I am Elliott Associate Professor of Music at Hampden-Sydney College, where I teach in the Department of Fine Arts. My work investigates western popular music since the invention of the phonograph, with special focus on electronic and experimental pop music, as well as on the use of media to alter consciousness. My monograph, Turn On, Tune In, Drift Off: Ambient Music's Psychedelic Past (Oxford UP 2023) explores the psychedelic aesthetics and countercultural history of the ambient music genre. My current research investigates the art and techniques of DJing in the US electronic dance music underground, particularly as they relate to psychedelic experience and aesthetics. I received a Ph.D. in Music (Critical & Comparative Studies) from the University of Virginia in 2015.
The Oxford Handbook of Electronic Dance Music, 2021
This chapter investigates why white and light-skinned artists have long dominated representations... more This chapter investigates why white and light-skinned artists have long dominated representations of ambient music, a popular (sub)genre of electronic music and style of EDM, within anglophone EDM scenes and media discourses. It explores how early discourses on ambient implicitly shaped the genre’s aesthetics around idealizations of hip highbrow and high-middlebrow white masculinity. Starting in the 1970s and 80s, these discourses tacitly disregarded the relevance of genres racialized as non-white to ambient’s ideals of aesthetic experimentation, affective detachment, cerebral introspection, and physical ease. EDM-oriented discourses reified the putative whiteness of this formation in the early 1990s by repeatedly attaching the ambient label to the expressions of white men while describing the music, by way of a racialized and gendered mind-body binary, as the “beatless” emanation of disembodied mind(s), rather than of individuals. This history illuminates how popular genres become racialized through feedback loops of musical production and discursive categorization. In the course of tracing this history, the author proposes that a discursive framework of “strategic anti-genre-essentialism,” which positions genres as processes rather than categories, may help to undermine essentialist assumptions about music and race without dismissing them.
Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2021
Music from the Hearts of Space, a freeform music program that aired across Northern California on... more Music from the Hearts of Space, a freeform music program that aired across Northern California on KPFA-FM Pacifica Radio from 1973, set forth an expansive transgeneric vision of contemplative atmospheric “space music” whose properties, in the following decades, would become more popularly codified as either “new age” or “ambient.” Histories of these latter genres typically separate out ambient’s avant-garde lineage and secular functionalism from new age’s therapeutic and spiritual concerns; but an examination of Hearts’s first decade on the air, leading up to its 1983 syndication via National Public Radio’s satellite network, reveals a sonic and cultural milieu that belies this eventual generic split. Through investigation of Hearts’s private archive and interviews with the program’s host Stephen Hill, as well as industry research, cultural-historical study, and style analysis, I situate the genesis of Hearts’s proto-ambient sound within the Bay Area’s new age movement of the 1970s and early 1980s. Informed by the metaphor of the global media environment established in systems theory and popularized by Marshall McLuhan and Stewart Brand, artists and media producers within this grassroots technoculture designed and spread “alternative” personal media for the development of holistic awareness. These media included slow, reverberant, hypnotic recorded music, as curated by Hill and his cohost Anna Turner under the guiding concept of “space music.” This early history and analysis of Hearts’s space music as an atmospheric medium for attuning the listening self to a worldwide media ecology deepens and complicates genealogies that isolate the formation of ambient music from that of new age, revealing a cross-pollination of highbrow and countercultural ideals that led many musicians associated with the new age movement to similar sonic conclusions to those of ambient music architect Brian Eno.
In the liner notes to his album Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978), Brian Eno (1948–) defined A... more In the liner notes to his album Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978), Brian Eno (1948–) defined Ambient music in contradistinction to Muzak’s ‘derivative’ instrumental pop arrangements. Ambient music’s historians and critics have often followed Eno by describing Ambient music as an alternative to conventional ‘background’ or ‘programmed’ music for commercial spaces. Such descriptions can be misleading, however, given that Ambient music’s dominant mode of reception is selective personal consumption, not public administration. This article investigates the aesthetics of Eno’s Airports, and elucidates the organizing role of the Ambient genre, within their primary reception context of personal recorded music listening. A comparison with The Black Dog’s Music for Real Airports (2010) shows how Ambient music then and now reflexively affords atmospheric use by translating a sense of physical dwelling and passage into mixed musical moods. By expressing ambivalence about the reality of airports and air travel, these Ambient records characteristically convey apprehension about the technological administration of human experience – a phenomenon that includes personal recorded music listening.
