worldmusic – Synecdoche

Today’s guest deejay is Peter van Cooten, host of Ambientblog and DreamScenes on Concertzender.

I ask each guest to deejay who they know who would be interested in participating in the show with a mix. Harrold Roeland, who was a guest deejay on Soundwave back in December, suggested Peter. I’ve known about Ambientblog for years and have listened to many of Peter’s mixes on Mixcloud. I’m thankful that Harrold made the introduction because Peter’s mix is exceptional.

Mix is not the word for what Peter does on today’s show.

It’s more accurate to say that Peter composed a concept album masterfully weaved from a multitude of sampled material. Take a look at the “playlist” below to get an idea of the scope of today’s show. It’s a work of art you get to immerse yourself in for the next hour.

Peter’s mix, like all of his Ambientblog shows, is an experience. Follow Ambientblog on Mixcloud to hear more of his work.

I’ve included an excerpt about today’s show from Peter’s website below.

Today’s show is special because it’s also Soundwave’s one-year anniversary.

I launched Soundwave to help me cope with the stress and isolation of COVID-19.

This close to what we all hope is the finish line of the pandemic its easy to forget that we were all white-knuckling it for the first couple of months. Every day was filled with existential dread. Would this trip to the grocery store kill me or someone I love? It’s exhausting to live that way.

During that time, I could not watch tv or movies or listen to music because they were not speaking to the truth of our new reality. I’d watch a tv show and fret how there was no social distancing and why the cast wasn’t wearing masks. Pop music was particularly difficult to listen to because it was so painfully vapid. How am I supposed to enjoy a love song when I might be a patient or a vector in this pandemic?

The only music that I could tolerate and gave me solace was ambient, classical, experimental, and instrumental music. It was the soundtrack for my stay-at-home lockdown. And if I found some relief with this music, why not share it with others? Any why not ask people I respect to share their mixes?

I’m humbled by everyone’s gift of generosity of time and effort. We’re all going through this together, each in our way. I’m grateful that during this pandemic that each guest deejay lovingly crafted mixes to share with us.

Today’s show is also special because today, I also got my first shot for the COVID-19 vaccination.

I was shopping for groceries when the Mercy Plaza Pharmacy called me and told me they had extra doses. Could I stop by for a vaccination? Most definitely.

My cilantro stymied the woman who was ringing up my items at the grocery store: were they regular cilantro or organic? She was about to do a price check when I explained that I needed to get the hell out of there to be vaccinated. I didn’t care about the cilantro’s cost; ring me up so I can leave! She understood.

The folks at Mercy Plaza Pharmacy couldn’t be nicer. They’re a family-owned business, and the owner checked up on me after my shot to see how I was feeling. We talked about San Diego, Sacramento, and our kids. This is going to sound weird, but I had such a great time that I can’t wait to go back.

So here we are a year later. We’re almost at the finish line. Hopefully, next year, this will be behind us, and we can all enjoy each other’s company. I’m looking forward to meeting some of you in person. Maybe I’ll even get to meet Peter.

Join us next week when our guest deejay will be Michał Milczarek.

See you then!

It’s my honour to open the second year of this series with my contribution. Of course, we can only hope that the series will continue for musical reasons, not because of the pandemic.

Clicking through the list of contributions, you’ll find that most of them are what I call mixtape-style compilations: a head-tail-mix of (full) tracks. Traditionally, my (Ambientblog) mixes are different (which does not mean necessarily ‘better’, by the way) in that they incorporate many sampled parts of tracks (a full-length track is either an exception or a very short track itself), mixed in a layered collage-style. I always try to shuffle the collage’s fragments so that they seem to melt together and thus start telling a different story.

Whether this is successful or not can only be determined by the listener.

This mix is simply named after the podcast Soundwave. It is a happy coincidence that it literally starts with waves—sonically manipulated by Jos Smolders—and ends with the same waves morphing into the sound of a cheering crowd.

Different kinds of soundwaves are all around us, every moment. Sometimes we’re aware; most of the time, we are not. This mix (hopefully) shows that it can be rewarding to take a moment’s rest to really listen and let the sounds affect you.

Thanks to Joseph Aleo for inviting me!

Jos Smolders “Plate 7”
Mia Zabelka & Icostech “The Final Stop”
Robert Scott Thompson “Still The Syllables Of Water Whisper”
Charley van Veldhoven & Túrion “Hemellichaam IV (Henrik Meierkord Recycle)”
FM Einheit & Susie Green “Joyful Pleasure”
Joey Largent “Below Diorite Waters”
Barbara Ellison “De Auflaan de Pussychat”
Jana Winderen “The Listener”
Grace Ferguson “Barnumbirr”
C-drík “An Imaginary Place Inhabited By Those Who Are Asleep”
James Osland & Finn Kelvin “Things That Have Form Will Alway Disappear”
Daniel Thomas Freeman “Crawling Out Of The Void”
William Basinski “For Whom The Bell Tolls”
Morgen Würde “Mittsommer”
Biosphere “Stordjupta”
Randal Collier-Ford “Eyes Of The Temple (feat. Northumbria)”
Merope “Alma”
Space Whisper “Park Date”
Innesti “Dark Describes An Arc”
Joost Lijbaart “Twinkling Night”
Pinkcourtesyphone “Another Interior”
f5point6 “Natural Selection”
Andrew Heath “I Sleep Above The Forest”
Lustmord “Journey Of The Dead Man”
Bow Quintet feat. Aidan Baker “Bryanbaum Variation”
Aase Frejadóttir “Saying It”
James Rushford “Musica Callada, Book I – Angelico”
Nick Luscombe “Tokyo Spring Birdsong”
Akropolis Reed Quintet “Homage to Paradise Valley: I. Ghosts of Black Bottom”
Kate Carr “I Spotted Some Backyard Dancing”
Olivier Alary “Khaltoum”
Kazuya Nagaya “the Book Of Sunken Memory”
Jos Smolders “Plate 5”
A Winged Victory For The Sullen “Every Solstice & Equinox”

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

Logo by Rik Oostenbroek

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!

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.

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

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

Logo by Rik Oostenbroek

Tag: worldmusic

SOUNDWAVE : 53 : AMBIENTBLOG

SOUNDWAVE : 27 : JONATHAN AMMONS