no longer a sharp distinction between foreground and background.”12 Unlike the sharp foreground/background distinction maintained in BGM (as Akiyama discusses in chapter 1), ambient media seeks to undermine this kind of subject/environment duality by dissolving the subject into the surrounding space. These imaginary landscapes are, by and large, devoid of people. Eno later notes:

An aspect of this landscape concern is to do with the removal of personality from the picture. You know how different a landscape painting is when there is a figure in it. Even if the figure is small, it automatically becomes the focus—all questions of scale and depth are related to it. When I stopped writing songs I took the figure out of the landscape.13

By eliminating all forms of figural focus, ambient landscapes can better serve as impersonal topographies for listeners’ anonymous drift.

This desire for music to serve as an evacuated environment of ambient subjectivation is closely tied to the increasing mobility of contemporary listeners. Eno writes of his personal use of recorded music while living the peripatetic life of an artist constantly traveling from place to place:

I realized while I was living this nomadic life, the one thing that was really keeping me in place, or giving me a sense of place, was music. . . . We can use recordings to insert a sense of place in the various locations we end up in. They repeat identically each time—they’re reliable portable experiences.14

As noted in chapter 1, this type of ambient subjectivation differs from earlier forms of BGM in not only providing embodied security but registering the precarity of contemporary lifestyles within the textures of the music itself. Eno makes this connection explicit in his comments on creating Ambient 1. He recalls thinking a music for airports

has to have something to do with where you are and what you’re there for—flying, floating, and, secretly, flirting with death. I thought, “I want to make a kind of music that prepares you for dying—that doesn’t get all bright and cheerful and pretend you’re not a little apprehensive, but which makes you say to yourself, ‘Actually, it’s not that big a deal if I die.’ ”15

Eno here provides a classic example of how the absolute background incorporates uncertainty by rendering it calm: the music doesn’t pretend to have removed any of the actual risk of flying but is nonetheless reassuring precisely because it both acknowledges this fear and orients it toward a more impersonal and equanimous sensory horizon. Ambient music models a form of ambivalent calm not only appropriate but advantageous for a less grounded time.

The Gradual Abstraction of Ambient Style

At the same time, the ambient landscape has a history of its own. In what follows I trace how the content of these imaginary landscapes has shifted in subsequent decades. Starting from a fantasy of blissful solitude, over the years ambient styles have shaded toward the ambivalently peaceful, imbuing their absolute backgrounds with a more pervasive sense of risk and insecurity even as they have strived to keep an underlying calm.

The August 2008 “Ambient & Chill Out” special issue of Japanese music magazine Studio Voice—the seed of what would become the first of the three ambient discographies released by Japanese publishers in the past several years—puts forth a rough framework for the past three decades of ambient music worldwide.16 Beginning with Music for Airports, the editors divide ambient music history into three periods. The first is the Classic Ambient Era (1978–87), when Eno and others carved out a new genre of atmospheric music in the space between popular music and the avant-garde. In the second period, the Club Culture Era (1988–97), ambient music joined the thriving rave and club scenes, becoming the “chill-out” partner to trance, house, and other forms of electronic dance music. Finally, the editors frame 1998 to the time of publication in 2008 as the Electronica/Drone Era, in which ambient music followed the emergent electronica scene out of the club and into a context of intensive and sustained home listening. In the process ambient became more aligned with independent experimental music and its small-scale, more personalized circuits of exchange. It might be argued this tripartite division is too schematic—exceptions can easily be found in each period—but it does provide a loose structure for understanding how ambient music has reimagined its role and its landscapes over time. Building on this model and linking it to larger social transformations, I present one key ambient musician from each of these periods, showing how the ambient approach to embodied security has over time become more abstract, deterritorialized, and insecure.

Hosono Haruomi, Ambient Tourist

Hosono Haruomi (1947–) was the first Japanese artist to begin exploring ambient music as a genre. Well versed in exotica and folk music after collaborations with Van Dyke Parks and others in the late 1970s, Hosono was the first to recognize the relationship between ambient music’s imaginary landscapes and the international relaxation tourism on the rise in Japan at the time. Hosono is best known for his California-styled folk rock project Happy End (Happii endo, 1969–72) and his highly innovative electropop trio with Sakamoto Ryūichi and Takahashi Yukihiro, Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO, 1978–83).17 What is less well known is his instrumental role in introducing ambient music to Japan, serving as its primary Japanese exponent throughout the 1980s.

