The line between ambient music and muzak can be a fine one. The former is “an atmosphere, a surrounding influence: a tint” to envelop the listener, music “intended to induce calm and a space to think,” according to Brian Eno’s liner notes on the topic, while the latter has become a watchword for unremarkable background sounds; stuff to merely fill a room’s silence. To the uninitiated, both can occupy the same murky generic space of the spa or hotel lobby – music that is as ignorable as it is interesting.
For her third solo album, Baltimore-based sitarist and producer Ami Dang pushes her own version of ambience, making the case for instrumental work that lets unease creep into its stillness. Opening with a keening sitar melody backed by the aortic throb of arpeggiated synths on Raiments, Dang goes on to employ her electronic palette with cutting force, darkly droning on Bopoluchi and sparklingly optimistic on Stockholm Syndrome. Her sitar, meanwhile, uplifts the synthetic bedding of her compositions with classical Indian raga melodies and polyrhythmic plucking. In fact, listening to Parted Plains is like experiencing the glacial lassitude of a one-hour raga compressed into four-minute movements.
By nature, then, these fragments can be an intense listen, especially on the compositions inspired by the four tragic romances of the Indian region of Punjab. On Sohni (named after the tale of Sohni Mahiwal, who drowned crossing a river to her lover), Dang layers multiple sitar tracks to evoke the swirling cacophony of water, while Love-Liesse uses oneiric, gently pedalled strings to evoke reunited lovers.
With no percussion, Parted Plains is an amorphous listening experience, one which billows out and provides the atmospheric ambience Eno describes. Yet, it is also much more than that: a self-assured and challenging collection, which would have no place in a spa or hotel lobby, and is all the better for it.
Also out this month
After fleeing to France from Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1960s, Fernando Falcão’s experimental instrumental record Memoria das Aguas fell into obscurity on its release in 1981. This first international reissue sounds remarkably fresh though – Falcão’s homemade string instruments taking on a harsh, electronic quality underneath his kinetic percussion. One of Africa’s foremost independent labels and a key primer for the myriad styles of Nigerian music, Tabansi, releases a sampler featuring a typically joyous new track from highlife pioneer Ebo Taylor and rarities from the likes of jazz trumpeter Zeal Onyia. British-Ghanaian producer Juls releases his debut album, Colour, a mid-tempo exploration through the burgeoning Afrobeats scene. Highlights are the easy-rolling verses of rappers Knucks and Ms Banks.
