Tag: indie

SOUNDWAVE : 27 : JONATHAN AMMONS

Today’s guest deejay is Jonathan Ammons, a journalist, radio producer, and musician living in Asheville, North Carolina. You can find his music on Bandcamp and listen to his radio show from WPVM and Pacifica Radio Network at the Dirty Spoon.

Jonathan is yet another amazing person I was introduced to through my old friend, Steve Howard (listen to Steven’s SOUNDWAVE mix here). Meeting Jonathan is one of the unexpected pleasures in the evolution of SOUNDWAVE.

I launched SOUNDWAVE to help cope with the stress of the pandemic. In the first few months of COVID-19 it seemed that stepping outside your house might kill you. If that wasn’t terrifying enough, my family was scattered about the country so for a long time it was just me and my dog. That took a toll on me and my usual distractions, music, reading and television, could not hold my interest at all. In fact, they annoyed me or angered me. The only thing that provided any comfort was ambient, classical, experimental and instrumental music. I reasoned that if that music was giving me solace it might help others as well so I launched SOUNDWAVE. Very soon afterwards I decided to invite the talented people I know who might enjoy or, more importantly, need to share a mix of their own. And that very quickly led to asking my friends who they knew personally who might want to participate in the show. That decision introduced me to such wonderful people as Adrian Utley, Hannah Peel, Charles Hazlewood and Jonathan.

I don’t really know Jonathan, though. We’ve just had a few email exchanges arranging today’s show but through his mix I feel I know him more intimately than I might know him through a dozen conversations. That’s all projection, of course, but that is the power of music. It bypasses the rational and hits on emotional truths, which is why I launched SOUNDWAVE in the first place.

Jonathan has some words about today’s mix below.

Join us again next week when our guest deejay will be Axel Arturo Barceló.

See you then!

 

Jonathan Ammons
Jonathan Ammons

Back in 2016 there were a series of forest fires that broke out throughout Western North Carolina, surrounding my home in Asheville. The air was thick with smoke, and a perpetual haze fell over everything. It just so happened that it fell right on the heels of a devastating national election, and for a moment, it truly felt like the whole world was on fire. 

I had just started spending time with a very lovely lady, and I asked her one night if she’d like to go watch the mountains burn.So I threw some camping chairs in the truck, grabbed a camera and a bottle of Champagne, and we headed out to the center of the fires. 

There’s a strange feeling when you sit and watch your home burn to the ground. Halloween orange glowing from every hilltop, brick red clouds in the night sky. Knowing that everything would grow back eventually, but that the sights you grew up seeing would be permanently scarred. The world would be better, maybe even healthier than it was before, but it would take a lot of ash and rubble to get there.

I started making my first ambient LP — First Sight — during those fires. At the time, my office was on my screened in porch, and I could sit while I composed and watch ash fall from the sky. I like to think that much of my approach to the way I currently make music came from that experience. 

I remember calling a friend one day, and saying, “you know how I’ve been complaining a lot about that knot in my stomach that wouldn’t go away? I think I finally figured out what that is. I think it’s despair. I just think it’s the first time I’ve ever felt it. Ithink I just didn’t realize it because it doesn’t feels as hopeless as I would have thought.”

From that point on, I was able to see the fragile, delicate things that fall apart, and not feel the overwhelming sense of loss I had initially felt. Instead, I understood it to be a burning of the dross, a disposal of things that were unnecessary. When a fire burns, after all, it makes way for far better things than grew there before. Sometimes you just have to let it burn.

I like to think of this mix as songs from the fire. Pieces of music that are as devastating as they are restorative. A little hazy, a little bleary, but beautiful in their own right. There are three original compositions in the mix, the first and last are from an as of yet unreleased record (this is actually their debut). The other, “Open Eyes”, is from my new album First Sight. The rest of the mix runs a gamut between crumbling organic sounds and stark synthesis. Ian William Craig actually wrote his new and beautiful record while also being surrounded by forest fires, Goldmund delivers gorgeous ambient versions of old Civil War era songs, and Oliver Patrice Weder delivers the most thoughtful, pensive piano performance… music to watch the world end. My favorite kind.

  1. Jonathan Ammons “Wishful Thinking”
  2. Tim Hecker “Chimeras”
  3. Wojciech Golczewski “Abner’s Wake”
  4. Jonathan Ammons “Open Eyes”
  5. Ben Goldberg “Demonic Possession is 9/10ths the Law”
  6. Oliver Patrice Weder “Sol’s Lullaby”
  7. Ian William Craig “Mountains Astray”
  8. Goldmund “The Flag of Columbia Shall Float O’er Us Still”
  9. Villages “Life Expectancy” 
  10. Jonathan Ammons “Dead Leaves”

Subscribe to SOUNDWAVE on iTunes, Overcast, Castro and Pocketcasts.

Logo by Rik Oostenbroek

SOUNDWAVE : 3 : SEAN HORTON

Let me rehash some stuff with you before we got to today’s excellent show featuring a lustrous mix from Sean Horton.

