As a writer one often asks oneself if perhaps they don’t lean a little too heavily on certain words and for me, aside from (among many others) the already-used ‘perhaps,’ the verb ’emerge’ and its adjectival offspring ’emergent’ quite frequently, I feel, find themselves pressed into service to help convey the mood and movement of a piece of music as heard in real time. And while I often, to one degree or another, chide myself for such over-reliances – the drive to avoid what I’m choosing to term ‘weak thesaurus syndrome’ could hardly be stronger – it’s nonetheless the case that given the fact that A) as rich as it is there are still only so many words in the English language and B) I have of late begun wading into the shoals of ambient music for reasons I’ll get to in a sec, I’m afraid that usage of that particular mother word and all its clingy dependents is pretty much unavoidable. As I suspect is the case for many of my generation that came of true musical age in the late 70s, my first encounter with ambient composition was Eno’s 1979-released Ambient 1 (Music For Airports). Drawn to the record … Continue reading A Soft, Exquisite Force – Pan•American/Kramer Collaboration “Reverberations of Non-Stop Traffic on Redding Road”