In the mid-1990s, Jon Tye was relentlessly focused on electronic music’s most extreme possibilities. That was the title of the inaugural compilation from his label, Lo Recordings, which aimed to map the fringes of post-rave electronic music in category-smashing experiments from artists like Scanner, Omni Trio, and Luke Vibert’s Wagon Christ project. Lo Recordings spent the next few years pushing outward, breaking down distinctions between genres and modes of listening on comps like United Mutations and Further Mutations, enlisting a provocatively motley crew—Aphex Twin, Tortoise, Hood, Thurston Moore, Squarepusher, Stereolab—in their demolition work.
Most extreme of all was the music Tye released under his own Twisted Science alias, by turns erratic and overdriven or dusty and dissonant. But he also had other, mellower projects, and as time has gone by, the dulcet side of his music has come to the fore. In 2021, the ambient historians at Music From Memory curated a star-gazing selection of the ambient and ambient techno he produced in the early 1990s in MLO, a duo with fellow Brit Peter Smith; now the label turns its attention to his ambient project Ocean Moon. Ways to the Deep Meadow’s seven atmospheric tracks are all new productions, but their billowing pads, gently pulsing arpeggios, and general air of wide-eyed wonder sound so classic, it would be easy to mistake the album for an archival release.
The mood throughout bobs somewhere between tranquil and hypnotic, beginning with the prayer bowl and rainfall that open “Ways to the Deep Meadow.” That song—inspired by a poem by Angus MacLise, who played in the Velvet Underground and La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music before moving to Nepal—is led by gently cycling synth arpeggios whose curious rises and falls remind me of one of M.C. Escher’s staircases. “Souls Fall Away” is a buoyant froth of beatific, if indecipherable, vocals, and “Angel Falls,” a few tracks later, evokes similar heavenliness. Things really only come down to earth twice: “Day of the Voyage” is a blissed-out procession led by a halting electronic drum pattern evocative of Indian music; “Plains of Paradise” is a Balearic devotional driven by rippling congas.
Per label press materials, portions of the album were apparently inspired by artificial intelligence, as Tye sought alternatives—theoretical, philosophical, and even spiritual—to what he saw as more pessimistic or critical perspectives. It’s unclear, however, whether he actually used A.I. tools in generating or organizing his sounds, or simply took inspiration, like any science-fiction writer, from the idea of the technology. In the angelic choirs and electronic pulses of “Ways to the Deep Meadow,” it’s certainly possible to perceive a sense of optimism about technology, and press materials say that Holly Herndon’s Holly+ app was used to process text from Janine Rook’s Made in Dreams, the exhibition that Ocean Moon’s song of the same name was created to soundtrack. But no words are detectable in that song, and fortunately nothing on Ways to the Deep Meadow bears traces of low-fidelity artifacts or other telltale marks of A.I. slop.
Those hallmarks, in fact, seem like the kind of thing that Tye might happily have worked into his music as Twisted Science, a project that often seemed guided by the desire to use new technologies in ways not originally intended. Ways to the Deep Meadow, in contrast, is a far more conventional affair; for fans of classic ambient and new age, even a nostalgic one. That fealty to familiar sounds and modes of beauty—consonant harmonies, glistening timbres, gentle symmetries—is one of its strengths. It’s a radiant tribute to the tradition that inspired it.
