How Does One Enjoy Ambient Music?

"Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting."

-Brian Eno

The everyday life of an ambient listener is unchanged mostly from that of a regular person. We go about our workdays and weekends; eating, sleeping etc. Perhaps every now and then we step inside a music store and buy something unusual like Eno's Music For Films or maybe a John Cage piece or something newer like Stars of The Lid. We proceed home, to listen to said record and perhaps our immediate neighbors wonder about our sanity.

Of course who cares about the opinions of other people? Though the ambient listener exists somewhere on the fringes of the rest of the listening world. Others might wonder what we are hoping to extract from the laconic and synth riddled tracks? Certainly we don't have the same expectations held for more accessible musicians in the genres of rock or pop. When I bring home an ambient record and cue it up on my turntable I'm not looking for the quick-fix of a four-chord punk song, in fact I am deliberately eschewing all forms of acceptable songwriting. I will not come away from the experience humming even a quieted tune, because to pinpoint a tune or a rhythm at all would be exhausting and counter-productive.

And yet I listen to ambient music the same way that I listen to most all my music, while cooking supper or reading a book or if the selection is notably impressive I prefer to do nothing at all.

Ambient music is perhaps founded on negation, a blatant refusal of anything resembling the components of song, the best ambient artists aim for immenseness, an expansive landscape of sound to recapitualate like a thought. Or to imitate the very acoustics of nature and sometimes to compliment them. In the case of Ambient Noise there is likely a surge of distortion which conducts the compositions. Though in most every case, from what I can tell, there is an underlying musicality in ambient music, and maybe this is a matter of acquired taste. Though an ambient track moves in particular parts, it is like an organism; at points the breathing indicates something you can nod you head to, if only once or twice. The overall sense is slightly removed but non-distarcting, in fact quite ideal for writing.

Though I wonder if listening to ambient music brings me closer to being a robot.