Hosono was introduced to Eno’s Obscure Records label (including his early 1975 protoambient release Discreet Music) by graphic artist Yokoo Tadanori, his collaborator on the India-themed psychedelic synthesizer album Cochin Moon (1978).18 He first began seriously listening to ambient music under YMO bandmate Sakamoto’s influence at the beginning of the 1980s. While Sakamoto had long been steeped in contemporary classical music, Hosono describes the early 1980s as the point where even a “pop music person” like himself began to listen to people like John Cage and Steve Reich in earnest.19 Yellow Magic Orchestra’s subsequent fourth album, BGM (1981), marked a shift to a more ambient sound. Hosono notes this was in part due to criticism of the band’s lightweight “cuteness” and partly out of a desire to embrace the new sounds coming out of Europe at the time. He looks back on the album as one of the band’s most important, a move away from their earlier Kraftwerk-style technopop and toward something more abstract and subtle.20 BGM is still a pop album, but the more abstract electronic touches running throughout mark a more atmospheric dimension to the band’s sound, particularly on “Happy End” and “Loom.” The latter track closes the album with three minutes of soft echoing synth chords and distantly dripping water that would not be out of place on one of Eno’s Ambient albums from the time.21

For Hosono the “extremely free time” (hijō ni jiyū na jikan) of Eno’s music made it an important part of his own musical self-care regimen in the early 1980s:

When the Ambient series came out, the music had a very psychological, healing effect on me, sort of like a tranquilizer. At that time YMO was doing really complicated, noisy songs, but when I came home and listened to music, I would only listen to ambient. From that point on I suddenly started going much more in that direction, playing the synthesizer on my own and going to a very private place. . . . I would put the Ambient series on auto play and let it run all day. I really listened to it as ambient music. It was incredibly refreshing. At the same time, among the so-called New Wave in London, there was a lot of this kind of thing, with musicians like Michael Nyman and the Flying Lizards. I was really influenced by this type of style. While on the one hand this was contemporary classical music through a pop filter, it also had a strong psychological pull. For me it was a really mysterious music, and other styles just couldn’t compete.22

Hosono came to ambient music as a way to afford peaceful moods in both listeners and in himself. As science writer Yoshinari Mayumi proposes in a 1984 discussion with Hosono, in the ancient past music probably first emerged as a form of therapy, a way to create spaces where people could come and feel better. In response Hosono claims the most interesting aspect of recent electronic music is the rediscovery of music’s role as an environmental healer.23

In a Euro-American context, Eno is often noted for his role in developing the music studio as a tool for creating atmospheric recordings (an approach following from the early 1970s studio experiments of Jamaican dub producers like Lee “Scratch” Perry). Hosono played an equivalent role in Japan.24 He describes the nonlinear studio production process as what allowed him to step outside the pop music scene and produce layered instrumental music as a solo artist. Hosono approached composing with a computer as a form of private “collaboration” with the machine, as the technological complexity introduced surprises into his usual compositional habits. For both Eno and Hosono, it was precisely the sculptural nonlinearity of studio composition and electronic technologies that allowed for the creation of a more private and atmospheric sound.25

In 1984, soon after Yellow Magic Orchestra disbanded, Hosono launched a series of recordings and books under the names Non-Standard and Monad (both as sublabels of Teichiku records). The Monad series became his ambient label, on which, paralleling Eno, he released a series of four ambient works: Mercuric Dance, Coincidental Music, The Endless Talking, and Paradise View (all 1985). The first is a score for an ambient video by Arai Tadayoshi; the second, a collection of Hosono’s music for television commercials; the third, music for an installation in Genova, Italy; and the fourth, a soundtrack to the eponymous film by Takamine Gō, part of the “new Okinawan cinema.” Hosono’s diverse ambient styles on these and later albums include psychedelic synth improvisations based on alchemical concepts, atmospheres inflected by traditional musics (particularly gamelan, north Indian classical music, Okinawan folk, and early Japanese music), minimalist arpeggio workouts, atmospheric dub, and field recording–based collage.

Hosono mixes Eno’s ambient influence with the exoticism of his 1970s work and infuses it with his own interest in the work of Carlos Castaneda and a wide range of indigenous cultures.26 In the book Hosono produced to announce the new labels, Globule (1984), he introduces his aspirations: “Non-standard . . . develops the ambient music started by Brian Eno to a global level and to converse with and respond to a dispatch from the earth.”27 Hosono introduces the term kankō ongaku (sightseeing music) to describe his ambient works, a pun on kankyō ongaku (environmental music)—the phrase most often used at the time to translate Eno’s “ambient music” into Japanese. With this nod to global ecotourism, Hosono strategically brought ambient music into dialogue with the emergent genre of “world music” and the larger boom in international tourism occurring in Japan in the mid-1980s. This image of the global (or “globule”) in Hosono’s mid-1980s work serves not just as a marker of ecological awareness but as an “encompassing element” of embodied security based on a planetary horizon (one striving to leave the more local insecurities of Japanese identity behind).

