Is this world hospitable? The answer impacts your experience of diegesis more drastically than anything else. A trip through the Pacific temperate rainforests would feel quite different than a journey across the volcanic plains of Venus, regardless of the details of each expedition. Places can feel as though they have attitudes towards us, and this influences our own emotions when we're in them. It's difficult to feel bad in a place that seems to heal you, equally difficult to be carefree in a place that has your doom written all over it. A soundworld can be hostile or docile in many ways. "Hostile" can mean gloomy or violent... "Docile" can mean cozy or ethereal... The terms don't correspond to specific inner states so much as broader clusters of emotion and sensation. Your reaction to a given diegesis may vary depending on the day, but once you understand it's climate it'll never fail to resonate with you.
Resist the facile equation of hospitable with good music and inhospitable with bad music. Both areas of affect can be amazing; hell is as timeless a muse as heaven. What makes for a bad experience is finding yourself in a world where there’s no atmosphere of any kind.
I’d contend that the most vivid, poetic examples of hostile worlds aren’t found in the obvious genres—the ones with the word “dark” in their name, etc.—but are rather the forbidden planets of the 50s and 60s avant garde. Nearly all the canonical works in early electronic music radiate dark energy: aural depictions of the monsters and winds of Hades (Schaeffer and Henry - "Orpheus 53"), howling city-sounds cast into the night with Pollockian abandon (Varese - "Electronic Poem"), ruins haunted by spirits and sirens (Xenakis - "Orient-Occident"), dreams of World War III as glimpsed through astral projection traveling along powerlines and radio waves (Stockhausen - "Anthems"). Even depictions of Heaven itself are deeply eerie (Stockhausen - "Song of the Youth"). And why would we expect otherwise? These composers grew up in a musical context culturally (and in some cases, temporarily) closer to that of Schumann than our own. If this stuff is startling and unfamiliar to us, imagine how it must have sounded to even the people making it back then.
Luc Ferrari’s “Visage V” is a lesser known but exemplary case study. Right out the gate you’re assailed by an industrial-machine drone of suffocating pressure. Layers constantly fade in and out, but through these changes in color and intensity this force never dissipates; at times it disconcertingly resembles the human voice. At intervals it lets up for just long enough to allow various species of feral mechanical creatures to burst in, snapping and barking in their own dialects. You soon find that these chrome and gunmetal hell-creatures are capable of accelerating into near-unfollowable flashes of violent, unpredictable movement—getting the way would result in grave injury at best. Through all the fluctuations that follow, you never get more than a few seconds to relax; even at its most subdued the piece bristles with tension and inhuman malevolence. On three occasions, descending swarms of nanobots envelope you then evaporate into trails of steam. After the third attack the work abruptly ends. Whatever alien intelligence was controlling events has pushed you out of its world.
The lesser known truth is that many of these same artists went on to construct wonderful audio-utopias. In the late 60s, Ferrari himself was one of the very first to leave the era of forbidden planets behind. He spent the following decades developing an unassuming yet prescient style somewhere between the open-world sample collages of chillout and a kind of proto-ASMR. These works reveal equal sensitivity to areas of the experience-spectrum that couldn't be more opposite to the ferocity of his earlier work. As a great thaw spread across the ivory towers, academy-affiliated composers like Michael McNabb, Michel Redolfi, and Laurie Spiegel pioneered what could (almost paradoxically) be described as avant garde new age ambient. Or take Pierre Schaeffer’s appointed successor Francois Bayle, who gradually shook off all traces of the austerity associated with his area of music in favor of a twinkling, enchanted warmth. Whereas 70s compositions like “The Acoustic Experience” foreground shrill brutalist synth tones, works from the 90s and 2000s like “Fables” and “The Form of the Spirit is a Butterfly” have sound palettes evocative of computer-age fairy tales.
Among the record collector types who tend to listen to this stuff, the turn to lightness and lushness is sometimes conflated with a fading of the visionary intensity of high modernism. But what if the greatest results of this shift are proof of exactly the opposite? These works vindicate their creators’ risky investment in the rejection of longstanding musical conventions. They’re proof that the vocabularies Schaeffer et al developed amount to more than a means to shock and obfuscate audiences, a rejection of traditional beauty for novelty’s sake—but rather to a new sound-poetry that can go anywhere.
Take Bayle’s "Mimameta". With a swift gesture the curtains open, and the ever-shifting glow of sunlight filtering through leaves envelopes you. Wistful chimes stir in an unfurling melody that’s somewhere between lyrical and incidental, introducing and later bookending the piece. This serene garden-world is not asleep, it’s bursting with activity. As your senses adjust to the delicacy of the environment, the ornateness of micro-motion and spatial positioning becomes overwhelming. Floating silver objects collide and cascade. Descending gusts of magic wind sporadically fall throughout the atmosphere. Colonies of birds begin chattering, fall silent, resume to reach a crescendo. Strangely tuned flutes that behave like birdsong babble and flutter. The rustle of plucked instruments, played by unseen faeries or fauns mischievously intrudes. This is a living tapestry that’s both a sanctuary and a riddle. We’ll return to investigate it further.
For subsequent generations of producers, navigating between hostile and docile climates was not so much an ability to be gradually and arduously developed as an assumed right. In the 90s in particular, the culture of a) working under multiple quasi-anonymous aliases rather than cultivating a singular brand or cult of personality, and b) releasing multiple mixes of the same track put producers in an ideal position to experiment. The UK techno duo GTO are maybe my favorite exemplars of the era’s spirit. Their rave anthem “Pure (Pure Energy)” is a survival game after nightfall, but “Pure (Beautiful Mix)” is a cave pond of healing. Aphex Twin is an other great exemplar, with work ranging from the wide open sky and ancient protean yearning of "i" to the physiological assault of "Ventolin".
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