In September 1978, Brian Eno coined the term “Ambient music” to describe a type of audio recordin... more In September 1978, Brian Eno coined the term “Ambient music” to describe a type of audio recording designed to create atmosphere. Ambient music, he proposed, should foster calm while registering doubt, and accommodate various different levels of listening attention. Since Eno’s proposal, Ambient music has become a genre of drone- and loop-based electronic music within the popular music market.
This dissertation examines several key recordings in the formation of the Ambient genre of popular music, with focus on releases from the U.S. and England between the late 1960s and early 1990s. Through music analyses of these recordings, as well as media analyses of their promotional rhetoric, this dissertation traces the sonic tropes and social practices discursively organized by the “Ambient” label. It describes how Ambient music serves users as a means of relaxing, regulating mood, and fostering an atmosphere or sense of place. Unlike most extant accounts of the genre, it also explores how Ambient recordings reflect aesthetically upon their instrumentality through musical techniques, metaphors, and moods. A survey of approximately one-hundred Ambient listeners rounds out the study, illuminating from a present-day perspective how reception practices relate to the production and interpretation of Ambient recordings.
Chapters 1 and 3 examine two proto-Ambient recordings from the Environments series of nature sound LPs (Atlantic, 1969–78), released by Syntonic Research, Inc. These analyses elucidate the aesthetics and technological uses that since consolidated Ambient music as a genre, and describe shifting attitudes toward consumer technology in the Western environmental and countercultural movements. Chapter 2 compares and contrasts Environments with recordings from the concurrently emerging Acoustic Ecology movement.
Chapters 4 and 5 investigate various artistic and conceptual practices that informed Brian Eno’s conception of Ambient music. Chapter 4 identifies precedents for Eno’s concept in the experimental avant-garde music of Erik Satie, John Cage, La Monte Young, and Steve Reich. Chapter 5 analyzes the title recording on Eno’s Discreet Music album (Obscure, 1975), placing its production in the context of 1960s and ‘70s English minimalism, as well as the research field of cybernetics. It concludes with a media analysis of the record as a consumer product, illustrating how the elimination of authorial intention in experimental composition and cybernetics translates into popular art.
Chapters 6 and 7 outline Ambient music’s explicit emergence as a term in the popular music market. Chapter 6 examines Brian Eno’s Music for Airports (Editions E.G., 1978) through a comparative analysis with The Black Dog’s Music for Real Airports (Soma Quality Recordings, 2010), illuminating the relevance of Ambient music’s contexts of consumption to interpretation. It concludes with a brief reading of Eno’s On Land (Editions E.G., 1982), which cemented Ambient music’s significance within private, individualized reception. Chapter 7 concludes the study with an overview of various recordings by The Orb, KLF, Mixmaster Morris, and Pete Namlook in the “ambient house” subgenre of electronic dance music, illustrating their connections with the aesthetic themes and promotional discourses of earlier Ambient recordings.
I am happy to share a PDF with anyone interested in reading. Feel free to email me at vszabo@virginia.edu.
In this paper, I interpret the musical performativity of Jamie Stewart, frontman for experimental... more In this paper, I interpret the musical performativity of Jamie Stewart, frontman for experimental pop/rock band Xiu Xiu, in terms of abjection. In contradistinction to analyses that represent abjection primarily as a psychic property or pathology, I read abjection as a state of social exclusion or rejection perpetuated by socialized individuals. Stewart’s provocative vocal performances in Xiu Xiu dramatize the conditions upon which these exclusions are formed and enforced, illustrating the connection between abjection and the normative aesthetic expectations by which we assess the moral status of others.
In his pioneering analysis of social stigma (1963), Erving Goffman explains how abnormal subjects are socialized to “manage” their stigmata, those signs which mark them as abject, so as not to interrupt the smooth functioning of civil exchange. This paper reads Stewart’s vocal performances as contestations of this implicit demand, showing vocalization to be a salient dimension of stigma management. In delivering the awkward vocal cues and unseemly sounds that signal degraded self-esteem, Stewart stages a refusal to manage the sonic stigmata associated with histories of depression, abuse, and deviant sexual desire. His performances sound out the struggles of those for whom the absence of reciprocality is an unwelcome norm, and of whom silence about such struggles is expected.
