Post-Ambient

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Post-Ambient is a recently conceptualised musical genre, fusing the noise-addled soundscapiness of Ambient/Post-Rock performers & composers such as Brian Eno, Henry Cow and Karlheinz Stockhausen with the childish theatricality & artful nihilism of Free Improvisation mavericks such as Hugh Metcalfe. Post-ambient music can either be composed using a Digital audio workstation (Ableton Live and Audiomulch are popular choices), it can be semi-improvised or it can be free-improvised.

The sounds involved can be greatly dynamically varied in timbre, pitch and texture (for instance using plug-ins such as Native Instruments' Absynth & smart-electronix), although post-ambient strives for a coherence, an idiomaticness and indeed a musicality (at least, in a pre-Cage sense of the word, for instance experimenting with jazz & classical instrumentation, or the use of toy instruments) that Free Improvisation and Noise performers consciously seek to avoid. A key feature of Post-Ambient, is a willingness to (as Damo Suzuki of Can said) "bring the outdoors indoors", but the metaphor is in this sense extended to not merely include birds, trees and ambiences, but also to any sound which can be conceptualised as "outside". This can take the form of using pre-recorded samples, or it could take the form of self-sampling.

Artists who have been retrospectively been identified as Post-Ambient, while having no involvement in the emergent London Post-Ambient scene include Four Tet.

Post-ambient was perhaps cruelly ushered into existence by the May 2006 release on Partially Sane Records of Anywhere's 1-track EP 'Ukulele', which received brief support from BBC Radio 1.

[edit] Key figures

• Galileo (Anywhere, We are Scientologists)
• Planck (Anywhere)
• Stewart Keith (Smell & Quim, Physeter Macrocephalus)
• Gottfried von Leibniz (The Rise & Fall)
• Gerald the Teddy (Anywhere, Nonvolume Drugs)
• Davor Reich (Solipsist, Physeter Macrocephalus)
• Iron Jeffreys (Solipsist, Manganese, John Aziz Quartet)
• Karl Waugh (disillusion..., Non-volume Drugs)
• Niels Bohr (We are Scientologists, I am Mark E. Smith)
• Rijkaard Houtvester (David Doak Trio, The Rise & Fall, I am Mark E. Smith)
• Robert Smith (No- not that one, David Doak Trio, I am Mark E. Smith)
• Olivier Munz (George Foreman's Killin' & Grillin' Rock n Roll Quintet)

[edit] Key releases

• Physeter Macrocephalus - Blue Bread (April 2006, Partially Sane)
• Anywhere - Ukulele (May 2006, Partially Sane)
• Anywhere - Where Else? (July 2006, Partially Sane)
• The Rise & Fall - c0uh7w (September 2006)
• Anywhere - The Casual Ocean (January 2007, Partially Sane)
• Solipsist - Standing on a well chilled cinder, we see the fading of the suns, and try to recall the vanished brilliance of the origin of worlds (February 2007)
• Galileo - Chinese Democracy EP (March 2007)