THE BEST PLAYLIST FOR FLUFFY, CREATIVE, SPACES
(play this while you read)
I love ambient music.
I love the way it defines its own time and space: we play it when we need to think, when we need to create, when we need to become. Ambient music is the natural partner to creation: soothing synths, keys, bells, and drones that massage your brainwaves as you attempt to do the impossible...
download an idea from the universe and upload it to reality.
My intensified love for ambient music began at a pre-screening of ENO: the Brian Eno biopic that audaciously used generative algorithms to create a unique timeline for every single screening.
But there was one sentiment from Eno (the inventor of the ambient genre) that I have to believe persisted across variations. While attempting to discover a musical purpose beyond his career as a rockstar by diving into the undiscovered ocean of ambient music, he wrote a one-liner to focus his artistic vision.
“I make music for artists making things in creative spaces."
At the time, I was neck-deep in an existential crisis, pretty convinced I was shit at everything and destined to make nothing of myself (typical.) But hearing that someone as prolific as Eno had experienced a similar crisis of faith, and found his way out by scraping together a few simple words that distilled his purpose... it was incredibly comforting. He created meaning from overwhelming emotion.
I was born and raised in a family where meaning only came through utility. For generations, we scraped by on railroads, coal mines, and GI benefits in the Appalachian Mountains. Though I'm probably a 20th-generation American, I'm only the second to attend college. Before my parents, higher education was an unnecessary and insurmountable expense. My mom went to school in West Virginia, but my dad used his GI bill to finish school in Arizona, making me the first generation born and raised outside Appalachia.
From what I've been told, life there was tough: my family actually hunted to eat, owned dogs to ward off raccoons and shot dogs that stole shoes off porches during harsh winters.
My mom’s skin is freckled by the distant memory of pine needles that microdosed a other-wordly work ethic into her, becase when she was thirteen, my grandpa bought a 10-acre piece of land. And for the next three months, he took my mom and uncle to spens 10 hours a day planting a pine tree grove.
"This is for our family" my grandpa said with pride.
I've only ever seen it from the satellite view on Google Maps.
My brother and I were west-coasters; "city cousins," they called us, despite living in a town with a population of about 5,000 (admittedly about 20 minutes away from a *massive* town of 20,000).
In the summers, we visited my cousins who were told to chop down five trees instead of standing in the corner for five minutes. Cousins who taught me to ride a horse bareback through the river without falling off. We slept in the house that my grandparents worked like dogs for years and saved money to build.
Utility was paramount here. Every penny collected, every receipt saved, every piece of wood burned, every piece of hay baled, every unruly fern pulled. Each action a note in an endless composition of survival.
I have remained the “city cousin”, though now I’m also dubbed the "California Liberal." These days, I often feel frustrated by the friction between myself and every other member of my family. My parents moved back to Appalachia after I went to college and my brother is gone, leaving me as this weird, distant relative planted firmly on the other side of the country from everything my blood has ever known.
I remember the times when I tried to overcome this disconnection; I lived for summers when my mom would take us "home" to West Virginia, where I could ride horses and swing on grapevines with my cousins and their silly accents. My mom used to joke that I lived in there, and just visited the deserts of Arizona for 11 months of the year. I’d like to think that kind of innocence is still buried deep somewhere in the Appalachian Mountains.
As I grew older and busier, and visits to West Virginia became less frequent, I began to carve out an identity under blazing suns. As a bratty teenager who despised her parents and every other older, authoritative relative, I reveled in the differences between myself and where I came from. I thought I was smarter and more modern; I studied computers and won scholarships. I was surely the generation truly advancing the family name - taking the burden of success my grandparents had created and my parents had shouldered. I was pushing it over the hill so many of us had been buried on.
Then my brother enlisted. And died in his barracks. And was buried on that hill. Suddenly, blood was thicker than water.
I spun into a life of chaos, leaving school, recklessly chasing dreams, suspended on the cliff of excitement hovering over a cavern of insanity, toes barely scraping the ground.
