it was never nothing

ambient japan/cosmic hotel lobbies/flight

ambient japan

All music has to do is next-to-nothing. I’m told of an art installation in the city where the artists stick a mic through the wall of the fourth floor and let it dangle several floors above Swanston Street. They feed the found sound in and amplify and distort it and have it 'there' at very low volume through the space, a concrete drone.

Ambient is everything, it was never nothing. The sound of moving water, birds, field recordings from actual fields of birds and more, underground drains, distant sirens, camera shutters and Burial's Metal Gear Solid clicks and whirrs, soft/soft trumpet, soft piano. I like the sound of entering the water and the endless sound of waves breaking, the sound that never stops.

In this vein I read Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au again because it's an ambient novella set in Japan, where a mother (from Hong Kong) and her adult daughter (from Australia, probably) go on holiday and a brittle quietness ensues – little chats and persuasions, whispers and suggestions and hesitations barely noticed, the interactions in indirect things (maps, stairs, pathways) rather than the direct. They wander around to galleries and folk-art exhibitions, in soft rain, moving imperceptibly around each other. The centre shifts, the weather changes, leaves fall, the sound of water. There's only the expectation of pink blushes in the trees, and Au cites sakura, the cherry blossom, but it too is only in passing, as if the gorgeous pink is a mirage in the park - faint, like a sketch.

In the 1980’s, Japanese ambient musicians/composers were making bare advertising music for that decade's technological boom – Sanyo, Sony, watches, Walkmans, gadgets. In this case it was the soundtrack to aspiration, a calm and composed near-future, if one had the means. There was a re-booted Cold War in the 80's as well as a tech-boom; America boycotted a Moscow Olympics because Russia wanted Afghanistan so the Soviets boycotted the LA Olympics four years later while shooting ballistic missiles over Europe.

Then in the 1990’s the next generation (Dream Dolphin, Takashi Kokubo etc) found what was called a ‘healing boom’, and their music soundtracked it -  a boom the media scholar Paul Roquet has highlighted as sharing "the promise of producing calm for (and in) the consumer."

The iyashi, or 'healing' products, he says, included "iyashi-themed magazines and books, implements for a wide variety of therapeutic modalities (aromatherapy, pet therapy, colour therapy, plant therapy, sound therapy, art therapy, massage therapy, sex therapy, etc), iyashi-style television shows, relaxation DVDs, iyashi-style pornography, and iyashi robots."

This boom was after the Kobe earthquake which killed 6000 and the Aum Shinrikyo cult's subway sarin gas attack, both in the early months of 1995. The 'technologies of mood regulation', says Roquet, enabling 'transposable' calm, which now of course post-everything has manifested in the scam of the Spotify ambient playlists such as 'Music for Plants', 'Music for Deep Concentration', 'Sunrise Yoga' and such, padded out by fake artists paid by the platform to make fake ambient - but what is the line between fake and real in composition that does so little and aspires to do nothing? Does it even matter? What would Brian Eno say?

Last month a Swedish newspaper (Spotify's owner is Swedish) established that a secret composer, Johan Rohr, had 650 other names on 2700 muzak tracks for ambient, children's and instrumental Spotify-branded playlists.

Still, the 80's and 90's Japanese stuff is authentic, and sounds futuristic again, given that the future is closing in, the planet not warming but boiling, genocidal wars allowed to proceed as they began. People retreat, they hide. People seek retreats, they seek gurus, they seek help. I hide. I don't like it much out there a lot of the time at the moment.

The daughter in Cold Enough For Snow leaves her mother for a day to go hiking - "there was mist on the mountains, and I noticed too that a fine rain was falling. I took out a waterproof cover and fitted it over my pack, as well as a raincoat. Again, I saw few people." She walks through villages and passes waterfalls, looks at frogs, woodsheds and gardens, through woods, disappearing "in and out of the forest like a character in a book."

It made me think of that bit at the start of Murakami's Norwegian Wood where Toru and Naoko are walking. 'We heard no other sounds. We met no other people. We saw only two bright, red birds leap startled from the centre of the meadow and dart into the woods…as if searching for something we'd lost, Naoko and I continued slowly down the path in the woods.

