murmurations

It was a while back now, but in late November last year I went along to an event in Glasgow celebrating thirty years of the Touch record label. The event showcased the work of three Touch artists: Philip Jeck, BJ Nilsen and Thomas Köner, who just released his first record for the label, ' Novaya Zemlya ', last year (though he's been releasing his work elsewhere for over twenty years now). Köner was actually the artist I had heard the least of before the gig, and I was curious as to what he would be like. The set-up on stage had the three artists' workstations arranged in a row, with Köner at the far left. This worked to his advantage, as he seemed to want to focus our visual attention not on him, sitting in front of a laptop and a mixing board, but on the projections on the wall behind him. These included various photographs of vast, desolate, Arctic-looking landscapes, all seemingly altered to appear faded, with their colour, brightness and contrast then adjusted...

I'm always interested in how artists portray their performance space, as it were, in their tracks. People often think this becomes irrelevant when you're writing electronic music – it's all inside the laptop, right? – but if anything the opposite is true. Experimental electronic artists often, intentionally or not, create imaginary performance spaces when they write a track, irrespective or whether they think their track doesn't really have a 'performer', as in a human being playing the instruments. Western listeners hear what sound like instruments and attach a certain agency to those sounds. At that point, the track stops being just a bunch of sounds, and becomes a landscape with some one in it. Once that 'performer' of sound is located, tracks can develop narratives based around the question of the performer's presence in the track. One of the tracks I've noticed this most clearly in is the beautiful 'Stagger' by The Sight Below. The...

Brian Eno's 1982 album Ambient 4: On Land stands as a landmark piece of ambient music, probably the most accomplished of the four works comprising Eno's ambient series. An equally-accomplished ambient work came out fifteen years later: Substrata by Geir Jenssen under his Biosphere moniker. What's interesting in considering these two albums side-by-side is that while both espouse a relationship with some notion of landscape or environment, they each do so in very different ways despite their shared genre labelling, leading to different effects on listening. One revealing approach to these different relationships is via the albums' respective portrayals of human interaction with its environment. How is the figure of 'the human' represented in each album's landscapes? How is the interaction between person & environment understood in each? And how does this shape our listening experience? Eno is the more explicit of the two artists in his intentions ...