I nearly slipped off the edge many times: the closest time being when I expressed to my parents that I wanted to make music, that I wanted to take this life of utility they had slaved over and turn it into art.
They tried their best to understand, to support me even. But I could feel the friction in the knob on the car radio, turning my new song into a low, indistinguishable humming, blending perfectly into the stale tension between us.
But my fingernails were dug deep into the corners of excitement, the only saving grace that allowed me to slowly crawl back up onto solid ground. And somehow, that persistence brought me to California, surrounded by the most intimidatingly brilliant artists, skilled musicians, intuitive filmmakers, sophisticated technologists.. watching the pre-screening of a Brian Eno biopic.
I wanted to to feel immerssed in it all, but I was still my mother's daughter, and there was a persistent voice reminding me that the proceedings were ‘pretentious’ and ‘over-done’. I was desperate to understand what it meant to be an artist, but I wasn’t sure if I could.
"maybe i am always looking through the eyes of an imposter"
I wrote this in my journal while sitting in a fancy Californian Estate that I had somehow secured a weekend-invite to, while staring out the 50-foot-tall window overlooking cows grazing on the hill, waiting to meet their afterlife on this evening's dinner plates.
Flowing steadily into my ears in that moment was the ambient music of Brian Eno. In the face of thoughts and insecurities that would have once thrown me into a cycle of self-pity and despair, it was a force that turned these familiar emotions into something hopeful. The music was bright and peaceful, illuminating dark and confusing spaces emotions.
Before I thought, “my family would hate this 'ambient stuff.’ What I believed was 'aesthetic' they would often call fluff. But there, reveling in the priviledged irony of watching doomed kobe cows roam over grassy hills, Eno's sounds washing over me, I realized that they're right:
it is fluff.
This music stuff: it's a soft and slightly opaque cushion between my thoughts and the sharp edges of my subconscious, allowing me to crawl deeper into introspection than I ever had before. Beauty serves a purpose. Aesthetic matters - fluff matters:
It has utility.
The urge to create art: it’s not silly, it’s not selfish, it’s useful. We are meant to make things beautiful, and put it back into the world.
That was something I had always believed, but for some reason in that moment, I truly understood it. I love ambient music because it's a tool that makes me feel differently, think differently, create differently. In no way is the art I consume and create a deviation from my family's dedication to utility. It serves a vital purpose: it creates space for transformation.
***
Brian Eno created wonderful things by falling serendipitously through the world of infinite musical possibilities, releasing everything except the core idea that he could develop a new niche within it: that he could make music for creative people in creative spaces.
And he did. He made music that taught me transformation doesn't mean abandonment. His ambient sounds reshape the familiar into something new without losing its essence. He helped me see that the friction of my past isn't disconnection, but a sign that it's still standing next to my present, rubbing shoulders with new ideas. If you run away from your past, you won’t feel anything.
My family isn't to be discounted or looked down on because of occasional discomfort from our differences. That tension is just another kind of music, a complex harmony of old and new.
Listen closely and you can hear it all: The nostalgic drone of my grandmother who became a mother to her 4 siblings as a teenager. The fluttering keys of my grandpa who had the strength to try again, and again, and again to build his own businesses and livelihoods after leaving the army with nothing. The chords of my father who escaped an abusive household without ever compromising his dreams of becoming a pilot, something he would finally achieve after 30 years as a mechanic. The central melody of my mother, who instilled in me the value of education, and loves me despite my intellectual evolution becoming increasingly frivolous within the context of the life she has known. The distant reverbs of my brother who, before succumbing to the patterns of the past, lived as a mischievous, athletic, kind, shy, teenage boy.
I hope one day that I have my own studio to play Brian Eno in, but until then, I have this playlist to listen to out of my laptop speakers while sitting at the desk in the corner of my room in my San Franciscan apartment. Though I know I will never create such a great work of art as the 10-acre pine-tree grove planted deep in the mountains of Appalachia, every day I'm pulling new ideas from the soil of it.
