According to Wikipedia, ambient music is “a genre of music that puts an emphasis on tone and atmosphere over traditional musical structure or rhythm.” I think that sums it up. My introduction to ambient music was via Brian Eno, the musican who got his start with Roxy Music. Another influence was Tangerine Dream.
Eno says, “When I started working on ambient music, my idea was to make music that was more like painting.” When you have the bucks to hire accomplished musicians and a nice recording studio, you can afford to be abstract about it. I have a keyboard, a couple of cheap Shure mics, a laptop and a program called Mixcraft (like Garage Band but for PC). My idea is just to produce something that sounds half decent.
Today’s selection is taken from one of my earlier pieces, done in the aforementioned more “traditional musical structure.” I had planned to call this version “Tomorrow’s Castles Are Only Sleeping About”. If you listen closely and know your prog rock history, you can figure that one out.
Then I thought to call it simply “Track 9.”
But after yesterday, I decided on Solidarity.