This paper analyzes several songs in which Stewart performs an acute awareness of the degraded moral status of his performances. I interpret them in the context of his broader performative project. In doing so, I seek to broaden the scope of existing queer theory that, following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2005), reads queer performativity as necessarily patterned around shame, stigma, and abjection. While much of this scholarship relies primarily on visual tropes, this paper instead focuses on the way sound likewise organizes social normativities.
Turn On, Tune In, Drift Off: Ambient Music's Psychedelic Past (Oxford UP, 2022), 2022
Turn On, Tune In, Drift Off: Ambient Music's Psychedelic Past rethinks the history and socioaesth... more Turn On, Tune In, Drift Off: Ambient Music's Psychedelic Past rethinks the history and socioaesthetics of ambient music as a popular genre with roots in the psychedelic countercultures of the late twentieth century. Victor Szabo reveals how anglophone audio producers and DJs between the mid-1960s and century's end commodified drone- and loop-based records as "ambient audio": slow, spare, spacious audio sold as artful personal media for creating atmosphere, fostering contemplation, transforming awareness, and stilling the body.
The book takes a trip through landmark ambient audio productions and related discourses, including marketing rhetoric, artist manifestos and interviews, and music criticism, that during this time plotted the conventions of what became known as ambient music. These productions include nature sounds records, experimental avant-garde pieces, "space music" radio, psychedelic and cosmic rock albums, electronic dance music compilations, and of course, explicitly "ambient" music, all of which popularized ambient audio through vivid atmospheric concepts.
In paying special attention to the sound of ambient audio; to ambient audio's relationship with the psychedelic, New Age, and rave countercultures of the US and UK; and to the coincident evolution of therapeutic audio and "head music" across alternative media and independent music markets, this history situates ambient music as a hip highbrow framing and stylization of ongoing practices in crafting audio to alter consciousness, comportment, and mood. In so doing, Turn On, Tune In, Drift Off illuminates the social and aesthetic rifts and alliances informing one of today's most popular musical experimentalisms.
The Oxford Handbook of Electronic Dance Music, 2021
This chapter investigates why white and light-skinned artists have long dominated representations... more This chapter investigates why white and light-skinned artists have long dominated representations of ambient music, a popular (sub)genre of electronic music and style of EDM, within anglophone EDM scenes and media discourses. It explores how early discourses on ambient implicitly shaped the genre’s aesthetics around idealizations of hip highbrow and high-middlebrow white masculinity. Starting in the 1970s and 80s, these discourses tacitly disregarded the relevance of genres racialized as non-white to ambient’s ideals of aesthetic experimentation, affective detachment, cerebral introspection, and physical ease. EDM-oriented discourses reified the putative whiteness of this formation in the early 1990s by repeatedly attaching the ambient label to the expressions of white men while describing the music, by way of a racialized and gendered mind-body binary, as the “beatless” emanation of disembodied mind(s), rather than of individuals. This history illuminates how popular genres become racialized through feedback loops of musical production and discursive categorization. In the course of tracing this history, the author proposes that a discursive framework of “strategic anti-genre-essentialism,” which positions genres as processes rather than categories, may help to undermine essentialist assumptions about music and race without dismissing them.
Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2021
Music from the Hearts of Space, a freeform music program that aired across Northern California on... more Music from the Hearts of Space, a freeform music program that aired across Northern California on KPFA-FM Pacifica Radio from 1973, set forth an expansive transgeneric vision of contemplative atmospheric “space music” whose properties, in the following decades, would become more popularly codified as either “new age” or “ambient.” Histories of these latter genres typically separate out ambient’s avant-garde lineage and secular functionalism from new age’s therapeutic and spiritual concerns; but an examination of Hearts’s first decade on the air, leading up to its 1983 syndication via National Public Radio’s satellite network, reveals a sonic and cultural milieu that belies this eventual generic split. Through investigation of Hearts’s private archive and interviews with the program’s host Stephen Hill, as well as industry research, cultural-historical study, and style analysis, I situate the genesis of Hearts’s proto-ambient sound within the Bay Area’s new age movement of the 1970s and early 1980s. Informed by the metaphor of the global media environment established in systems theory and popularized by Marshall McLuhan and Stewart Brand, artists and media producers within this grassroots technoculture designed and spread “alternative” personal media for the development of holistic awareness. These media included slow, reverberant, hypnotic recorded music, as curated by Hill and his cohost Anna Turner under the guiding concept of “space music.” This early history and analysis of Hearts’s space music as an atmospheric medium for attuning the listening self to a worldwide media ecology deepens and complicates genealogies that isolate the formation of ambient music from that of new age, revealing a cross-pollination of highbrow and countercultural ideals that led many musicians associated with the new age movement to similar sonic conclusions to those of ambient music architect Brian Eno.
