To make beautiful music to chill out to is a simple concept. But those simple things can prove the most beguiling. A quick scan of ambient music in the 2010s reveals a cornucopia of immersive headtrips, icy expanses, sorrowful collages, high-concept inversions, and no small amount of kosmische synths, yet an album of light-as-a-feather music for yoga still scans as a bit gauche. One imagines digital djembes, sappy flutes, and seashore cover art staring you down from the CD rack at a local health-food co-op. New age’s earnestness was both its greatest asset and its Achilles’ heel, spurring artists to radical spiritual goals while often blinding them to their own corniness. But on Tides: Music for Meditation and Yoga, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith keeps things in check. Commissioned in 2013 by her mother as background music for her yoga practice, the album elegantly sketches nine pieces with a minimum of means—just Smith’s Buchla synthesizer and a few field recordings. This is functional music, and as with the best functional music it finds freedom in getting out of its own way.
Tides is lean. It’s a testament to its economy that the ascending melodic noodle central to the opening track feels grandiose after a few spins of the LP. True to its name, Tides slowly ebbs and flows, moving with a gradual deliberateness that has nothing to do with tension and release. Instead you wade into it, floating on its bobbing waves until you’re ready to come out. The tracks are just distinct enough to keep monotony at bay, but cohesive enough that you might not catch when one ends and the next begins. Put it on loop and go about your day and you’d be hard pressed to notice when you were in the fourth, fifth, or eighth rotation.
That said, Smith really hits her stride as the album develops. “Tides I” may serve a mood-setting purpose, but it hews a little too close to children’s music. Its buoyancy grates every so slightly, telegraphing serenity with perhaps too much eagerness. But soon enough, the music stretches out, melting into something more sublime. “Tides IV” gently slows time with a warbly melody and warm whooshes of static, while “Tides V” bathes in lush, consonant drones.
This wind-down, from the bustle of the day into the still center of a deep stretch, casts a spell regardless of context, but true to its nature it works best when played in the background. When listened to without distraction, the album felt somehow lacking—I kept searching for a foreground that never appears. But when you put it on and forget about it, it can transform a room. In this sense, Tides succeeds as ambient music in its purest form.
I’m often struck by a suffocating optimism that keeps cropping up in modern pop. In cafes, advertisements, and seemingly anywhere millennials congregate, I hear choruses of wordless whoa whoa whoa-ing—a plague of ambitions and superlatives. At moments, Tides edges in this blandly pastel direction, nudging its round synth tones into treacly affirmations. But at its best, it truly does soothe. Often, the purely pleasurable gets a bad rap in music. As critical listeners, we may feel uneasy with the inviting, the humorous, or the purely fun. Darkness, ambiguity, and innovation are wonderful, but do we need them while doing yoga? Tides requires no justification for its existence beyond its own warmth. Take it or leave it, but as its final track dissolves into three minutes of bird calls and chimes, I doubt you won’t feel better than when you put it on.
