22. Snorkel – Glass
Darkly
21. Quiet Village – Silent Movie
The idea of ambient music, defined by Brian Eno in the liner
notes for 1978’s Music For Airports,
required that “it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.” For purveyors of ambient music of ambient
music in 2008, that maxim should probably be reversed: Ambient music should be
as interesting as it is ignorable. While
Eno undoubtedly changed the way rock musicians think about music, he also
inspired thousands of musicians to lean hard on ignorable qualities, chasing
after the idea of ambient music.
Unfortunately, uninteresting music is exactly that. Ironically, the thrill in listening to
ambient music is often the danger within it:
How much does the artist have to do before he tips over into music that needs to be heard? How little does he have to do to make someone
listen? How much does he have to do to
make someone listen just a little bit? If you put “interesting” on the x-axis of a
graph and “ignorable” on the y-axis, it would be pretty easy to chart most
bands. Two artists this year exploded
that entire idea, creating albums that can’t decide how much they’d actually
like to be heard. Snorkel’s Glass Darkly
and
A collective of six pedigreed and versatile London-based
musicians, Snorkel builds its songs on foundations of simple grooves—often with
only two or three notes—and improvisation.
Each foundation carries a series of genre-explorations. “Rub Attractor/My Elephant” takes a turn
toward mariachi. “Bubble Black” rides on
fantastic, jazzy drum-skittering. Dub,
post-rock and afro-beat all get put through their paces, as do long-forgotten
genres like, say, glitch. Sometimes the
guitars use heavy metal chord patterns.
Frequently, the horns don’t quite fulfill the melodies they
promise. Industrial noises, computer
garble, and flights of laughter reach up through the music. The overall effect of Glass Darkly is bursts of interesting held steady by a bassline of
ignorable.
Quiet Village takes a far
different approach—one stylistically closer to Girl Talk, of all people. Joel Martin (Zeus) and Matt Edwards (Radio
Slave) take liberal samples from sources considered tragically unhip—we’re
talking Janis Ian and The Alan Parsons Project—and weave them into strangely
compelling grooves. Unafraid of
approaching easy-listening territory, Quiet Village (named after a classic Martin Denny track) seem absolutely fascinated by
schmaltz. That preoccupation dominates Silent Movie. Then, the album’s highlights blow up the
formula: On “Circus of Horrors,” a
psychedelic guitar riff creates the rhythm while syrupy sounds—flutes and TV
theme music—frollick underneath. Sirens
get dropped into the mix, but even they sound as breezy as a gust of wind off
low tide. “Too High To Move” transforms
the spoken story from Captain n’ Tenille’s “Never Make Your Move Too Soon” into
Isaac Hayes’ “By the Time I Get To Phoenix” for the Starbucks jazz effecianado.
Though they approach the music from two wildly disparate angles, both Quiet Village and Snorkel come up with conceptually familiar albums. Glass Darkly’s improvisatory spirit and Silent Movie’s recontextualized elevator music both result in intricate, idea-based jams posing as background music—both elusive and deceptively simple; both indelibly funky in spite of themselves.
-Martin Brown, 2008
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