I love ambient music.
I love the way it defines its own time and space: we play it when we need to think, when we need to create, when we need to become. Ambient music is the natural partner to creation: soothing synths, keys, bells, and drones that massage your brainwaves as you attempt to do the impossible...
download an idea from the universe and upload it to reality.
My intensified love for ambient music began at a pre-screening of ENO: the Brian Eno biopic that audaciously used generative algorithms to create a unique timeline for every single screening.
But there was one sentiment from Eno (the inventor of the ambient genre) that I have to believe persisted across variations. While attempting to discover a musical purpose beyond his career as a rockstar by diving into the undiscovered ocean of ambient music, he wrote a one-liner to focus his artistic vision.
“I make music for artists making things in creative spaces."
At the time, I was neck-deep in an existential crisis, pretty convinced I was shit at everything and destined to make nothing of myself (typical.) But hearing that someone as prolific as Eno had experienced a similar crisis of faith, and found his way out by scraping together a few simple words that distilled his purpose... it was incredibly comforting. He created meaning from overwhelming emotion.
I was born and raised in a family where meaning only came through utility. For generations, we scraped by on railroads, coal mines, and GI benefits in the Appalachian Mountains. Though I'm probably a 20th-generation American, I'm only the second to attend college. Before my parents, higher education was an unnecessary and insurmountable expense. My mom went to school in West Virginia, but my dad used his GI bill to finish school in Arizona, making me the first generation born and raised outside Appalachia.
From what I've been told, life there was tough: my family actually hunted to eat, owned dogs to ward off raccoons and shot dogs that stole shoes off porches during harsh winters.
My mom’s skin is freckled by the distant memory of pine needles that microdosed a other-wordly work ethic into her, becase when she was thirteen, my grandpa bought a 10-acre piece of land. And for the next three months, he took my mom and uncle to spens 10 hours a day planting a pine tree grove.
"This is for our family" my grandpa said with pride.
I've only ever seen it from the satellite view on Google Maps.
My brother and I were west-coasters; "city cousins," they called us, despite living in a town with a population of about 5,000 (admittedly about 20 minutes away from a *massive* town of 20,000).
In the summers, we visited my cousins who were told to chop down five trees instead of standing in the corner for five minutes. Cousins who taught me to ride a horse bareback through the river without falling off. We slept in the house that my grandparents worked like dogs for years and saved money to build.
Utility was paramount here. Every penny collected, every receipt saved, every piece of wood burned, every piece of hay baled, every unruly fern pulled. Each action a note in an endless composition of survival.
I have remained the “city cousin”, though now I’m also dubbed the "California Liberal." These days, I often feel frustrated by the friction between myself and every other member of my family. My parents moved back to Appalachia after I went to college and my brother is gone, leaving me as this weird, distant relative planted firmly on the other side of the country from everything my blood has ever known.
I remember the times when I tried to overcome this disconnection; I lived for summers when my mom would take us "home" to West Virginia, where I could ride horses and swing on grapevines with my cousins and their silly accents. My mom used to joke that I lived in there, and just visited the deserts of Arizona for 11 months of the year. I’d like to think that kind of innocence is still buried deep somewhere in the Appalachian Mountains.
As I grew older and busier, and visits to West Virginia became less frequent, I began to carve out an identity under blazing suns. As a bratty teenager who despised her parents and every other older, authoritative relative, I reveled in the differences between myself and where I came from. I thought I was smarter and more modern; I studied computers and won scholarships. I was surely the generation truly advancing the family name - taking the burden of success my grandparents had created and my parents had shouldered. I was pushing it over the hill so many of us had been buried on.
Then my brother enlisted. And died in his barracks. And was buried on that hill. Suddenly, blood was thicker than water.
I spun into a life of chaos, leaving school, recklessly chasing dreams, suspended on the cliff of excitement hovering over a cavern of insanity, toes barely scraping the ground.
