Zones Without People

"And in all of nature, in trees for instance, I see expression and a soul, as it were." Van Gogh

“Rave music doesn’t so much abolish ‘soul’ as disperse it across the entire field of sound.” Simon Reynolds

Is there anyone in this world? Consider the options: you could be somewhere densely populated, surrounded by a cacophony of voices; you could be somewhere intimate, alone with a single person; or you could be in a world that’s deserted or uncharted. Sometimes the third possibility is the most exciting.

That belief won’t make sense to all listeners. Some will be lost without the overt auditory presence of another human (conveyed via singing, breathing, studio chatter, etc.) and decry music that inhabits this region of affect as soulless, devoid of feeling or meaning.

But listening to music as diegesis reveals the wrongness of that assumption. Just as in visual art, where skies, oceans (or Bob Ross’ “happy trees”) are imbued with emotional qualities, so too can soundscapes that offer little to no overt signs of human life take on expressive resonances. The performer is no longer the only one who can speak to us; nature, machines, data streams—in music all of these and more can sing songs of their own. This music does not reject everyday emotions so much as venture beyond them.

You can encounter ghosts in these worlds. Peripheral mirages of human presence creep in when you least expect them. Too fleeting and distant to satisfy listeners who long for music to come from a clear, corporeal “speaker”, these presences can nevertheless have a haunting beauty. They imbue your surroundings with a sense of buried mystery—a sense that you’re at a boundary between one world and another.

No genre contains more zones without people than the sleepy countrysides of ambient. When Brian Eno coined the term, he was referring to music that could function as ambience. But, looking back on decades of music assigned the label, has the salient quality of ambient music in general really been that it’s “as ignorable as it is interesting”? Arguably, no. Selected Ambient Works Volume II remains the masterpiece of the genre, yet it’s difficult to ignore when used as background noise. A friend described the album with my favorite adjective, “unsettling”, within about two seconds of hearing it in such a context. (Yet music from the old master of dramaturgy and pathos, Beethoven, seems to be quite easy to tune out for most people.) Rather, what makes ambient so interesting is its use of ambience as subject matter: the musical equivalent of landscape painting. Its slow-moving pads and sparingly placed real-world sounds evoke the mysterious quietude of dream environments. In a way, Eno himself embraced this reinterpretation of the term’s meaning with the place-themed Ambient 4: On Land, his best work. The more we treat ambient as immersive close-listening music—rather than like an automatic Philip K. Dick-style mood-altering machine—the more beautiful it becomes.

Take the seventh track on Selected Ambient Works Volume II for instance. First impressions are of light and motion: nighttime and gentle undulation. There are distant gleams of moonlight, or some other light source. Occasionally, tape distortion murmurs in the background—ancient, dusty wind from the peripheries sweeping through. Slowly, the swaying back and forth takes on a musical sense of swing. In these dream pastures and forests, at once cozy and disquieting, the grass is dancing, as though ancient memories of boisterous celebrations are still reverberating through the landscape. 

Dance music should be antithetical to what we’re talking about—it’s what DJs play at gatherings of people, after all—yet this dichotomy was permanently shattered in the 80s by the machinic precision of techno, house, and electro. Anything beyond clockwork drum machine patterns and bursts of quasi-harmonic noise became optional, superfluous to the groove. In the following decade, the sci fi introversion suddenly possible in dance music lead to the rise of ambient techno, which combined the pastoral landscapes of the former with the mechanized propulsion of the latter, allowing you to tour extraterrestrial rainforests in airships and relax in space stations orbiting at the edges of foreign solar systems.

Psyche’s “Crackdown” is a classic example of dance music entering zones without people, evoking melancholic space travel, a lonely commute along an interplanetary highway. The BPM is firmly within danceable range, yet there’s a sense of moving forward slightly too fast, as though you’re speeding to get to a destination. The constant neon glow of the pads illuminates the floating road ahead. Later, the universe’s drowsiest alarm goes off. Yet there’s a bounciness, a stylishly syncopation that makes the journey fun. Underneath is a baseline mantra that radiates a calm sense of purpose. Flickering holograms of a romantic conversation keep appearing; visions seem to appear of their own accord out here where it’s just you, the highway, and the stars and planets.