Marilyn Ivy has documented the rising interest in rural sites in Tōhoku (northeastern Japan) like Tōnō and Mount Osore in the 1970s, all part of a larger desire for horizons of primal mystery and folk cultures resistant to the rationalizations of modernity. The empty rural landscapes featured in Dentsū’s long-running Discover Japan domestic travel campaign transformed into more explicitly otherworldly sites with the introduction in 1984 of the Exotic Japan campaign, focused on esoteric destinations like Mount Kōya, the secluded Shingon Buddhist temple complex. Travel beyond Japan’s borders was also increasingly available as a means to engage these exotic realms. New tourist infrastructures and increasing purchasing power in the 1970s and 1980s allowed unprecedented numbers of Japanese to leave the country and explore. The mass media was eager to show the way, as in NHK’s popular Kitaro-scored series The Silk Road (1980–84, 1988–89). Hosono had just completed his own more literal forms of spiritual tourism, traveling around Japan to various religious sites as part of a project with religious studies scholar Nakazawa Shinichi (published as Kankō [Sightseeing], 1984).28 The landscapes on offer in Hosono’s ambient works move from the hazy metropoles and marshes of Eno’s early ambient recordings to embrace this “paradise view” of global tourism, offering up the imaginary atmospheres of exotic cultures for affective consumption by the urban listener.

In 1978, the same year Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports was released, Hosono collaborated with graphic artist Yokoo Tadanori on two landmark albums, the tropicalia-styled Paraiso (Alfa) and the aforementioned electro-exotica experiment Cochin Moon (King Records). The latter was the product of a trip Hosono and Yokoo made together to India, and the covers feature Yokoo’s signature collage aesthetic. The Paraiso cover (Figure 4) imagines a coastline where hula dancers, floating Buddhas, the Taj Mahal, the Manhattan skyline, a Polynesian choir, Mt. Fuji, palm trees, and cherry blossoms all come together in a single landscape. This cultural composite assumes a totality of representation, reaching all the way to the horizon. Like Eno’s Ambient series covers, these covers are cartographic in a way, but they map cultural rather than physical spaces, using images drawn from exotica, movie posters, and religion. Unlike Eno’s quasi-scientific anonymity, Yokoo’s maps draw freely from popular culture and the rapidly developing global tourism industry.

The self-consciously exoticizing approach of his 1970s tropicalia albums continued in Hosono’s subsequent ambient invocations of other cultures—particularly his use of images and sounds from Okinawan, Caribbean, Pacific Islander, South and Southeast Asian, and Native American cultures. In typically ambivalent Hosono style, this embrace of the exotic is often performed with a wink to the audience. As with Satie’s description of furnishing music (described in chapter 1), it is difficult to know how seriously Hosono intends his “sightseeing music” to be taken and how much he is simply playing with his audience.29 Like Satie and later ambient innovators the KLF (but unlike Eno), Hosono’s ambience is often tinted with a subtle sense of the parodic, noting the ridiculousness of the “paradise view” while performing it with relish. Building from the self-consciously artificial exotica of artists like Martin Denny, Hosono’s “sightseeing music” acknowledges how with global tourism and “world music” the planet has become affectively mapped, with certain locations deemed more calm and atmospheric than others. In this respect Hosono’s sightseeing music ironically foreshadows the later cultural appropriations of major-label “world music” releases of the 1990s such as Enigma’s MCMXC a.D. (1990) and Deep Forest’s self-titled debut (1993).30

At the same time, Hosono was serious in seeking out an ecological perspective within ambient music. In a recent discussion with Nakazawa, Hosono looks back on his 1980s ambient music as a precursor to contemporary environmentalist movements, noting how the genre presented a more integrated perspective on a unified earth. In 1986 Hosono released his own environmental manifesto, the F.O.E. Manual, based on Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth catalogs in the late 1960s and early 1970s. F.O.E. stands for Friends of Earth, one of Hosono’s ecologically themed ambient music side projects of the mid-1980s. This 1980s ambience, Nakazawa points out, sought out a form of spirituality and religion not tied to any particular tradition, seeking instead to bring everyone together through an ambient orientation to this planetary horizon.31

A central track on Mercuric Dance, “Fossil of Flame—Fifty Bell Trees” is exemplary of Hosono’s ambient music in this calming planetary mode. As with all of Mercuric Dance, the track is composed largely of an analog synthesizer voice rich with harmonic warmth and soft in contour. The individual notes have a long decay, expansive reverb, and a gently wavering pitch. The tempo starts off slow and soon grows slower, with indulgent pauses between each phrase. The simple melody rises for four notes and then drifts back down the octave with a more restful and dispersed energy. Translated into somatic terms, these unhurried melodic lines take the form of a steady inhalation followed by an exhalation increasingly slow and deep.

With each cycling of the melody, supplemental notes appear on the descent, making the exhalation more textured and profound. After two and a half minutes, sharper sawtooth synthesizer tones bubble up at the fringes of the descending phrase. The texture grows gradually richer but maintains a harmonic simplicity drawing listeners into a more sedate and focused frame of mind. The music repeatedly falls back into near silence, only to resume again with the melody reaching toward higher and more sustained tones.

Around the seven-minute mark, this sonic focus widens to take in an expanded range of sounds, with the jangle of what sounds like a Tibetan singing bowl and the distant cry of a crow now softly audible in the distance. The crow caws as the synthesizer drones gradually peel away and the track falls silent.

