[microsound] Favorite Writings on Ambient Music?

[guiver ben]

well i kindof liked Tony Marcus' chapter in modulations (ed Peter Shapiro), also Simon Reynolds Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock. Serpent's Tail, August 1990, ISBN 1-85242-199-1 and also Kodwo Eshun's More Brilliant Than...Pauline Oliveros chapter in Audio Culture ("...our ears felt like canyons..."), have also been looking at Haunted Weather by David Toop. 

trying to read Cyberpositive by Orphan Drift, and havent really managed to  take to Attali's Noise. 

its a pity that Kodwo isnt still writing about music, and i'd like to hear more from Robin Rimbaud (he had a chapter in the most recent book about sampling compiled by Dj Spooky). 

i suppose that its not necessarily concrete texts about sound that can be illuminating though, although i'm struggling to think about a text that has engaged or influenced me into sound but from a non-specific standpoint/non-literal (ie not necesarily about music or sound) right now, i think its often the way people talk about sound thats helps animate it, or helps me get into it, for example Robin talking once about how his sound installation at the Salles de Departes in France was like "someone theres a window in the room open and  someone's learning to play the piano for the first time, about a mile away" ie in the sense that the sound was only just audible in the room




--- On Thu, 2/26/09, John Hopkins <jhopkins at tech-no-mad.net> wrote:

> From: John Hopkins <jhopkins at tech-no-mad.net>
> Subject: Re: [microsound] Favorite Writings on Ambient Music?
> To: microsound at microsound.org
> Date: Thursday, February 26, 2009, 7:06 PM
> greets!  (after a day of travel and doing field
> recordings....)...  BTW, 
> I'm not sure if I had announced an open participatory
> project here that 
> a good friend is running -- aporee maps...  for locative
> sound work.  
> http://aporee.org/maps/  I'd be interested in feedback.
>  I am 
> participating under the name "neoscenes" if you
> do a search in the 
> database...
> 
> but on the writings on ambient front, I would recommend a
> writer who I 
> discovered 25 years ago, the recent French Nobel winner,
> Jean Marie 
> Gustave LeClezio.  Hi fiction works (mostly out of print in
> English 
> translation, but a few newer ones are around since the
> Nobel award, 
> surely older ones will be reissued soon) -- given the term
> ambient, his 
> writing is a deep exploration of the ambience of what would
> be to most a 
> non-descript place.  hard to describe, but his works are
> atmospheric in 
> a microscopic way....
> 
> The Book of Flights is my favorite (being a nomad), but The
> Giants, and 
> The Flood are also excellent ...
> 
> jh
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