In the liner notes to his album Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978), Brian Eno (1948–) defined A... more In the liner notes to his album Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978), Brian Eno (1948–) defined Ambient music in contradistinction to Muzak’s ‘derivative’ instrumental pop arrangements. Ambient music’s historians and critics have often followed Eno by describing Ambient music as an alternative to conventional ‘background’ or ‘programmed’ music for commercial spaces. Such descriptions can be misleading, however, given that Ambient music’s dominant mode of reception is selective personal consumption, not public administration. This article investigates the aesthetics of Eno’s Airports, and elucidates the organizing role of the Ambient genre, within their primary reception context of personal recorded music listening. A comparison with The Black Dog’s Music for Real Airports (2010) shows how Ambient music then and now reflexively affords atmospheric use by translating a sense of physical dwelling and passage into mixed musical moods. By expressing ambivalence about the reality of airports and air travel, these Ambient records characteristically convey apprehension about the technological administration of human experience – a phenomenon that includes personal recorded music listening.
In September 1978, Brian Eno coined the term “Ambient music” to describe a type of audio recordin... more In September 1978, Brian Eno coined the term “Ambient music” to describe a type of audio recording designed to create atmosphere. Ambient music, he proposed, should foster calm while registering doubt, and accommodate various different levels of listening attention. Since Eno’s proposal, Ambient music has become a genre of drone- and loop-based electronic music within the popular music market.
This dissertation examines several key recordings in the formation of the Ambient genre of popular music, with focus on releases from the U.S. and England between the late 1960s and early 1990s. Through music analyses of these recordings, as well as media analyses of their promotional rhetoric, this dissertation traces the sonic tropes and social practices discursively organized by the “Ambient” label. It describes how Ambient music serves users as a means of relaxing, regulating mood, and fostering an atmosphere or sense of place. Unlike most extant accounts of the genre, it also explores how Ambient recordings reflect aesthetically upon their instrumentality through musical techniques, metaphors, and moods. A survey of approximately one-hundred Ambient listeners rounds out the study, illuminating from a present-day perspective how reception practices relate to the production and interpretation of Ambient recordings.
Chapters 1 and 3 examine two proto-Ambient recordings from the Environments series of nature sound LPs (Atlantic, 1969–78), released by Syntonic Research, Inc. These analyses elucidate the aesthetics and technological uses that since consolidated Ambient music as a genre, and describe shifting attitudes toward consumer technology in the Western environmental and countercultural movements. Chapter 2 compares and contrasts Environments with recordings from the concurrently emerging Acoustic Ecology movement.
Chapters 4 and 5 investigate various artistic and conceptual practices that informed Brian Eno’s conception of Ambient music. Chapter 4 identifies precedents for Eno’s concept in the experimental avant-garde music of Erik Satie, John Cage, La Monte Young, and Steve Reich. Chapter 5 analyzes the title recording on Eno’s Discreet Music album (Obscure, 1975), placing its production in the context of 1960s and ‘70s English minimalism, as well as the research field of cybernetics. It concludes with a media analysis of the record as a consumer product, illustrating how the elimination of authorial intention in experimental composition and cybernetics translates into popular art.
Chapters 6 and 7 outline Ambient music’s explicit emergence as a term in the popular music market. Chapter 6 examines Brian Eno’s Music for Airports (Editions E.G., 1978) through a comparative analysis with The Black Dog’s Music for Real Airports (Soma Quality Recordings, 2010), illuminating the relevance of Ambient music’s contexts of consumption to interpretation. It concludes with a brief reading of Eno’s On Land (Editions E.G., 1982), which cemented Ambient music’s significance within private, individualized reception. Chapter 7 concludes the study with an overview of various recordings by The Orb, KLF, Mixmaster Morris, and Pete Namlook in the “ambient house” subgenre of electronic dance music, illustrating their connections with the aesthetic themes and promotional discourses of earlier Ambient recordings.
