Ambient connections – Danish soundscapes and Waking Life reflections
Article and pictures by Juliette Thouin
In Ocean of Sound (1995), sound artist and music theorist David Toop gives an alternative history of ambient music that weaves together an immensely disparate array of sounds, genres, styles, stories, and eras. Going from Debussy to Sun Ra to Aphex to Lee Perry to Arthur Russell, it’s a story of experimental (and technological) music’s journey across the twentieth century. A particularly engaging aspect of Toop’s theory is his departure from ambient’s strict definition imposed by the reverence of Brian Eno as the inventor of ambient.
Hero stories are not only redundant; they also limit perspectives to a very closed and narrow view. Elevating individual figures like Eno to almost mythical status sidelines the countless other artists, sounds, reflections and movements that have contributed to this rich and vast genre. Appropriately, refreshing contributions to ambient noted by music journalists such as Phillip Shepburne and Freddie Hudson on the recent darker and more club-oriented twists highlight the artists’ and labels’ involvement in collaboratively-rich communities, preferring anonymity to the cult of personality, floating across the aether of sound. To quote Toop, ambient music might be better defined as music that “searches for new relationships between maker and listener, maker and machine, sound and context”, as he puts it in Ocean of Sound.
Discussions on ambient in recent music criticism have been relatively anxious, as commercialisation has swallowed essence, reducing ambient to a fixed image. At the peak of the anxiety is the genre’s relatively new function as a mental state optimiser to bolster workers’ productivity or as an interim self-healing coach to cope with the pressures and demands of the contemporary, ultimately helping sustain the status-quo.
“Does this shift towards a collectivised listening of ambient mean anything? Were people becoming too overwhelmed by the loudness of the world?”
Here in Lisbon, where I am based, I started to notice a considerable increase in ambient nights, as well as the presence of chill-out rooms or stages in more alternative scenes, such as in the collectives living room and Planeta Manas. Even producer and label co-founder Croatian Amor, a central figure of Copenhagen’s alternative scene, just came to the city’s established club, Lux Fragil, for a live ambient set, next to long-time collaborator and louder producer Varg2tm, to celebrate Posh Isolation’s birthday. In this year’s curation of the electronic festival Waking Life, which takes place in Crato in Portugal, there was a substantial amount of ambient programming, coming from a wide range of nationalities, including Denmark’s acclaimed artist Astrid Sonne. I began to wonder whether this shift towards a collectivised listening of ambient could mean anything. Were people becoming too overwhelmed by the loudness of the world? Or was ambient music reaching towards new potentials through new collectivised experiences?
When music starts getting particularly faster and harder, like in the 90s when raves were raging, in the 2010s when EDM was peaking, and now with post-Covid’s hard techno popular ascension, ambient-y music tends to find a new audience and chill-out rooms return. Both extremes of tempo tend to be attributed to harsher socio-economic conditions – people seek extremes during times when precarity intensifies (as the increase in Europe of populism also testifies to). So, ambient’s popularity does indeed respond to the increasing pace and pressures of contemporary life.
The line-up of Waking Life was diverse enough that it could compare at least slightly to Toop’s hugely diverse ambient anthology. I didn’t know so much about what happens inside the festival, except that it takes place around a lake and that it is an immersive experience, often likened to the more known Boom Festival, also in Portugal and notorious for its focus on psychedelic music, arts, and holistic culture. I went to Waking Life hoping to drift through its lake of sound and try to feel ambient developments through collectivised experiences.This led me to reflect thoroughly on many of the ambient releases I’ve spent time listening to in the past years, including numerous coming out of Denmark. My trip to Waking Life made me reconsider what I found appealing about other artists working with ambient sounds in one way or another and what this might tell about the contemporary status of the genre in general.
The closely-knit Danish Ambience
What does the Danish ambience look like from the outside? Recently, several Danish artists from its alternative scene have come to Lisbon – Astrid Sonne, Croatian Amor, ML Buch or Xuri – all crafting their own specific overtone of ambient. This implicit connection between Denmark and ambient had some foundation. But why? If ambience concerns surroundings, my first (meteoropathic) thought was weather. There is a coldness in some of its experimental and ambient, for instance in “In Alarm Light” by Croatian Amor and Soho Rezanejed, “Moderato” by Astrid Sonne, “Rei” by oqbqbo or “Hello” by Vanessa Amara, that is reminiscent of the iciness, isolation, and desolation of grey winter days.
