Drip-drip-drip

The Alters - Blue Hole
Lighten Up Sounds #28

This blog asks, "How the fuck do you write about ambient music without sounding like a big purple knob?" Fuck if I know. But it's a question I contemplated while listening to Blue Hole by Kansas City's the Alters. Because there were synthesizers and all sorts of electronic fanaticism that reminded me of the music associated with a high-level, video game boss. Not the actual affray with said boss, but the build-up—when you're one bad-guy-packed room away and the background sounds are extra shadowy and foreboding. At another point, the music became rabid and nearly overwhelming, like that accelerated video footage you see of ants scurrying across and picking apart an animal carcass.

Okay, that was all so biggish and purplish and knobbish.

Since I'm all about embracing activities that are self-serving, I choose to use ambient music as a tool for mining the depths of my memory. And on Blue Hole, there was an instance where the drip-drip-drip of the synths abruptly whisked me away to my old bedroom in Boston and those summer storms and how the rain would spill down the roof and dribble onto the skylight one floor below, and the insanity of how even when the rain ceased, the drip-drip-drip didn't and the INSANITY of how I allowed such disquiet to completely unbalance me.

Blue Hole's second side features ambient pieces constructed around what sounds like a pungi (Google "what snake charmers play”). I will refrain from telling you that the pungi often sounds out of focus and extraterrestrial, like it was recorded by a Voyager 2-type spacecraft and had emanated from a far-flung planet where the instrument is used by the upper crust of some advanced alien culture to weave flames into loops, which are then worn like jewelry.