The hints of traditional musics (in both instrumentation and rhythm) sprinkled across Hosono’s ambient works situate the synthesizer less as a novel technology and more as an organic extension of the “world music” growing popular at the time. The track’s title, described in the liner notes as a synthesis of the elemental forces of fire and wood, pictures an exotic landscape both unfamiliar and organic, combustible but timeless and ritualistic: a fossil of flame, fifty bell trees.

For all its exotic trimmings, however, Hosono’s evolving theory of ambiance eventually came to understand these esoteric landscapes as expressive of an imaginary rather than an existing space. As Hosono argues in his essay collection The Ambient Driver (Anbiento doraivā), “Ambience is less a particular style of music, and more a word designating a certain mental state.”32 In a 1998 panel discussion on neoshamanism at the NTT InterCommunication Center in Tokyo, Hosono revises his earlier approach to ambient music, repositioning it away from a mimetic role representing the earth and toward a more private interior space:

Since the beginning of the 1980s I had been doing mostly ambient music, which was like an ocean of music to me. The people from the younger generations of the pop music world began creating their music from an “oceanic feeling” sensibility from the beginning of the ’90s. Ambient was originally associated with a more ecological context, but this was mistaken. Ambient is the musical form with the greatest reach, or periphery of attraction—in short, from the expanses of one’s deeper interior. And in making ambient music I came to the realization that it is definitely not an external environment, but rather the internal ambience that has this “oceanic feeling.”33

Here, Hosono comes close to admitting the exotic landscapes adorning his “sightseeing music” from the 1980s primarily served as affective resources for his own (and his listeners’) inner feelings of reflective calm. The simple, rippling blue of the Mercuric Dance album cover reflects the ambiguity of this oceanic feeling: does it depict a sea turned on its side or simply the curves of a window shade softly insulating the listener from the outside world? (Figure 5).

Tetsu Inoue, Ambiant Otaku

In the 1990s ambient styles began spreading into the electronic dance music scenes, partly in response to the KLF’s seminal album Chill Out in 1990 (packaged with a sticker reading “file under ambient”). As home electronic music production became more affordable later in the decade, however, the main locus of ambient music production shifted away from the chill-out rooms of the dance clubs. Aphex Twin, Autechre, the Black Dog, Boards of Canada, and other British electronic music producers inspired a migration toward a more complex strand of rhythm-oriented electronic music, incorporating unusual meters, modes, and compositional structures. Ambient music production followed these shifts into more conceptual territory.

A central figure in this transition to a more cerebral ambience was Japanese ambient music producer Tetsu Inoue, who moved from Kyushu to San Francisco and then to New York in the mid-1980s after being turned on to ambient music via the progressive psychedelia of Pink Floyd, the synthesized classical music of Tomita Isao, and the compositional experiments of Yellow Magic Orchestra. Inoue recalls becoming gradually frustrated with the drugged-out audiences at his club performances, leading him to seek out a more focused and meaningful relationship with his listeners. The ideal listening environment became, for Inoue, a quiet domestic space, with lights off and headphones on. By the end of the century, ambient music would increasingly focus on this type of “bedroom listening.”34

In contrast to Hosono’s exotic elsewheres, the ambient music of the 1990s moved further from a mimetic relationship with existing landscapes, seeking out more abstract imaginary horizons instead. Inoue describes the motivation behind his 1996 album World Receiver as a purely mental environment: “I have a landscape in my mind that I had to express.”35 The weightless sounds and anonymous images scaffolding Inoue’s ambient spaces make a marked contrast with the more specific horizons of Hosono’s exotic cultural itinerary. As a representative example, consider the title track to Inoue’s debut album, Ambiant Otaku (1994).36

“Ambiant Otaku” is based on three loops: a short, descending five-note pattern in a middle register repeating roughly every two seconds, a higher three-note pattern intersecting it on a similar rhythm, and a lower note pulsing, Morse code–like, also roughly once every two seconds. There is a slight difference in duration between the first two and the last of these three patterns, however, so they offset each other in shifting syncopation as the loops continue to cycle. The amplitude of their reverberations slowly grows as they continue to loop across the first few minutes of the piece. Around the one-minute mark, another element appears: a synth tone sliding up and down playfully through the lower-mid frequencies. The contour of the slides recalls the shape of whale song, swimming up and down in a smooth arc through a reverberant ocean. This continues throughout almost the entirety of the piece. In contrast to the tightly structured loops, this voice has a gestural and improvisational quality, a freedom playing across the shifting pulse of the more patterned layers. About a minute and a half into the track, an even higher-pitched cluster of fluttering tones enters, shimmering and bright as they slide over one another. Around the three-minute mark, something resembling a more traditional rhythm appears—an occasional thumping bass drum. These thumps, together with the offset rhythms of the ongoing loops, often appear to be on the verge of coalescing into a steady beat. Instead, they continue to slide across one another without ever falling into sync.