The stillness is key. The exoticism of urban nature. I saw the new Wim Wenders film set in Tokyo, Perfect Days. It's….the same thing? For the first half, the main character, a lovely public toilet cleaner doing his best to fend away loneliness, doesn't talk. At all. In the second half he says less than twenty words. I want to call this ambient film-making but when I put that on Twitter a commenter had a better idea; she loved his mindfulness and considered it a 'mindful' film in terms of the observations around peace and quiet, and personal moments whether in company or not which are slowed down, and held, and occupied.

Wenders lingers on small moments so fragile they might not even be moments. The cleaner, Hirayama, photographs leaves on trees, on film, on an old Olympus mju. He listens to The Animals, Patti Smith and the Velvet Underground on cassette in his van, he reads Faulkner on a futon on the floor. He has desires - we meet her - but they are so quiet as to be repressed. He gazes at 'things' - shadows, colours, trees - and smiles at them, they make him happy. He takes his lunch to a hidden big-city grotto of trees. He likes to play. He's kind to the homeless and to children and, for the film, works Zen-like six days a week from dawn in the soft rain cleaning toilets, maintaining a routine yet only just resilient enough to handle a shift in that routine, a shift in the tectonic plates, a shift in his emotional safety.

The film remains largely unresolved - so ambient - and Cold Enough For Snow does too, as the mother and daughter come to their end of their Japan holiday together, in which an awful lot was said but never to each other. The final passage has them both buying gifts for other people, and  the daughter helping the mother to take off her shoe.

cosmic hotel lobby

I keep revising this, a playlist for an imaginary hotel lobby somewhere on the edge of a crystal desert in 2025. It all started with the Ethiopian jazz guy Hailu Mergia his record Wede Harer Guzo, made with a band called Dahlak, in 1978, in Addis Ababa.

Dahlak were a hotel band in a time of kitsch and dictatorships. The late 70’s hotel band in Ethiopia’s dangerous capital played amongst louche curtains, orange furniture and grand pianos. Emperor Haile Selassie the King of Kings is dead after being jailed by a Marxist military coup. Ethiopia is instead financed by the Soviets and Cuba with the nasty Derg government killing objectors in the streets. Curfews in place, yet bands play all night. Corruption, murder, spies and tunes!

Hailu, who plays the keyboards, went through a few hotels with a few different bands but ended up at the Ghion, equally luxe back in the day and still there now, with floor to ceiling wardrobes in the rooms for all the military uniforms they once needed to accommodate. They made Wede Harer Guzo here and he released it on cassette to one record shop down the road, the Sheba Music Shop.

It's been exhumed and re-issued, as you might expect.

It got me thinking about these kinds of strange, liminal hotel lobbies both real and imagined, all dreams and nightmares from the 70’s - I got taken as an unhappy child to The White Heron hotel restaurant at Christchurch Airport, maybe 10, 11, 12-years-old, to witness the brown and the orange in their original and natural habitat, the prawn cocktail, gin&soda, a weird, in-between place at the airport, so glamourous or so it seemed but in truth merely disguising change and transition, secrets, lies and romance, and, now, nostalgia.

The playlist is to imagine this sense of transit and secrecy and to conjure up images of spies, heat, hypercolour and expectation, all shifting and changing and reptilian. With an arid, psychedelic desert outside, colour-flaring in pink and lime green, The Crystal World, lost hikers, secret wives, and lamps. I think of it as this - you walk into a hotel and there’s a band playing in the lobby, on a rug, drinking wine and keeping very still, and this is what it’s like.

flight

A pilot told me a story about her father, a Lithuanian man who came to Bunbury after WW2. He was abusive to his wife and kids and an alcoholic. It wasn’t good at home. She became a pilot and when he was old and infirm, and alone, she would go the place he lived and bring him to the small airfield where she worked and place him in his wheelchair under the control tower with a box of KFC, so he could watch the planes, which he liked.