This mood has been especially pushed outside of the country by Loke Rahbek (aka Croatian Amor) and Christian Stadsgaard’s label, Posh Isolation, though many of their releases aren’t ambient in the more traditional sense of the genre. Celebrating its fifteenth year, this now-established label has thrived by cultivating idiosyncratic productions while maintaining a cohesive vibe.
When I came to Copenhagen late spring, the sun was shining so I was not able to soak this pre-supposed lonely iciness. Instead, I noticed a deep communal spirit that seemed embedded in the city’s essence and its inhabitants. Public spaces were shared spaces, truly public. The infrastructure, at least in the centre, was designed in a way that encouraged people to sit wherever together. In contrast, in Lisbon, the city council is increasingly making public space hostile, changing it into a “passage space” rather than a living space for its residents, gradually removing the right to sit in these spaces. Copenhagen’s city planning on the other hand, has been aimed at making the city an “urban living room” at the service of its residents’ communal conviviality – and it shows. Even residential buildings are surrounded by common courtyards, many of which accessible and open from the street. At least on the face of it, communal spirit seemed to be etched into Danish air – much like it seems to be in its labels.
One long scroll down Posh Isolation’s Bandcamp reveals that features and collaborations have defined it since its first release by Puce Mary and Loke Rahbek. While some older artists may have traded dissonant ambivalence for defined emotional effects (cf. “New Healer” by Croatian Amor, Scandinavian Star and School of X), the label has an eye for upcoming artists with particular sensibilities. Though Ryong’s debut on the label might seem far from ambient, the song “Smile, baby” seems particularly attuned to the ambience of 21st century western cyber-bittersweetness.
Posh Isolation is not the only Danish label to share its particular shade of ambient. Janushoved (Internazionale, Hasfeldt, Xuri, etc.) channels a more traditional ambient, leaning heavily into a depersonalized aesthetic that cultivates a strong sense of community. Another established label, Escho ( Fine, Astrid Sonne, Puyain Sanati..), less bound by aesthetics, genres, and borders, promotes ample space for experimentation, fostering both individual artists’ development and an extremely diverse catalogue. Rhizome (Alto Aria, Laenz, Ingri Høyland, etc.), the youngest of these labels, infuses academic theory into its music, enriching an awareness on the processes of collaboration and producing concept-driven compositions. Most of these would not be defined strictly as ambient, but they all contribute in some way to what the ambient scene has been evolving towards. With a very broad ambient-y idea in mind, I went to explore how these dynamics could play out in a live setting at the Waking Life festival.
Learning about ambience with upsammy and Waking Life
Club-ambient producer upsammy’s dj set was the highlight of my festival experience. I had been eager for her collaborative performance with experimental drummer Valentina Magaletti but had struggled to fully engage with their improvisations. They were the first concert I attended, and in reality, it took me a few days before being able immerse myself fully in the festival. Truthfully, I felt quite uneasy with the inherent contradiction of its utopian pretensions as a politically driven, conscious alternative to current reality rather than fully admitting that it was a drug-induced holiday for neo-hippies.
Upsammy belongs to a diverse strand of clubbed-out eco-sounding ambient that has emerged from the community, substituting hypnotising beats for introspection, structure for jelly-fluidity, and rhythmic consistency for organically mutating soundscapes. What differs perhaps from previous alliances of club with ambient is that this newer mutant seems to operate as a whole rather than a sum of each, powered by technological evolution from production to sound design. Labels like Glasgow-based INDEX:Records and LA-based peak oil have driven the more airy releases, but others like Omen Wapta or the newly founded Copenhagen Academeia expose a darker strain. What these tracks might have in common is being grounded in heavy dub bass movements.
“upsammy dropped us into an aquarium, where sound were gliding and immersing from all sides. It was like a time warp, but it felt like everyone was experiencing it at a different pace.”