At nearly five minutes, a contrasting three-note loop comes in louder in a lower register, responding to the patterns that opened the work. This complex assemblage of sliding loops and shimmering layers continues until near the end of the piece, almost eleven minutes after it began. Different voices continue to emerge and drop out as the music progresses. The original two loops gradually disappear about halfway through, only to reappear in the final two minutes to take the track to its concluding fade. As is evident here, Inoue’s ambient style had absorbed a great deal from the new electronic music (and the minimalist music before it), particularly its emphasis on interlocking looped patterns and the building up and breaking down of textures layer by layer across the length of a piece.37

The emphasis in “Ambiant Otaku” is on high-frequency shimmering textures. Along with the whale song and the expansive reverb, my impression as a listener is one of drifting inside the ocean, looking up at the light flickering off the surface of the water above as a variety of sea creatures slowly swim by. I am perhaps influenced by the image of a large stingray floating across the sea floor in the booklet to Inoue’s next album, Slow and Low (1995). The deep seas often come to mind listening to Inoue’s resonant textures—or, if not the ocean, then the depths of space. Unlike the more culturally specific topographies of Hosono’s ambient works, Inoue’s absolute backgrounds are weightless, ambiguous, and pulsing with abstract patterns. The spaces to which they refer are oriented more toward floating than walking, standing, or sitting—more zero gravity than earthbound.

This shift from potentially inhabitable imaginary landscapes toward more abstract horizons is evident in the artwork accompanying the albums. Unlike the quasi-cartographic images adorning Eno’s Ambient series, the simple designs and hand-drawn sketches of Hosono’s Monad quartet, and Yokoo’s exotic collages, Inoue’s FAX +49-69/450464 label releases all feature highly symmetrical covers, with circular images organized in empty black fields. The mandala on the cover of Ambiant Otaku (Figure 6) is characteristic of the music’s conceptual organization: a highly detailed geography, but one without reference to any human-scale landscape. Rather, the mandala offers a simultaneous guide through the mind and the universe as a whole—the macrocosm and the microcosm together. On the reverse sleeve is a striking image of a fetus wired into a microchip. Here, Inoue hints at the kind of psychedelic mood regulation producing these abstract patterns and oceanic feelings. Are we drifting under the sea or tucked away inside an electronic womb? The title of the album similarly riffs playfully on the image of the Japanese otaku, devotees of various subcultures who strive for encyclopedic expertise in their chosen field, even if it leaves them out of touch with the wider world. While the valence of the term has shifted in subsequent years, the stereotype of the otaku in the mid-1990s imagined them as isolated at home, surrounded by and in some sense surviving off electronic media: a state parodied by the circuit-board fetus pictured here.38 Inoue playfully invokes the otaku to imagine a different kind of ambient listener, one who approaches this ostensibly “background” genre with an obsessive attention to detail.

While Eno focused on music for airports and Hosono imagined travels through distant cultures, Inoue’s ambient otaku might never desire to leave the house at all. This increasing interest in more private, listener-controlled atmospheres becomes clearer when looking at the production context for Inoue’s work. While Eno and Hosono were known for studio-based production techniques, Inoue’s music was part of a larger shift toward the autonomy offered by home-based recording.

Pete Namlook’s FAX +49-69/450464 came to serve as the premier otaku-style ambient music label of the 1990s. Founded in Germany in 1993, the label was known for its highly systematic packaging (where different icons and colors denoted minutely differentiated subgenres), highly limited editions (usually from five hundred to two thousand copies per release; Ambiant Otaku was first released in an edition of five hundred), and prolific output (at its height in the mid- to late 1990s, the label was releasing one album every two weeks). FAX +49-69/450464 was successful in developing a small, dedicated audience of devoted ambient listeners, some even taking out a subscription to the label to ensure they did not miss a single release.

The image of the “world” and, more specifically, the planet Earth appears repeatedly in Inoue’s work. The cover designs for the first three volumes of 2350 Broadway (1993–96), an ambient collaboration between Inoue and Namlook, pair circular photographs of New York street scenes with an image of Earth. Both images float in a larger circle of empty black space.39 Unlike Hosono’s “Globule,” however, this Earth is firmly detached from any specific culture, serving as an abstract terrain for the listener to drift alongside.

In this way, the “landscapes” produced by ambient music in the 1990s came to reside more exclusively within the albums themselves—and between the ears of the listeners floating within them. This is not to say those making or listening to this kind of music were socially withdrawn. Collaboration between artists is a regular feature of both Hosono’s and Inoue’s discographies and, indeed, of ambient music as a whole. Ambient music in the 1990s was also becoming increasingly transnational, as mapped out in the title of a release by the ambient “supergroup” HAT (Hosono Haruomi, Atom Heart, and Tetsu Inoue): Tokyo Frankfurt New York (Daisyworld, 1996). Collaborations across continents became a regular practice, as technology allowed for an easy exchange of musical material, first through the mail and later over the Internet.

