In the ongoing experiment of defining ambient music, Australian composer Lawrence English and his Room40 label are the control group. In the music he releases and creates (start with The Peregrine, if you’re not familiar), he is an ambient classicist, rigorously grooming abstract pitches and timbres as they traverse vast spans of time via moments of deceptive stillness. If there were ever any doubts that English is a staunch defender of the form from bells and whistles (ambient people love bells and whistles, but you know what I mean), he dispelled them earlier this year in an essay for FACT. Part ambient-history precis, part ambient-future manifesto, it commemorated the 40th anniversary of Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports—which is to say, the 40th birthday of what we consider ambient. If there were such a thing as the Ambient Preservation Society, English would be its president, and this would be his state of the union.
English frames the milestone as ambient entering middle age, an anthropomorphic device that falls apart if you apply it too broadly. (Is jazz geriatric?) Still, the analogy feels apt when considering English’s music within the state of the art. His latest release, a collaboration with William Basinski of The Disintegration Loops fame, has a 40-year-old feeling of competence and caution, of being lived in, of knowing what it is. Its title a reference to the dark forest of Dante’s Inferno, Selva Oscura is a reverent and ordinary tribute to ambient filmmaker Paul Clipson, a mutual friend who died this year. It is not new age or chill-out or IDM. It does not have beats, melodies, or any other bricolage to bind it to any other musical tradition. It does not feign acoustic instruments or choirs. It is ambient music, or it is nothing. Or, to infer from English’s account, it is ambient music, so it is nothing.
Of the pair, English, like a composer, has the steadier idiom and the more cerebral air. Basinski, ever melancholic, is more inclined to let the medium do the talking, in the rustle of the tape loops, the babble of found sounds, and the hush of shortwave radio static. The two 20-minute pieces here hew closer to English’s clean, burnished style than Basinski’s looser, danker one, with more smoothly layered hums than creepy decay. Working remotely in Los Angeles and Brisbane, the creators avoided jammy gestures, kneeling chastely before the form. Instead of moving through a landscape, the record evokes standing still for eons as a landscape moves around you. No rhythms, only ripples; no moments, only motion. High and low, thick and thin, drift and shine—these are the most concrete properties haloing the sound, which exists in a perpetual state of becoming something else.
In that FACT essay, English walks us through the golden age of ambient purity, the wanton diversifying of the 1990s, and the welter of the now. His conclusion, at its core, is plain: Ambient’s future lies in its past. To English, the commandments Eno brought down from the mountain, inscribed in tablets of cloud, are perpetually contemporary. After all, ambient’s defining claim is that it responds to any experience, space, and time. It lives in an eternally renewing present. You don’t have to join the APS, with its implicit mandate to keep circling and circling the airport instead of landing, to admire the clarity of English’s convictions, and he isn’t bothered by people making ambient into pop. He just wants to know what it really is and make sure it gets done. This is a kind of service, one that Selva Oscura fastidiously performs. Someone has to hold down the bedrock of a form so that others may elaborate, fussing about orthodoxy so we don’t have to.