I am happy to share a PDF with anyone interested in reading. Feel free to email me at vszabo@virginia.edu.
In this paper, I interpret the musical performativity of Jamie Stewart, frontman for experimental... more In this paper, I interpret the musical performativity of Jamie Stewart, frontman for experimental pop/rock band Xiu Xiu, in terms of abjection. In contradistinction to analyses that represent abjection primarily as a psychic property or pathology, I read abjection as a state of social exclusion or rejection perpetuated by socialized individuals. Stewart’s provocative vocal performances in Xiu Xiu dramatize the conditions upon which these exclusions are formed and enforced, illustrating the connection between abjection and the normative aesthetic expectations by which we assess the moral status of others.
In his pioneering analysis of social stigma (1963), Erving Goffman explains how abnormal subjects are socialized to “manage” their stigmata, those signs which mark them as abject, so as not to interrupt the smooth functioning of civil exchange. This paper reads Stewart’s vocal performances as contestations of this implicit demand, showing vocalization to be a salient dimension of stigma management. In delivering the awkward vocal cues and unseemly sounds that signal degraded self-esteem, Stewart stages a refusal to manage the sonic stigmata associated with histories of depression, abuse, and deviant sexual desire. His performances sound out the struggles of those for whom the absence of reciprocality is an unwelcome norm, and of whom silence about such struggles is expected.
This paper analyzes several songs in which Stewart performs an acute awareness of the degraded moral status of his performances. I interpret them in the context of his broader performative project. In doing so, I seek to broaden the scope of existing queer theory that, following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2005), reads queer performativity as necessarily patterned around shame, stigma, and abjection. While much of this scholarship relies primarily on visual tropes, this paper instead focuses on the way sound likewise organizes social normativities.
Turn On, Tune In, Drift Off: Ambient Music's Psychedelic Past (Oxford UP, 2022), 2022
Turn On, Tune In, Drift Off: Ambient Music's Psychedelic Past rethinks the history and socioaesth... more Turn On, Tune In, Drift Off: Ambient Music's Psychedelic Past rethinks the history and socioaesthetics of ambient music as a popular genre with roots in the psychedelic countercultures of the late twentieth century. Victor Szabo reveals how anglophone audio producers and DJs between the mid-1960s and century's end commodified drone- and loop-based records as "ambient audio": slow, spare, spacious audio sold as artful personal media for creating atmosphere, fostering contemplation, transforming awareness, and stilling the body.
The book takes a trip through landmark ambient audio productions and related discourses, including marketing rhetoric, artist manifestos and interviews, and music criticism, that during this time plotted the conventions of what became known as ambient music. These productions include nature sounds records, experimental avant-garde pieces, "space music" radio, psychedelic and cosmic rock albums, electronic dance music compilations, and of course, explicitly "ambient" music, all of which popularized ambient audio through vivid atmospheric concepts.
In paying special attention to the sound of ambient audio; to ambient audio's relationship with the psychedelic, New Age, and rave countercultures of the US and UK; and to the coincident evolution of therapeutic audio and "head music" across alternative media and independent music markets, this history situates ambient music as a hip highbrow framing and stylization of ongoing practices in crafting audio to alter consciousness, comportment, and mood. In so doing, Turn On, Tune In, Drift Off illuminates the social and aesthetic rifts and alliances informing one of today's most popular musical experimentalisms.
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Writing by Victor Szabo
This dissertation examines several key recordings in the formation of the Ambient genre of popular music, with focus on releases from the U.S. and England between the late 1960s and early 1990s. Through music analyses of these recordings, as well as media analyses of their promotional rhetoric, this dissertation traces the sonic tropes and social practices discursively organized by the “Ambient” label. It describes how Ambient music serves users as a means of relaxing, regulating mood, and fostering an atmosphere or sense of place. Unlike most extant accounts of the genre, it also explores how Ambient recordings reflect aesthetically upon their instrumentality through musical techniques, metaphors, and moods. A survey of approximately one-hundred Ambient listeners rounds out the study, illuminating from a present-day perspective how reception practices relate to the production and interpretation of Ambient recordings.
