People who have died say that death is like dreamless sleep. Sleeping has always been an issue for me, and as age wears on I find that it’s an increasingly inescapable enemy. If you’re in the middle of life, yeah maybe ambient music can be a bit boring. Ambient music doesn’t tend to do well in the hustle of the daily work flow at ones day job for instance. I tend to enjoy ambient work in the beginning or the end of my short periods of life.
I first listened to all of this in the middle of a hectic work day filled with shitgarbage. As a result my first notes were cold detached one liners devoid of any real meaning or feeling like “Nice ambient sounds with some guitar overlay”. Mentioning instrumentation or layering helps no one, and is a boring fucking read. I had to get more in tune with what was going on in the music.
I had to calm the fuck down.
Constellation Tatsu has put together a grouping of tracks that, while not great for a work day, are perfect for the more quiet parts of your day. The tracks were received separately, and not in any particular order.
Opening track from the album Open Submission out 05/15/18 on Constellation Tatsu.
Wake up, put on “Open Submission” by Alex Crispin, do yoga, and have breakfast without breaking your silence. Continue your silence for as long as you can in your day, as you don’t really need to talk anyway, because nobody cares what any of us has to say. Be like the title suggests, shut the fuck up, and just submit to the world. The use of sampled sounds, and played instrumentation is a welcome addition. We all know that Alex could have just taken the Full House song and slowed it down 400x in paulstretch, but instead he put in the effort and actually wrote music. It’s beautiful really, and continually reminds me of the ocean for some reason. Swimming in the deep ocean. Sinking down into the darkness for miles and miles.
Track from the album Scene out 03/15/18 on Constellation Tatsu.
Alternatively “blue reminder” by Chihei Hatakeyama is perfect for when you are in that weird in between dream state as you drift off to sleep. While you lie there with your eyes closed, still seeing your bedroom around you, enjoy the dreamy emotional depth that is Chihei Hatakeyama. When the “tall man” appears at the end of your bed you’ll understand what the reminder was for while you’re soundlessly screaming. The comforting pad synths and distorted vocalizations will soothe you as “they” crowd around you and you drift off to sleep. It’s really a very melancholy track with these sad overtones that start to sink in more as it goes on. A mournful wailing calling out into a cold, empty universe for understanding. Cold and empty except for us, and whatever it is that watches me sleep at night.
Opening track from the album Shade Terrarium out 03/15/18 on Constellation Tatsu.
Coruscent Reas, by Endurance, is very calm in the beginning with Birds, sounds of water, and nice mallet like tones. It gradually builds into this intense and stressed feel. This is more for that ‘right after work, I still haven’t started drinking, and my brain feels like hot fuck’ period of time I think. I hadn’t been able to tune into this one fully, and I thought maybe this one is more environmental. I need to be outside in the woods, submerged in the experience, and I live in the suburbs. So I went and sat in my herb garden in the backyard.
The birds remain present, but after the mallet tones, comes some nicer kind of pad sounds which give way to these very unsettling machine like noises. This is wrangled and suffocated into this beautiful swell that the birds even defer to. These tones build into a sort of beacon of sound in a vast empty plain. Building to the crescendo of sound like a religious ritual where everyone builds to the same note and holds it as long as possible. It ends much more quickly than it started, and the sounds of nature return.
Excerpt from the album Ascension Now out 03/15/18 on Constellation Tatsu.
The last track in the grouping was “a higher energy realm (excerpt)” by Lunaria . I wrote the most notes about this one, but it’s also the longest of the tracks. I would say it’s the most approachable and placable in a headspace. It seems very tense, with its droned out organs, and that crescendo that won’t let the tension release, until it does. A lot of this track was built on pace rather than tone I feel, and once there was an end in sight it was taken without hesitation. One moment you’re sucked into the organs, then there were dark space drones, then the sweeps came…
It was ambient music, and it was good.
So sayeth the nobody.
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