Swimming to Mekong
The genre "organic ambient soundscape" is a fairly new category in the music business, and at the same time it could be the oldest kind of listening entertainment that there is, in the form of theatrical sound effects or just mindful listening to the natural world, with all those fabled trees falling in the forest somewhere. Kelly David has been exploring his concept of organic ambient soundscapes, coming from a background of traditional music, including very early classical training and some precocious compositions, followed by a twenty year career working at radio stations playing other people's music in New York, Boston, DC, San Diego, Dallas, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and Honolulu.
His first album, Broken Voyage (2002) was inspired by about 6 memoirs he read that were written between the 1890's and 1938, by explorers who risked their lives searching for evidence of active cannibalism in the most remote Pacific Islands. The voyages always ended badly, with ship wrecks upon heavily jungled islands where, once the seaman stepped out on the shores, native drums began sounding from deep within the island.
Four album covers, the catalog as of 2019
Angkor is the second album and came out in 2006, honoring the spirit of the land and the people of the Khmer Empire, combining harmonically rich textures and surreal sounds with field recordings of traditional ethnic musical sounds and spiritual inspirations. The final production is the result of a fax to Steve Roach in 1998 and subsequent correspondence. Steve mixed and produced the album and contributed an awesome rhythm track to one piece to pull it together. Steve taught Kelly how to pull an album together. Kelly released an album with Steve Roach in 2014, The Long Night, a deep excursion into the eternal nocturnal gossamer atmospheres and non-rhythmic textural harmonic soundscapes. These albums are currently available on Bandcamp.
Kelly and I discussed the new album via email. Meditation in Green is Kelly's first on the Spotted Peccary Music label, and is available for physical purchase and downloading from the Spotted Peccary since August of 2019. The following is a collage treatment of the discussion. I hope you, intrepid reader and listener, enjoy what you find here, and most of all, give Meditation in Green many good long spins.
KELLY
Today, the totality of electronic tools available to an electronic musician is seemingly endless. With that in mind, it's not the gear, it's what you do with it.
ROBIN
I am constantly struggling with the genre names, such as ambient tribal shoe gazing chill trance electronic soundscapes (in various configurations) and these words are all highly amusing to me, hopefully I can get it right.
What should we call it? Maybe categorizing it as anything is not acknowledging how unique it is.
You have proven that music does not have to follow the old rules.
KELLY
I can't really answer the marketing questions. It's an intriguing thought. I am not sure what marketing consists of for this ambient electronic genre. I imagine, like everything else, you want to help build your brand. Right now, I don't mind immersing myself in a more progressive presentation of, whatever my brand is.
Let's go back to the beginning of what constitutes music. For me, it's always an organization of sounds. When I was in the classical mode, I believe there was only one way to organize sounds. One must have a melody and a harmony both progressing essentially in parallel.
I distinctly remember the day when I first heard the music of Steve Roach. I realize that he had mashed melody and harmony together in a way that I myself was yearning for. I became fascinated with his music. So much so, that when I moved to Denver in 1997, I sent Steve a fax.
Yep. A fax. That long ago.
One of the greatest things I learned from Steve, was how to undo my classical training. We joked about it when he was producing my first album. An amazing learning experience for me.
We were viewing the tracks in the computer and I asked him to move several bars back, and he remarked that it was time for me to come out from behind bars. Yeah. I was behind bars in my musical thinking. I am forever grateful to him for that learning.
That said, my musical organization today invariably reflects my classical training, which I can't completely undo.
Meditation in Green is the result of my exploration of Khmer temples in the Mekong Delta. Since college, I have been fascinated with the Khmer civilization. Previously, I tried to explore some of these feelings, when walking around ancient stone monuments, in my album Angkor.
The Mekong Delta was the southernmost tip of the Khmer civilization, and their only route to the sea. The Delta is water, an immense catalog of organic life there.
Details from the gatefold artwork for the album
In Meditation in Green, I attempted to re-create this organic intensity of nature that I experienced in the Delta.
ROBIN
What I hear is a whole new range of possibilities for listening. It is revolutionary listening matter. Its not the first of its kind but it is the first use of this specific set of sounds. A new door has opened.