Chapters 1 and 3 examine two proto-Ambient recordings from the Environments series of nature sound LPs (Atlantic, 1969–78), released by Syntonic Research, Inc. These analyses elucidate the aesthetics and technological uses that since consolidated Ambient music as a genre, and describe shifting attitudes toward consumer technology in the Western environmental and countercultural movements. Chapter 2 compares and contrasts Environments with recordings from the concurrently emerging Acoustic Ecology movement.
Chapters 4 and 5 investigate various artistic and conceptual practices that informed Brian Eno’s conception of Ambient music. Chapter 4 identifies precedents for Eno’s concept in the experimental avant-garde music of Erik Satie, John Cage, La Monte Young, and Steve Reich. Chapter 5 analyzes the title recording on Eno’s Discreet Music album (Obscure, 1975), placing its production in the context of 1960s and ‘70s English minimalism, as well as the research field of cybernetics. It concludes with a media analysis of the record as a consumer product, illustrating how the elimination of authorial intention in experimental composition and cybernetics translates into popular art.
Chapters 6 and 7 outline Ambient music’s explicit emergence as a term in the popular music market. Chapter 6 examines Brian Eno’s Music for Airports (Editions E.G., 1978) through a comparative analysis with The Black Dog’s Music for Real Airports (Soma Quality Recordings, 2010), illuminating the relevance of Ambient music’s contexts of consumption to interpretation. It concludes with a brief reading of Eno’s On Land (Editions E.G., 1982), which cemented Ambient music’s significance within private, individualized reception. Chapter 7 concludes the study with an overview of various recordings by The Orb, KLF, Mixmaster Morris, and Pete Namlook in the “ambient house” subgenre of electronic dance music, illustrating their connections with the aesthetic themes and promotional discourses of earlier Ambient recordings.
I am happy to share a PDF with anyone interested in reading. Feel free to email me at vszabo@virginia.edu.
In his pioneering analysis of social stigma (1963), Erving Goffman explains how abnormal subjects are socialized to “manage” their stigmata, those signs which mark them as abject, so as not to interrupt the smooth functioning of civil exchange. This paper reads Stewart’s vocal performances as contestations of this implicit demand, showing vocalization to be a salient dimension of stigma management. In delivering the awkward vocal cues and unseemly sounds that signal degraded self-esteem, Stewart stages a refusal to manage the sonic stigmata associated with histories of depression, abuse, and deviant sexual desire. His performances sound out the struggles of those for whom the absence of reciprocality is an unwelcome norm, and of whom silence about such struggles is expected.
This paper analyzes several songs in which Stewart performs an acute awareness of the degraded moral status of his performances. I interpret them in the context of his broader performative project. In doing so, I seek to broaden the scope of existing queer theory that, following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2005), reads queer performativity as necessarily patterned around shame, stigma, and abjection. While much of this scholarship relies primarily on visual tropes, this paper instead focuses on the way sound likewise organizes social normativities.
Book Reviews by Victor Szabo
Books by Victor Szabo
The book takes a trip through landmark ambient audio productions and related discourses, including marketing rhetoric, artist manifestos and interviews, and music criticism, that during this time plotted the conventions of what became known as ambient music. These productions include nature sounds records, experimental avant-garde pieces, "space music" radio, psychedelic and cosmic rock albums, electronic dance music compilations, and of course, explicitly "ambient" music, all of which popularized ambient audio through vivid atmospheric concepts.
In paying special attention to the sound of ambient audio; to ambient audio's relationship with the psychedelic, New Age, and rave countercultures of the US and UK; and to the coincident evolution of therapeutic audio and "head music" across alternative media and independent music markets, this history situates ambient music as a hip highbrow framing and stylization of ongoing practices in crafting audio to alter consciousness, comportment, and mood. In so doing, Turn On, Tune In, Drift Off illuminates the social and aesthetic rifts and alliances informing one of today's most popular musical experimentalisms.