Inoue describes the value of collaborative work precisely in terms of his interaction with other musicians: “Collaboration is more like vibration and feedback. . . . I get bored sometimes working by myself, because there’s no feedback.”40 Inoue’s comment hints one impulse for an otaku-style turn toward more private forms of music is a dissatisfaction with the modes of interaction available in contemporary social environments and a desire for the more significant person-to-person exchanges available within subculture groups formed around particular hobbies and interests. This dissatisfaction with the given landscape is reflected in the texts accompanying Inoue’s FAX projects. The liner notes to 2350 Broadway describe the albums as “music for a city that is unlivable.”

While rejecting the larger social landscape, the FAX +49-69/450464 label demonstrated a renewed interest in fostering accessibility and direct communication at a more personal level. Namlook’s actual fax number was included in the label name for easy reference, and 2350 Broadway was the address of Inoue’s apartment in New York, where the music was produced. The (sometimes controversially) limited print runs of FAX +49-69/450464 releases allowed Namlook to grant artists more control over their releases and facilitated contact between a small community of artists and listeners. Inoue’s recognition of the facile sociality of public listening in the club environment, paradoxically, entailed a return to private spaces, capable of sustaining potentially more satisfying interpersonal and artistic interactions.

In the 1990s ambient music aligned itself closer to the neoliberal focus on personal autonomy, from the solo “bedroom” producer to the solitary headphone listener. The more abstract, imaginary landscapes on offer allowed more room for audiences to mix the recordings with their own personal horizons, allowing ambient music to function more effectively not just as music for airports and chill-out rooms but as a more private technology of the self. Finding the given landscapes unlivable, ambient producers and listeners in the 1990s increasingly decided to invent their own.

Hatakeyama Chihei, Ambient Isolationist

Approaching the turn of the century, darker textures began to emerge as the “encompassing element” of this abstracted ambient sound. In a 1995 Artforum essay, music critic Simon Reynolds notes a shift from a warm and fuzzy ambient style toward what he calls, borrowing the name of an influential 1994 ambient compilation, “isolationism.”41 While isolationism maintained the general ambient emphasis on slow-changing textures and timbres, the style introduced a more explicit feeling of unease. Following David Toop, Reynolds describes an isolationist focus on “nonspecific dread,” the flip side to the earlier ambient styles’ tendency toward “nonspecific bliss”:

With isolationism, the absence of narrative signifies not utopia but entropy, paralysis. But there’s still a neurotic jouissance to be gleaned from this music; it’s a victory over what Brian Massumi calls “ambient fear,” the omnipresent low-level anxiety of the late-20th-century mediascape. By immersing yourself in the phobic, you make it your element.42

As Reynolds goes on to argue, isolationism was based on the allure of dystopian calm, an empty space where all signifiers of social life had been evacuated. He cites literary critic John Carey on the modernist fantasy of apocalypse, which Carey sees as a response to overpopulation. Reynolds reads isolationism as “a kind of estheticized death wish,” a “near-monastic impulse” to flee the endless turnover of pop culture, turning away from an already weakened social solidarity to “revert to an inanimate, inorganic state, free of the irritation of fleshly, animal desire.” This emerging form of ambience was a curious sort of anesthetic affording calm at the same time as it registered the painful loss of what had to be erased in order to create such empty horizons. But this “neurotic jouissance” did serve a purpose: isolationist ambience offered affective entrainments for a calm confrontation with loss and uncertainty.

Miyadai Shinji makes a similar argument in the Japanese context in Owari naki nichijō o ikiro (Live the endless everyday), written in the wake of the Kobe earthquake in January 1995 and the release of sarin gas onto the Tokyo subway system by the doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyō two months later. Miyadai notes the prevalence in 1980s Japanese popular culture (particularly in anime and manga) of a psychological desire to transcend the routine boredom of the postindustrial everyday by destroying the existing world and living in a heightened state of postapocalyptic awareness. Miyadai proposes this as a way to understand the motivations of apocalyptic cults like Aum Shinrikyō as well as the “disaster volunteer” boom in the wake of the 1995 Kobe earthquake. He reads this desire for apocalypse as a desire for the clutter and crowds to be swept away in order to usher in an evacuated and oceanic space granting freedom of movement and an escape from existing social identities. The intensity of this cathartic upheaval is followed by the absolute background of a world made cohesive through complete desolation. In music a similar boom and bust can be heard, for example, in the general shift from the noise music of the 1980s and 1990s, with its emphasis on sensory overload, to the more reductionist and “lowercase” sounds of the new century.43

While already quiet to begin with, Japanese ambient music in the 2000s made a similar shift toward postapocalyptic isolationism. The new ambience began to set aside the fantasy of floating freely over large expanses and instead stuck close to the materiality of sounds embedded in more diminutive and constrained spaces. Where earlier styles stimulated feelings of movement and drift, ambient music in the new century often sounded like it was doing its best just to hold still. The tones were darker, and the compositions often hinted at fatigue even when they did their best to stay bright and open. Compared with the ambient music of earlier decades, compositions became more fractured and partial, with no image of global wholeness, no oceanic feeling without registering the sinking pull of the undertow. The absolute background was becoming less absolute, even as it still strove to provide a sense of cohesion on the somatic, sensory level.