Upsammy’s set was time control. She plays this bubbly-IDM wrought with floating bleeps and blops, submerged dubby basses, these rounded rattling kicks, and quivering drums of all patterns and sizes. The producer dropped us into an aquarium, where sounds were gliding and immersing from all sides. Particularly, in this stage, Praia, the sound system made music move like thoughts. It was like a time warp, but it felt like everyone was experiencing it at a different pace. Each person bounced distinctively and instinctively, clutching onto one of the many rhythms playing.
Incidentally, on the way to upsammy, we ran into a wormhole. Some sort of grand and precise manipulation of lights and fog had created a full-thrown hallucination that hypnotised us for some time. These were the serendipitous apparitions that had made me more comfortable with the festival. The closer-to-utopic quality of this organisation was, in my opinion, the investment in daydreamt ideas that had little purpose but required complex execution. Everywhere around the festival, imagination seemed to materialise.
Coming to Waking Life, I had hoped to gain some insight into why there seemed to be an increased tendency in collectivised instances of ambient. Upsammy’s set reinforced my bias that the dancefloor remains the setting for intimate and collectivised experiences. The anonymity of it provides its proximity and inclusivity (dependent on the condition of respect for everyone) for each to let go.
Astrid Sonne’s wholesome doubt
I was curious to see how Astrid Sonne’s vocal-pop development to her electroacoustic experimental ambient would materialise in a performance. This was the first time I was seeing her play live and I would have liked to see her in her more experimental debuts, but it was refreshing to see a conservatory-trained artist let loose.
During the pandemic, Sonne had told Passive/Aggressive’s writer Mathias Schønberg that she would always purposefully leave space in her compositions for her listeners’ feelings. Post-“Great Doubt”, it seems that the abstraction that her instruments permitted also partially fed a level of self-awareness, imposing some distance with her listeners. In Waking Life, the artist no longer hid behind them, coming to the fore of the stage whenever she could put her instruments, and their protective barriers, down.
One of those moments was her Mariah Carey cover “Give my all”. When the beat dropped and the heavy bass pounded, the roughed-up instrumentals resonated with the skeletal essence of dub that lingers through London’s dissonant pop, of the likes of Mica Levi or Dean Blunt. Now based in London, these dragged four-by-four’s, also heard in “Boost” and “Say you love me”, testify to the artist’s deep inhale of the city’s ambivalent mood.
“Ambient, which focuses on creating atmosphere, seems to often leave space for the surroundings of people, and sometimes, as it seems for Sonne, leaving little space for the person (or ego).”
Despite being perhaps the furthest from dub than other ambient acts I attended during the festival, its diluted legacy plus the newly disclosed embodiment made me reflect on ambient’s depersonalised essence. Both dub and ambient could be described as depersonalised music in their own way. Dub, from its inception in the Jamaican sixties, is about stripping out the vocals, abstracting the person, and in the words of cultural theorist Kodwo Eshun, leaving the “skeletal ribcage” of the song. In this way, dub acknowledges the person through their absence, or at least this ghostly process by which they are rendered absent. Ambient, which focuses on creating atmosphere, seems to often leave space for the surroundings of people, and sometimes, as it seems for Sonne, leaving little space for the person (or ego). Dub reveals its raw ambience by abstracting voice and ego, but in her new artistic development, Sonne had stripped down her sound and self by laying her velvety and mundane voice bare.
While not presenting a particularly radical development to the genre or to the festival, the concert brought forth a certain softness and easiness that came as a breeze. The air during the concert was wholesome; the audience seated, relaxed, and focused were giving their all to warmly welcome Astrid Sonne’s humble drift.
Synthesising nature’s care: Ingri Høyland’s Ode To Stone
Ambient music carries a deep bond with nature, traditionally aspiring to the patterns and rhythms of breezes, trickles, and rustles, as well as to its time—slow, subtle processes of growth and change. The impending environmental doom proves we need a new relationship with ecology – one that sees it as more than just a resource to exploit. Some eco-ambient, in my opinion, might be too preoccupied with nature’s awe as a way to feed an inner dialogue of comfort. Others, like Ingri Høyland’s Ode To Stone, a response to an open call on Danish national parks, seem to challenge this exploitative and dominating relationship.
“”Memory in hand” feels like a codified birdsong broadcasted as a reflection on water”
Ode To Stone wanders in the ground. The album is a collaborative project with artist and bassist Ida Urd, sculptor Lea Gulditte Hestelund, and fellow ambient artist Sofie Birch, working together on the composition/performance, concept, and mixing respectively.
