Home Page > Blog > December 2024 > "Ambient Music Pro Leagues"

"AMBIENT MUSIC PRO LEAGUES"

[9/12/2024]

Pictured: random attempt at drawing an Agnaktor from memory. Unrelated to post!

Probably the funniest story my mom tells about me when I was a baby (too young to even remember this happening) goes like this: there was a period of a few months where I was crying my head off any time I heard noise in another room, and especially when there was no one else in the room with me while I was in the crib. Pretty normal baby behavior, sure. But I would cry to any number of things, like steps in the hallway (during the day!), the sound of dishes being done downstairs, and the odd car driving by our quiet neighbourhood. It drove my parents absolutely batty. The funny part comes when my mom hatches a plot, deciding to try an unhinged experiment with me while my neurons were still developing.

Basically, she would place my crib in a spot where I could hear the washing machine, but not have it be too audible to where I would start crying. Even if it was just a short nap, she'd make sure I'd fall asleep next to her so I'd feel comfortable with extraneous sound. Then, more and more she would nudge the crib closer and closer to the washing machine, having a bit more sound exposure, and leaving me to sleep alone more when I felt comfortable to do so soundly. She could've probably ended the experiment at a certain point of my comfortability, where I'd be able to sleep okay somewhere like the living room that was just busy enough to prove the experiment was a success.

But for some strange reason, she decided to go all the way. (Advance notice: I personally do not see this as neglectful or dangerous because I do find it genuinely funny, but most parents certainly shouldn't do this with their kids in the future; my role as a scientific guinea pig here stands as just a strange story in my life that resounds with me now as an adult, which I'll get into here soon.)

She would keep me right next to the laundry room, just right outside the door. Next, she would crack open the door, just a hair, then a crack, then enough for a draft, then enough to fit through. I slept like a rock almost every time, my mom tells me. I'm sure that's far enough, right? No! She would then place my swaddled self directly onto the shaking dryer like it was an auto-rocking crib while she switched out the laundry in the machine. And through all of it... it worked! The experiment a resounding success! I could sleep undisturbed, and she could check in on me asleep without waking me up, or carry me around the house while she did chores to keep an eye on me better. I would nap in bliss, zen, quiet like a stone sat at the bottom of a white-water rapids river.

But the scientific hypothesis sometimes cannot predict certain outcomes; that's what the scientific method and experiments are for after all, aren't they? To discover strange, new, unpredicted results! Safe to say the unfortunate unpredicted outcome of the washing machine baby experiment was a worse situation than what she started out with. But one may say, "but now the baby can fall asleep with noise around, so what's the issue?"

Well, the big issue was that now I could ONLY fall asleep with noise around. I would wake up and be deathly terrified and consciously aware of a quiet room, and I hated it! Dusk and dawn was made into the witching hour as my screams pierced the still night, and the activities of the day would be met with hours of peaceful slumber. I can't imagine what being my parent was like, although my mother tried to relate that feeling to me several times: it sucked, like, pretty bad.

Fast-forward a little bit (about twelve years) and I'd be doing some truly unhinged things just to go to sleep. Before I discovered that music can be more than just what was on my iPod that my sister gave me, I was popping in some cheap Walmart quality earbuds right before bed so I could listen to Vampire Weekend to help me sleep. If you can believe it too, it DID help me fall asleep (though I'd often wake up several times at night to tangled cords around my limbs, and typically woke up to my eardrums ringing in pain). I'm not sure my mom even knew I was doing that for a while. It just helped me to have the noise, even if the crackle of peaked audio substituted washing machine rattling and probably permanently damaged my eardrums at the same time.

In my youthful stupor of not knowing that falling asleep without noise aid wasn't normal for a pre-teen, I found two solutions. One, an anti-anxiety sleep pill that kept me asleep through the whole night; turns out I had undiagnosed anxiety disorders, and that usually doesn't help with the whole "getting a full night's rest" thing. But, two, I also discovered ambient music!

I'll link albums couple below that I especially love. The world of Bandcamp ambient really opened my eyes to the kinds of textures audio can have, the meandering melodies stimulating the mind to colourful dreams. It was a wonderful time... unfortunately mired by the fact that I developed a bit of a discoverer's obsession that would have me stay up for hours past a reasonable bedtime trying to find the perfect soundscape to eventually fall asleep to in thirty seconds.

Now, with my fiance and a CPAP machine that treats my recently-discovered sleep apnea (another condition which also hinders my sleep; go figure), I am able to rest easy without many sleep aids. Although sometimes I wonder if our humidifier and the churn of my CPAP also takes up the mantle of sound to help me slumber.

This long-winded anecdote is to say: I have an acute taste for ambient music and audio texture nowadays. Even at work, I play wordless music that should act as a downer for most people, but it keeps me focused somehow. It's easy to get lost in the scrub-brush of overwhelming tape hiss.

But this becomes an issue when the glacier of strange tastes is met with the small, but still undeterred icebreaker that is "so... what kind of music do you like?" And sure, I listen to more than just ambient music. But it feels a bit like waltzing around a central pillar in my life that many people are often weirded out by, or don't understand enough to engage with me about it. Even some close friends and my fiance I got to listen to an ambient album I discovered recently that shot quickly up to the top of my "best-of" list for 2024. My fiance, after listening said: "I like the album cover." Devastation. And my best friend, after seeing the link said: "I like the font." A killing blow!

I see some memes that are like "don't ever hand the ambient music lover the aux, all they'll play is Disintegration Loops." Funny, I do laugh. But it is difficult to talk about regardless. There's never really an occasion to listen to ambient music with friends (even when I get high), nor do people pay attention to it like I try to. And it's no fault of theirs, most ambient music I feel is tailor-made to melt into the background. But surely there is more attention to give it, more grace to treat it with, beyond the seconds between turning off the bedside lamp and floating away to an unconscious sleep? Oh well. If someone is reading this, send me your favourite ambient albums. Here's some of mine, from listener stater-packs to limited-run cassette tape loops.