This dissertation examines several key recordings in the formation of the Ambient genre of popular music, with focus on releases from the U.S. and England between the late 1960s and early 1990s. Through music analyses of these recordings, as well as media analyses of their promotional rhetoric, this dissertation traces the sonic tropes and social practices discursively organized by the “Ambient” label. It describes how Ambient music serves users as a means of relaxing, regulating mood, and fostering an atmosphere or sense of place. Unlike most extant accounts of the genre, it also explores how Ambient recordings reflect aesthetically upon their instrumentality through musical techniques, metaphors, and moods. A survey of approximately one-hundred Ambient listeners rounds out the study, illuminating from a present-day perspective how reception practices relate to the production and interpretation of Ambient recordings.
Chapters 1 and 3 examine two proto-Ambient recordings from the Environments series of nature sound LPs (Atlantic, 1969–78), released by Syntonic Research, Inc. These analyses elucidate the aesthetics and technological uses that since consolidated Ambient music as a genre, and describe shifting attitudes toward consumer technology in the Western environmental and countercultural movements. Chapter 2 compares and contrasts Environments with recordings from the concurrently emerging Acoustic Ecology movement.
Chapters 4 and 5 investigate various artistic and conceptual practices that informed Brian Eno’s conception of Ambient music. Chapter 4 identifies precedents for Eno’s concept in the experimental avant-garde music of Erik Satie, John Cage, La Monte Young, and Steve Reich. Chapter 5 analyzes the title recording on Eno’s Discreet Music album (Obscure, 1975), placing its production in the context of 1960s and ‘70s English minimalism, as well as the research field of cybernetics. It concludes with a media analysis of the record as a consumer product, illustrating how the elimination of authorial intention in experimental composition and cybernetics translates into popular art.
Chapters 6 and 7 outline Ambient music’s explicit emergence as a term in the popular music market. Chapter 6 examines Brian Eno’s Music for Airports (Editions E.G., 1978) through a comparative analysis with The Black Dog’s Music for Real Airports (Soma Quality Recordings, 2010), illuminating the relevance of Ambient music’s contexts of consumption to interpretation. It concludes with a brief reading of Eno’s On Land (Editions E.G., 1982), which cemented Ambient music’s significance within private, individualized reception. Chapter 7 concludes the study with an overview of various recordings by The Orb, KLF, Mixmaster Morris, and Pete Namlook in the “ambient house” subgenre of electronic dance music, illustrating their connections with the aesthetic themes and promotional discourses of earlier Ambient recordings.
I am happy to share a PDF with anyone interested in reading. Feel free to email me at vszabo@virginia.edu.
In his pioneering analysis of social stigma (1963), Erving Goffman explains how abnormal subjects are socialized to “manage” their stigmata, those signs which mark them as abject, so as not to interrupt the smooth functioning of civil exchange. This paper reads Stewart’s vocal performances as contestations of this implicit demand, showing vocalization to be a salient dimension of stigma management. In delivering the awkward vocal cues and unseemly sounds that signal degraded self-esteem, Stewart stages a refusal to manage the sonic stigmata associated with histories of depression, abuse, and deviant sexual desire. His performances sound out the struggles of those for whom the absence of reciprocality is an unwelcome norm, and of whom silence about such struggles is expected.
This paper analyzes several songs in which Stewart performs an acute awareness of the degraded moral status of his performances. I interpret them in the context of his broader performative project. In doing so, I seek to broaden the scope of existing queer theory that, following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2005), reads queer performativity as necessarily patterned around shame, stigma, and abjection. While much of this scholarship relies primarily on visual tropes, this paper instead focuses on the way sound likewise organizes social normativities.
The book takes a trip through landmark ambient audio productions and related discourses, including marketing rhetoric, artist manifestos and interviews, and music criticism, that during this time plotted the conventions of what became known as ambient music. These productions include nature sounds records, experimental avant-garde pieces, "space music" radio, psychedelic and cosmic rock albums, electronic dance music compilations, and of course, explicitly "ambient" music, all of which popularized ambient audio through vivid atmospheric concepts.
In paying special attention to the sound of ambient audio; to ambient audio's relationship with the psychedelic, New Age, and rave countercultures of the US and UK; and to the coincident evolution of therapeutic audio and "head music" across alternative media and independent music markets, this history situates ambient music as a hip highbrow framing and stylization of ongoing practices in crafting audio to alter consciousness, comportment, and mood. In so doing, Turn On, Tune In, Drift Off illuminates the social and aesthetic rifts and alliances informing one of today's most popular musical experimentalisms.