VAN MAGAZINE: The Ambient Influence on Contemporary Music
VAN MAGAZINE: The Ambient Influence on Contemporary Music
BY GEORGE GRELLA
“For Cerrone, ambient is a ‘process music.’ In pieces like ‘Double Happiness’ and ‘Memory Palace’ (the latter can be heard on ‘Beyond,’ a 2017 album from the Los Angeles Percussion Quartet, on which they also play Thorvaldsdottir’s ‘Aura’), Cerrone integrates field recordings with the live musicians. The sounds of the Italian countryside in ‘Double Happiness,’ and the crickets heard at the start of ‘Memory Palace,’ are a way to hear Cerrone’s own memories, and, he says, ‘maybe...open up a space for the audience.’
The non-intrusive approach of this new generation of composers may still feel radical and unusual in the classical tradition, but it is intuitively familiar for anyone who loves ambient music. ‘I like to create the feeling of spaciousness’ Cerrone tells me. ‘I want things to move forward, but I want to give the audience space.’ This is the space to be out of time, to inhabit the universe that ambient music makes within our own.”