A collaboration between Martino Di Vietro and Andrea Chiappori, two stalwart contributors to the Italian collective, the album reminds us how interesting music-making can be when it doesn’t aspire to create hits.
Opening track “Faillo Anthem”, named for a mountain outside of the artists’ native Genova, plunges us into dark waves of sound that inspire unease without being outright discordant, as if Vangelis’s soundtrack for Blade Runner were slowly succumbing to analogue decay.
“Inside the Motherboard” takes this logic further, layering boomeranging synth tones to impart the retro-futuristic vibe of Cold War science fiction.
My favourite track is probably “Sinfonia per la Nascita di un Rettile” (Symphony for the Birth of a Reptile), which radiates a disquieting otherness that feels simultaneously pre- and post-human.
Although classifying the album as ambient makes sense, it doesn’t fit what mainstream listeners typically expect from the genre.
Last night I was talking to a friend about a difficult predicament. Eager to change the subject for a little while, she asked me what piece I was working on.
“Are you familiar with the ambient genre?”
“Yes,” she replied. “It’s the sort of thing you play in the background without getting distracted.”
“That’s frequently the case,” I told her. “YouTube is filled with videos like that, the sort intended to work subliminally. But this record is different. It demands your attention.”
I went on to explain that there is considerable variance within the genre.
One way to think of ambient music is that, instead of filling a space, as a classical concerto or pop ballad might, it creates a space to be filled.
Often that space is meant to calm the listener, like a room with soft lighting, a comfortable place to lounge, and minimal clutter. Listeners aren’t supposed to remember the sounds they heard so much as the way they felt after hearing them. Long tracks based on a specific frequency, such as one of the Solfeggio frequencies, exhibit this characteristic.
While Ambientali Variazioni 2 avoids abrasive sounds, it makes a stronger impression. For one thing, the music is unpredictable.
Anthropologically, human beings are programmed to react to obvious deviations in routine. Although a heartbeat varies subtly over time, so long as it falls within certain parameters, the sound will put us at ease. The same goes for other repetitive sounds in our world, like waves breaking on the shore or wind in the trees.
Even when rhythms like these come from living creatures, they have a transcendental quality. We find them harmonious, in part, because they seem to be the product of a natural world that makes human striving seem inconsequential.
By contrast, Ambientali Variazioni 2 is human-centred, like everything in Colletivo Sbermuz’s small catalogue. Even when the music conjures a spacious environment, we never forget that someone made it for our listening pleasure.
Another way to think about the ambient genre derives from the medium of cinema.
Some ambient records have a documentary character. Either they try to recreate the experience of hearing at a particular place and time—a train station, a quiet street, a fisherman’s dock at night—or they use different field recordings to create a montage effect.
The other extreme features purely synthetic tones, conjuring a listening environment out of thin air. Instead of trying to capture something about the world, this kind of ambient music fashions its own.
Despite the occasional intrusion of sounds that could have been recorded on location, Ambientali Variazioni 2 definitely falls into this latter category. Pushing the analogy further, we might call this “ambient fiction” to contrast with “ambient documentary”.
That’s squarely in keeping with the music’s speculative character.
What sets Di Vietro and Chiappori’s approach apart from mainstream examples of the ambient genre is their insistence that listeners put in work. It’s not enough to take in sounds passively. They need to activate their imaginations.
This is true for everything Colletivo Sbermuz has done so far. No matter how subtle or quiet a track gets, it still makes demands.
As I said to my friend, Ambientali Variazioni 2 isn’t the sort of record that can be relegated to the background. And while it surely has a subliminal effect on the listener, as I found listening to it on auto-repeat while doing household chores over the past week, its primary function is consciousness-raising.
In these increasingly dark times, devoting so much energy to something that isn’t overtly political might seem wasteful. But that’s the wrong way to think.
The artists who work in Colletivo Sbermuz understand that, in a world where every last bit of the human mind is subject to technological colonisation, resistance must begin with the capacity to imagine an alternative.
Ambientali Variazioni 2 does a splendid job of motivating listeners to do just that.
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Photograph courtesy of Marco Pezzati. Published under a Creative Commons license.