Usually there is a tempo, rhythmic beats and words and singing, usually you hear musical instruments. Now we can do more than that. Before John Cage published his listening philosophy there were many other sonic explorers (such as 20th century musicians like Varese, Ives, Schoenberg, Xenakis, Stockhausen), that was way back then. Sometimes it seems like the new art comes from the contrarians who have been told "you can't do that!" and so they go ahead and do it. To paraphrase Zappa, "Well, watch this! Actually, I do it all the time."
What is it? Is it even music? If it is not music, then why listen to it? Push play. It plays. Time goes by, and you hear stuff. One is absorbed or distracted or amused or baffled by the sounds. I have listened to the songs on Meditation in Green enough now so that I can almost anticipate what is going to happen and sort of sing along in my head.
KELLY
And believe me Robin, I really appreciate your attempt to sing-along with my new album.
I got lucky with some field recordings there. I recorded the monks you hear in the title track at a temple in the southernmost part of the Delta. We came upon the temple as a ceremony was underway.
My recording was made a distance away from the building and created a kind of natural ambience. You can hear that in their singing.
I think I'm really into creating musical collages now. I take bits of sound and figure out how to organize it in a way that creates a tapestry.
I don't really want to over think that part of it too much. Mainly, because I can over think a lot of things in my life. I blame that on the legal training.
I was the oldest of five kids. Conferred a nominal amount of responsibility on me. My parents had me take piano lessons beginning at age 5 all the way through sixth grade. It didn't grab my soul. But as I think back it really gave me some fundamental understandings that I tumbled to later in my musical life.
I switched to trumpet in sixth grade. It was okay. But then in seventh grade I was put on the French Horn, because there were too many trumpets. The French horn became my thing. I studied with a principal in the National Symphony. When he moved to the New York Philharmonic, I switched to a different teacher, also with the National Symphony.
She was very cool. She gave me books on compositional form and really talked me up into going to a music conservatory.
I started writing music in middle school. I still have a copy of my first composition set to a poem of Carl Sandberg. All open fifth in parallel. There I was, breaking the rules, early on.
In my home, I was exposed to the classics. My parents liked symphony, ballet and opera. We went to the symphony on a regular basis.
One cool thing my father exposed me to early on, and it was weird coming from him, were field recordings made for the Smithsonian in the 1930s featuring Native American music.
My father, born in a coal mining town in southwestern Pennsylvania, loved the primitive power coming from those drums and the word power coming from the singing.
The son of a Serbian immigrant, he grew up weird in that coal mining town, liking opera as a kid. Throughout his entire life, he listened to the Metropolitan Opera Saturday afternoon broadcasts. He's 90 now. My father listens to my music. I think he's very supportive. That said, I doubt he's ever listened to any piece more than once. But it's okay. He's there.
ROBIN
I am of the age that Vietnam means something very specific to me, I mean that long war of course. Thankfully there is nothing like war heard on or in Meditation in Green. Monks chanting, some twangy old strings, some gongs, odd atmospherics, maybe a little short wave radio, water and thunderstorms.
This ambient sound art concept is not exactly new, but it creates a situation that allows sound artists today to be very original in how to take the concept of musical entertainment. None of the artists sound the same in a recognizable trend or style except for being remarkably odd listening. Meditation in Green is like that. The vocabulary is still being developed for talking about these sounds. All I can do is try to describe what I hear.
Strange things to hear in headphones for amusement. Once the personal listening lab was a radio or home hi-fi set, then it was in the car, now we have these little earbud sound listening devices directly inside our ears.
KELLY
Musically, I'm not sure where I'm going next. Trying to spend as much time in the studio, as I can. It never seems enough time.
The weather here in Colorado is pretty spectacular from the summer to late into the fall. Hard to stay in a windowless studio all the time on weekends.
Some time ago I decided, that I would try to model my life after Charles Ives, the classical composer in the early days of the roaring 20s. He had a straight day job his entire life within insurance brokerage. He used to pay local New York orchestras to play his music so he could hear one in a hall. I never could come close to Ives as a composer, but I like having a business world as my part of my world.
Imagine that.
ROBIN
Thank you Kelly, I am touched by your music and I look forward to seeing how Meditation in Green does. I hope it does well with sales and that other intrepid souls are inspired to take things into their own hands to reveal new ideas to everyone, much like you have accomplished here.
The album is available from Spotted Peccary Music:
Originally published August 23, 2019
#KellyDavid #newage #ambientmusic #SpottedPeccaryMusic #instrumental #electronicmusic
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