I’ve listened to “Memory in hand” on a loop. A track both disorienting and harmonious that feels like a codified birdsong broadcasted as a reflection on glistening water. High-pitched trills move horizontally between each ear while a deep synth grounds you below its level, creating this constant shimmer between light and dark, peace and agitation.
Lea Gulditte Hestlehund’s practice revolves around bodies and living forms that are “not really human”. In Ode To Stone, the body is absent in its form, seeming to exist only through glimpses of sensations. It does materialise in the closing track, “Body knows”, amidst the field recordings of waves crashing and strong winds that rattle against the mic. A profound bass muffles your ears in the same way the wind might in an outdoor experience, that overpowers the possibility of hearing anything else from the surroundings. This bass comes and goes, inhales and exhales – who is breathing? Is it you, the stone, the wind, the dunes, the surroundings or the ambience?
Released on the conceptually-driven label Rhizome, the Danish collective explores alternative modes of storytelling to move beyond traditional narratives of aggression and domination, focusing instead on collaboration and care. Inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s “carrier bag theory,” which reframes the carrier bag as the first human tool rather than the spearhead, Rhizome emphasises interconnectedness and shared narratives.
What if the ode to the stone is the stone as a carrier? The stone humbles the human, it carries world time, shrivelling human time to particles compared to the eras it lived and memorialised. Ambient music removes not only music as the focal point but also the human.
Bringing ambient to life: Ulla S’ autonomic compositions
Ulla S (aka ulla, Ulla Straus) was one of the producers I had really looked forward to listening to at Waking Life. The American producer is part of the prolifically collaborative environment that has been pulling ambient towards new sensations, releasing on labels West Mineral Ltd., Motion Ward, Lillerne Tapes, 3XL, and with projects such as Pontiac Streator, Perila, or more recently, Ultrafog. I had been rather sceptical of the choice of stage programmed for her joint performance with Jan Jelinek, acclaimed experimental sound artist and faitiche label founder – the stage Outro Lado had been home to an almost constant flux of tech house during the festival. But it turned out to be the ideal ambience.
“Ulla S’s performance at Waking Life merged the natural and the synthetic into one living piece.”
Instead of the stage, the pair had moved to a couch in the middle of the audience who were for the most sitting or lying down in groups chatting. When I also laid down, feeling the heavy force of the subwoofer vibrations, I noticed for the first time that the speakers and lights were hanging from the trees. It was hard to distinguish between field recordings of birds and real ones, merging the natural and the synthetic into one living piece. It felt like the place to experience this synergy between the natural and the technological that this new wave of ambient was sensualising.
When Ulla started her set, it felt like a microphone had been placed in the middle of the lake around which the festival was centred. It captured and transmitted the water-logged distortions and echoes, fragments, drops, and flickers of the stories and music that had been taking place during the past four days. Every bleep and bloop of the set was part of this bigger whole.
This performance opposed the necrotizing stereotypes of old ambient music by bringing the pieces to life – compositions were alive. New waves of ambient music shift from abstract depictions of nature to autonomic forms. Autonomic refers to processes that occur involuntarily or automatically without conscious control, like breathing. As technology advances, these artists seem to focus less on mimicking nature and more on understanding its workings.
Ambient senses of collectivity
So, are we listening to more ambient because the world has become overwhelmingly loud? While the socio-economic pressures of our times undeniably influence cultural trends – with ambient being one – another important factor that should not be taken for granted is the unprecedented access to music. 10 years ago, music critic Simon Reynolds titled his article We Are All David Toop Now among many other things noting that internet access means that being a music nerd, listening to a hugely diverse library of music, and producing super-hybridised music has never been easier.
But this feeling of collectivity that has been emerging in both the production and reception of ambient music, in my own opinion, does speak to the political undercurrents of music. Music, in my view, is inherently political – not necessarily in an activist sense but because it can make you feel part of a something. Many different somethings and feelings previously unexplored – like upsammy’s underwater dancefloor, Astrid Sonne’s intimate performance, or Ulla S and Ingri Hoyland’s fusion of nature with technology. Ambient music is more than just an escape.
Info: Waking Life took place in Crato, Portugal on June 19-24.