I nearly slipped off the edge many times: the closest time being when I expressed to my parents that I wanted to make music, that I wanted to take this life of utility they had slaved over and turn it into art.
They tried their best to understand, to support me even. But I could feel the friction in the knob on the car radio, turning my new song into a low, indistinguishable humming, blending perfectly into the stale tension between us.
But my fingernails were dug deep into the corners of excitement, the only saving grace that allowed me to slowly crawl back up onto solid ground. And somehow, that persistence brought me to California, surrounded by the most intimidatingly brilliant artists, skilled musicians, intuitive filmmakers, sophisticated technologists.. watching the pre-screening of a Brian Eno biopic.
I wanted to to feel immerssed in it all, but I was still my mother's daughter, and there was a persistent voice reminding me that the proceedings were ‘pretentious’ and ‘over-done’. I was desperate to understand what it meant to be an artist, but I wasn’t sure if I could.
"maybe i am always looking through the eyes of an imposter"
I wrote this in my journal while sitting in a fancy Californian Estate that I had somehow secured a weekend-invite to, while staring out the 50-foot-tall window overlooking cows grazing on the hill, waiting to meet their afterlife on this evening's dinner plates.
Flowing steadily into my ears in that moment was the ambient music of Brian Eno. In the face of thoughts and insecurities that would have once thrown me into a cycle of self-pity and despair, it was a force that turned these familiar emotions into something hopeful. The music was bright and peaceful, illuminating dark and confusing spaces emotions.
Before I thought, “my family would hate this 'ambient stuff.’ What I believed was 'aesthetic' they would often call fluff. But there, reveling in the priviledged irony of watching doomed kobe cows roam over grassy hills, Eno's sounds washing over me, I realized that they're right:
it is fluff.
This music stuff: it's a soft and slightly opaque cushion between my thoughts and the sharp edges of my subconscious, allowing me to crawl deeper into introspection than I ever had before. Beauty serves a purpose. Aesthetic matters - fluff matters:
It has utility.
The urge to create art: it’s not silly, it’s not selfish, it’s useful. We are meant to make things beautiful, and put it back into the world.
That was something I had always believed, but for some reason in that moment, I truly understood it. I love ambient music because it's a tool that makes me feel differently, think differently, create differently. In no way is the art I consume and create a deviation from my family's dedication to utility. It serves a vital purpose: it creates space for transformation.
***
Brian Eno created wonderful things by falling serendipitously through the world of infinite musical possibilities, releasing everything except the core idea that he could develop a new niche within it: that he could make music for creative people in creative spaces.
And he did. He made music that taught me transformation doesn't mean abandonment. His ambient sounds reshape the familiar into something new without losing its essence. He helped me see that the friction of my past isn't disconnection, but a sign that it's still standing next to my present, rubbing shoulders with new ideas. If you run away from your past, you won’t feel anything.
My family isn't to be discounted or looked down on because of occasional discomfort from our differences. That tension is just another kind of music, a complex harmony of old and new.
Listen closely and you can hear it all: The nostalgic drone of my grandmother who became a mother to her 4 siblings as a teenager. The fluttering keys of my grandpa who had the strength to try again, and again, and again to build his own businesses and livelihoods after leaving the army with nothing. The chords of my father who escaped an abusive household without ever compromising his dreams of becoming a pilot, something he would finally achieve after 30 years as a mechanic. The central melody of my mother, who instilled in me the value of education, and loves me despite my intellectual evolution becoming increasingly frivolous within the context of the life she has known. The distant reverbs of my brother who, before succumbing to the patterns of the past, lived as a mischievous, athletic, kind, shy, teenage boy.
I hope one day that I have my own studio to play Brian Eno in, but until then, I have this playlist to listen to out of my laptop speakers while sitting at the desk in the corner of my room in my San Franciscan apartment. Though I know I will never create such a great work of art as the 10-acre pine-tree grove planted deep in the mountains of Appalachia, every day I'm pulling new ideas from the soil of it.