When Brian Eno made Music For Airports, airports still meant something. To paraphrase Paul Virilio, the culture of teleconferences, trending topics, and shared experiences with information have distributed the once-localized stress of the airport and the workplace across all lived environments. The demanding gaze of capital follows us out of the office and into the bedroom, the kitchen, the classroom, and outdoors. Eno’s experiments involving sound in airports and hospitals have, if anything, only cast doubt on the relationship between “ambient music” and personal well-being, especially as it increasingly seems that generalized anxiety is a foreground of a shared postmodern life. Background music doesn’t work anymore. Labels like Vancouver’s 1080p and producers like Melbourne’s Andras Fox have repopularized a beat-oriented brand of ambient techno we called “new age” before the electronics were considered primitive, and before the aesthetic was pastiche. The new wave of new age understands that organized sound won’t change us chemically, but capitalizes on the potential that humorous play will transport the listener to a less anxious space and time.
As Journeymann Trax, Bobby Draino directs his play at notions of place and attempts to make techno that traverses imaginary distances. Track titles like “Canopy,” “Black Forest,” and “Ice Sheets” create fantastic images of environments left untouched by the Anthropocene, and the sounds they signify unfold in a way that mirrors that act of the imagination. Sounds we know from “non-ambient” techno, like vocal samples and drum machine hits, interject throughout like the ruffling of some creature in the distance. Soundworlds appear structurally sound, but many things problematize their physics, like different reverb settings used on different sounds and parameters that change gradually. Smoke Tape is a collection of songs that are both immersive and unreal. The reason they command the foreground of the listener’s attention is because they acknowledge their unreality, which creates tension. Sometimes that tension is as simple to observe as that between house music and ambient music, as signs of both genres dance around one another in a kind of harmonious tug-of-war.
What Smoke Tape inherits from smoke is a fundamental lack of clarity. The mind is unable to separate itself from an understanding of our world (as shaped by humans) as “natural,” but Journeymann Trax sets out into the imagination, pursuing a truer, purer “nature” somewhere else. Smoke Tape is, like a lot of 1080p records, just a bunch of simple, tongue-in-cheek techno tracks; but while I don’t think it has accomplished anything profound or metaphysical, I also can’t reduce it to nostalgia for a forgotten frontier of electronic sound. Smoke Tape is an experiment in reference. It attempts to create new and unanticipated possibilities by approximating what has been done before, and by looking for utopia in a prior state of the imagination rather than an imagined future. Maybe this is what new age music was about in the first place. To go further, maybe this is what we once found so exciting about electronic music proper.
More about: Bobby Draino, Journeymann Trax