This shift was again paired with shifts in music production technology. The computer music of the 1980s and early 1990s was heavily based around synthesizers and samplers and depended on the MIDI interface to allow these electronic controllers to communicate with one another. By the turn of the century, however, computers had developed enough processing power to perform more advanced signal processing using onboard software. With the spread of digital audio processing tools like Max/MSP in the late 1990s, ambient music production shifted away from its origins in analog knob twiddling and moved toward a more malleable palette of digital signal processing (DSP). The new digital audio interfaces allowed for the easier manipulation of microsounds (sounds less than one-tenth of a second in duration) as well as more extreme variations in frequency range and sonic contour. Early experiments in digital ambience (such as Inoue’s 2000 release Fragment Dots) tended toward the digitally pristine and informationally dense. By the mid-2000s, however, artists were beginning to grow fatigued with purely electronic signal manipulation and began seeking out ways to integrate the tonal richness of traditional acoustic instruments with the new textural possibilities of DSP.44

Hatakeyama Chihei (1978–) is one of the most active of this younger generation of ambient musicians in Japan, releasing over a dozen albums under his own name, recording and performing with Date Tomoyoshi as the ambient duo Opitope, and (like Hosono) sidelining as a soundtrack composer and record producer. His first solo album, Minima Moralia, appeared on the trendsetting Chicago independent music label Kranky in 2006. The album focuses on recordings of guitar and vibraphone reworked through digital processing, exploring the properties of both acoustic and software-affected sustained tones. On some tracks the sound of the original instrumentation comes through relatively unmanipulated; more often, though, it comes through mostly effaced, with the sounds containing only a vague memory of their original source.

Unlike ambient producers of the 1980s and 1990s, Hatakeyama and others of this younger generation often create music rooted in recordings of acoustic instruments and the gradual decay and transformation of these signals.45 The music returns to the emotional directness of acoustic instrumental performance, but not without simultaneously hinting at a hollowing out of the affective promise it once held. It is as if the capacity for digital audio manipulation at the microsound level has undone the integrity of individual musical notes, and yet these fractured remains are the only emotional material left to work with. As with postapocalyptic isolationism more generally, this is a music stitching together a new type of absolute background from the fragments and residues of an earlier, less mediated age.

Minima Moralia’s seven tracks each reference a particular space in their titles, from small cinematic scenes (“Swaying Curtain in a Window,” “Beside a Well”) to digital weather patterns (“Granular Haze”) to intimate Bachelardian spaces (“Inside of the Pocket”). The intrigue in many of these tracks comes from listening for traces of the original guitar and vibraphone signals as they emerge distorted to various degrees through filters, time manipulations, and digital effects. Many tracks build to a counterpoint briefly established between a relatively recognizable guitar picking and a more abstract set of sounds obliquely referencing the original acoustic recordings. The melodic quality of the unmanipulated guitar, nodding toward the sentimental at times, is continually undermined by the destabilizing patterns of the squeezed and stretched textures surrounding it. In this way the music stays local and intimate, even as it hints at the anonymous and uncertain. As envisioned in their track titles, Hatakeyama’s compositions appear to reference highly atmospheric locations but make it difficult to imagine these scenes against any stable horizon. Refusing to blot out the uncertainty engulfing these quiet moments, the compositions warmly lure the listener in while hinting at a larger threat.

“Beside a Well,” the last and longest track on the album, begins with a set of fluttering drones: one sharp and mid- to high frequency, the other a low-end wobble. In between these two more constant textures, vibraphone chords echo and swell at regular intervals. The layering gradually intensifies over the first five minutes of the piece, with the bass drone growing stronger and the high end coalescing into a piercing static haze. The individual drones begin to bleed into one another, reflecting and refracting the other sounds as they rise and fall in amplitude.

Soon after the five-minute mark, these textures fall away, and a more recognizable guitar picking enters and loops, drenched in reverb and with upper harmonics amplified. This more gestural picking in the middle registers remains audible but is gradually submerged in a more active set of glitchy textures and sine tones in the high end, just as the vibraphone begins responding indirectly to the pluck of the guitar strings. Around eight minutes into the piece, these sustained loops begin to give way to a more all-consuming flood of soft static, with glassy harmonics emerging in the high frequencies. By the ten-minute mark, this wash of noise and a rising electric guitar squall have completely taken over. The low-end drone from the beginning of the piece again starts to lumber, contorting slowly within the fuzz. This mix continues looping, eventually fading into silence at the eleven-and-a-half-minute mark.