I launched SOUNDWAVE because it was my way of coping with COVID-19. My wife is away for the next month with her unit and our kids our with their dad for the foreseeable future. It’s just me and my dog. Work keeps me busy during the day but at night it gets lonely. I found myself listening to a lot of ambient, classical, experimental and instrumental music and I decided to share it with my friends and created the show you’re listening to now.

My intention was to release a new show once a month. After the first show I decided I would release SOUNDWAVE weekly until the stay at home order ends. But then it occurred to me that pretty much everyone else on the planet is also stuck at home so I invited friends, deejays, musicians, producers, etc to participate on the show. And that brings us to our first guest deejay, Sean Horton.

I interviewed Sean Horton for solipsistic NATION to talk about Decibel Festival, an annual music and digital arts festival in Seattle that ran from 2004 to 2015. Decibel Festival was unique platform for exposing attendees to leading-edge multimedia art from around the globe. With a focus on live performance, interactive multimedia art, state-of-the-art sound and technology based education; Decibel solidified itself as one of the premier electronic music festivals and promotional organizations in the world. In 2014, Sean was named #43 on Rolling Stone’s “50 Most Important People in EDM.”

Sean also records under them name Nordic Soul where he distills his love for techno, house, hip hop, jazz, soul, industrial, ambient and dub. As Nordic Soul, Sean has shared the stage with an eclectic mix of musicians from Grimes to Moby to The Orb to Major Lazer to… well, the list goes on. Sean has also performed at several major festivals world-wide, including Dimensions (Croatia), MUTEK (Montreal) and Communikey (Boulder). Nordic Soul has released music on a wide variety of labels including K Records, Buttermilk Records, Peloton and basic_sounds.

Given all that, you understand Sean was one of the first people I invited to join me and SOUNDWAVE. Funny thing, Sean and I have struck up a friendship online which moved from talking about music to our favorite books, tv shows and movies and then to living under COVID-19. An unexpected and welcome development of the pandemic. I look forward to meeting Sean in Los Angeles after this dies down a bit and hoisting a pint with him. From a safe six feet, of course.

Sean has crafted a beautiful mix, but I expected no less from him. Prepare for an emotional journey and see where it takes you. I’ll let Sean introduce his mix below. I know you’re going to love it just as much as I do.

I’ll see you all next week when we are joined by our next guest deejay, my old and dear friend, Steven Howard.

 

Sean Horton
Sean Horton

During this time in isolation I’ve been rediscovering my love of ambient music. I first discovered ambient music working at Harmony House records in Detroit my junior year in high school in 1992. It was the early days of the Rave Movement and Detroit was a hot bed for warehouse parties and Techno Music at the time. This was also a remarkable time where nearly every Rave would have two rooms, a “Dance Room” and an “Ambient Room.” I was an “Ambient Room” individual largely in part because I fell in love the music.

Out of all of the ambient music albums I’ve encountered over the years, the two that I come back to the most are the first and second ambient albums I ever knowingly experienced, Brian Eno’s Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks and Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Vol. 2. This mix features two of my favorite selections from each album.

Historically ambient music has predominantly been characterized as synthetic, but over the past fifteen years or so there has been growing movement of more organic forms of ambient music and film scores which are often referred to as neo classical (i.e. Nils Frahm, Max Richter, Ólafur Arnalds, Hauschka, Jóhann Jóhannsson , Hildur Guðnadóttir, Stars of the Lid, etc.). Where Ambient music fueled my teen-early 20’s love of electronic music; neo classical music fueled my love of melody and organic tone. I firmly believe that both ambient and neo classical music can and should co-exist.

This particular mix evolved out of a playlist I put together in late March 2020 featuring some of my favorite ambient and neo classical artists and songs. As common with a lot of ambient music, these selections are all void of rhythm and nearly void of all voice. That said, this is an ideal mix for reading, writing, sleeping, meditation, yoga, etc. My hope is this mix will instill a sense of calm and mental clarity with the listener.

  1. Cliff Martinez “Will She Come Back”
  2. John Foxx and Harold Budd “Subtext”
  3. Eluvium “Individuation”
  4. Aphex Twin “#20”
  5. Apparat “44”
  6. Hauschka “Destination Unknown”
  7. bvdub “Your Painted Armor Aches to Crack”
  8. Windy & Carl “Forest Trails”
  9. Tim Hecker “Radiance”
  10. Stars of the Lid “A Meaningful Moment Through a Meaning(less) Process”
  11. David August “MUSES AND ASHES”
  12. Brambles “To Speak of Solitude”
  13. Grouper “Parking Lot”
  14. Ólafur Arnalds & Nils Frahm “20:17”
  15. Jon Hopkins “The Wider Sun”
  16. Jonsi & Alex Somers “Daníell In The Sea”
  17. Ben Lukas Boysen “Sleeper Beat Theme”
  18. Helios “Seeming”
  19. Ólafur Arnalds “Doria”
  20. Robert Fripp & Brian Eno “Wind on Wind”
  21. Brian Eno “An Ending (Ascent)”

Subscribe to SOUNDWAVE on iTunes, Overcast, Castro and Pocketcasts.

Logo by Rik Oostenbroek