“Beside a Well” is organized into a three-act structure common to ambient drone works, with a loosely looping intro, a somewhat more defined and melodic central section, and a final sequence where the individual elements begin to dissolve into a wash of noise. Despite all the wobbling and throbbing textures, “Beside a Well” carefully avoids a regular pulse. The drones and the guitar picking lumber forward with an asymmetric gait, raising their heads above the fuzz only to eventually be pushed back under amid the quietly swirling mass of sounds. As with earlier ambient music, most changes are gradual, allowing a listener’s concentration to wander elsewhere. Compared with Hosono and Inoue’s work, however, Hatakeyama’s textures are far noisier, with digital static and wayward frequencies often making for a relatively rougher mix.

The album is named after Theodore Adorno’s classic book of short essays and aphorisms Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. Written while Adorno was in exile in the United States in the late 1940s, the book attempts to rethink morality in the face of both the stultifying effects of popular culture and the horrors of the early twentieth century. Hatakeyama, who regularly structures albums around ideas from philosophy as well as classical Japanese literature, denies any deeper meaning in his use of the title beyond a personal admiration for the book.46 In the context of ambient music history, however, the invocation of Adorno’s “damaged life” is an apt one. Ambience in the new century operates in a situation where sound has lost its structural and semantic integrity, where minute digital manipulations have ripped apart the once reassuring confines of stable instrumentation and acoustic resonance. The fractured materiality of sound, in turn, echoes the deepening social instability of Japanese life in the new century.

Ambient fear—which Brian Massumi described in 1993 as a low-level “background radiation saturating existence”—was a real presence as Japan moved into the twenty-first century and worries over the nation’s future continued to deepen.47 The popular media had plenty to fret over: global economic trends brought home the increasing vulnerability of the local economy even as the recession continued; the rise of China threatened to place Japan in the position of an also-ran Asian neighbor; North Korea continued to threaten missile strikes; a long string of ineffectual and short-lived political administrations did little to inspire confidence; and confusion reigned about Japan’s global role in an age of oil wars, the post-9/11 “war on terror,” the rise of Silicon Valley–style capitalism, and ever-looming ecological catastrophes. Meanwhile, more deeply rooted social problems were proving increasingly difficult to ignore: the low birthrate and rapidly growing ranks of elderly in need of care, relatively little progress in the push for gender equality and work–life balance, and an increasingly insular workforce relatively ill equipped to operate in the international arena. After the most recent natural disaster and nuclear meltdown in March 2011, national discussion again centered on whether Japan would find a way forward, even as much of the political maneuvering surrounding these events seemed only to evidence further stalling. While it is worth questioning who stands to gain from painting such a bleak picture, it is fair to say these various threats have often combined to generate an ambiguous if palpable mood of anxiety and uncertainty.48

The Japanese ambient music of the new century has often sought to provide atmospheres suitable for this more precarious time. Rather than blurring out the larger landscape to feel safe in a drifting cocoon, ambient music increasingly renders audible the fraught relation between its local affordances of mediated calm and the deeply troubling developments in the middle and far distance.

The abstract ikebana on the cover of Minima Moralia (Figure 7) portrays exactly this: the ambivalent rest of a beleaguered object in an uncertain setting. A single blackened flower with a bent stem sticks up out of a simple curved white vase, barely distinguishable against an empty white background. The flower appears dried out and fragile but is nonetheless rooted to this uncertain ground, holding on and trying to hold steady.

Taken together, Hosono, Inoue, and Hatakeyama model three ways ambient music has sought to foster feelings of embodied security through attunement to imaginary landscapes. Hosono’s 1980s listeners were dissolved within a far-flung global exoticism, albeit not without a sense of ambivalence and irony. Inoue provided, as the liner notes to his Slow and Low album put it, “Muzak for random sculptures and Mixmedia mood swing.” Ambience in the 1990s retreated to a more imaginary and internalized setting, but in its own way reintroduced the possibility of more personalized and interactive landscapes. Hatakeyama’s work in the new century has allowed for a more expressive acoustics to enter into the picture, but situated within a far more uncertain sonic territory. While ambience of all three types continues to be produced even now, an increasing number of ambient musicians has sought to organize their work around an absolute background resonating with, rather than resolving, the larger anxieties of twenty-first-century life. This incorporation of uncertainty might be understood as an even more effective way of affording calm: rather than providing alternative fantasy landscapes, the more porous and ambivalent backgrounds of recent ambient music mesh more easily with the uneven flows of everyday life, whether you are walking under the noisy highway or stuck in traffic yourself.

The next chapter shifts from a focus on the absolute background to look more closely at how ambient media help us move with these complex rhythms of the city. Whereas this chapter focused on how ambience works at the far horizon of perception to serve as an absolute background of ontological security, the next chapter focuses on how ambient media can provide a framework for mobility at a more directly somatic level, where the rhythms of the body come up against the rhythms of other objects in shared space.