Ambien1 is approximately 3 hours and 41 minutes of acousmatic ambient recordings with a splash of musique concrète and onkyo/onkyokei, guided by principles of repetition, epic duration, slow pace, and breathing space.

This project emerged out of insomnia. To help myself sleep I would start recording and then play slow improvisations (usually on my guitar) intended to lull. No sounds were made by/with a computer. I used my instruments as tools of thought, allowing myself to relax and meditate through play. I would then listen to the recordings on my iPhone to help myself sleep, hence “ambien” music, which plays of course off of sleeping pills and Brian Eno’s Ambient series. Other musical inspirations than Eno: Toshimaru Nakamura's no-input mixing board music, Sachiko M, Hiroshi Yoshimura, Harold Budd, Oneohtrix Point Never, and Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith. Recordings were edited minimally or not at all.

What sonic qualities aid sleep? Sleep increases our sensory threshold, resulting in lower sensory perception; we will continue sleeping unless the sound is particularly loud and sudden/disruptive—like an alarm—so to aid sleep, music must not alarm. It could employ muted sounds with few to no amplitude variations, especially those resisting dramatic crescendo or decrescendo, opting instead for relatively level dynamics. There should be an emphasis on consonance over dissonance, the intent to soothe or please, with few or no key changes, so that stillness, stasis, settling, sedation, and leveling (sleep as flatness) can be reinforced.

From the fact of our circadian rhythms we can understand sleep as cyclical; the musical equivalents are loops and samples. What is helpful and soporific about counting sheep is that it’s a repetitive action. There’s something about repetition and the sequential that lulls. If we consider a point traveling clockwise around a unit circle—like the tip of a clock’s second hand—and a graph of the point’s height over time, we would see the graph as a sine wave oscillating between 1 and -1. So if circadian rhythm is a time-based cycle, it is also a process of oscillation. Sleep is periodic like a wave, so much of this music involves repetition, slow and relaxed like a body resting.

More on repetition: mantras in meditation serve in part to provide the foundation for transcendence of mind beyond body. This record does not intend to represent any kind of spirituality, but the idea of mantra provides a useful analogue for understanding the connection between repetition and the path to relaxation, and in this case specifically, restful and peaceful sleep.

While a handful of these recordings are not exactly sedative, following different rules than those above, they are otherwise extended meditations on themes addressed in the songs’ titles--again, using musical improvisation as a mode of thinking, shifting between conscious choices and allowing the subconscious to take control. While acousmatic recordings necessarily divorce sound from source, the titles focus the sounds around specific ideas; still, the listener is welcome to allow his/her imagination to drift and conjure new meanings from each soundscape. In many if not all of these recordings, new sounds will emerge depending on the intensity of the listener’s engagements with the sounds. Recordings warrant multiple visits and tend to produce new revelations with each listen; actually, completing the album in a single listening session is, if even achievable, discouraged. The listener may access different experiences of these sounds by listening through headphones, loudspeakers, or laptop/smartphone speakers. As I mentioned, I’ve fallen asleep to many of these songs played on my iPhone by my pillow.

Please take your time. This is an album intended for quiet contemplation, to help slow down the mind in these chaotic times and achieve a sense of comfort, focus, and tranquility. I hope that you find the music calming. We move too quickly these days, amid too much noise. Ambien1 aims to offer an alternative that can through sound help soothe the hyperactive into a restful state. True to Brian Eno’s idea of ambient music, this album also fades into the background of a room, shaping its atmosphere. Please try listening in different environments or situations!

Caution: may cause drowsiness.


MISC. NOTES ON PRODUCTION

Natural and electronic sounds were sampled, as well as my voice, which for many songs (1, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 18, & 19) was chromaticized and played live like a synth patch on my sampler routed through a few effects pedals.

"ambien1take1ambien" is one that always makes me fall fast asleep :) I can't remember which guitar I used here.

"It's Raining" is a song I made while thinking of my friend Lluvia. As you can hear, I recorded real rain for this song. The stuttering effect was something I added in GarageBand for iOS, playing the effect like an instrument. I added the rain later, once I acquired a new laptop (post-January 2017). I love this piece and find it extremely relaxing.

"I'd Take My Time" takes its title from a line in Animal Collective's "Bees". I think my song is timbrally in dialogue with AC's. Some of this was live play with my acoustic guitar, and some of it was the same guitar sampled, and then effecting those samples to produce the middle section. This was tracked into Logic sometime between January and June of 2017.

"Carrying Water Uphill" came from a phrase my brother Bobby told me: we are all the water we carry. I wanted the keys to sound like they were sort of slipping or stumbling their way uphill. This was also tracked entirely into Logic sometime between January and June 2017.

"(no)Time&Space2Think" was one of many guitar+loop pedal meditations recorded on my iPhone. I think it creates the time and space that I was searching for in that moment.

"XenoEco" was made on a Yamaha QY70 in the Gila National Forest, summer 2016, emphasizing a divide between humans and nature, a sense of how foreign the natural environment has become in light of technology. Later I tracked the song into GarageBand iOS via direct input to the iPhone headphone jack.

"Voice Memo: lergg" continues my Voice Memo project of one-off recordings captured with my iPhone. The sample in the background (which I think sounds a bit frog-like) is actually a loop I made with my guitar. I love this song.

"fuzz/feed" involved some combination of vocal samples, fuzz pedal, and Moogerfooger ClusterFlux.

"Variations of Stride" is a sonic transcription of the evolution depicted in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. This relied heavily on Animoog. I think this was one of a few songs I came up with while walking near my mom's neighborhood in El Paso. Inspired by Björk, I would go for long walks up the mountain, wearing headphones, and compose on the go. In another way this song is a record of my emotional and mental path during one of these walks. It was a very inspiring day.

"Gelflings in Love" was composed by sampling a loop of my voice, chromaticizing that loop, and playing chords and melody with this sample. Tempo of the loop’s repetition adjusted with pitch. This introduced a variety of rhythms related mathematically to their corresponding pitches. I used my voice in this way to maintain a human element in the music. This song will always have a special place in my heart.

A "lullegy" is a lullaby + an elegy, or perhaps an elegy through lullaby. I made this after watching Thelma & Louise, which is one of my favorite films of all time. It's such a beautiful ending and it always makes me cry, knowing the tragic freedom that they achieved in the end.

I really love "Deep Space *Busy Signals#". It sounds like trying to make a phone call in the middle of outer space and not being able to reach anyone. Reminds me of that Elton John lyric in Rocket Man: "It's lonely out in space."

"We all need friends." and "Stranger" were made with Animoog, but the latter includes some non-Animoog components.

"Deserted" is as much about being locked in a desert as it is about being deserted.

"on a good day" is probably one of the darkest songs I've ever made, and it came from a dark place, emotionally, where this emotion was the happiest I could feel at the time.

"As Trains Pass" contains a sample I recorded of trains passing through downtown El Paso. There's a particular bridge where you can stand over the trains as they pass beneath you. The other, smoother sample was made with guitar.

"95Buick" chromaticizes a sample of my car bell. The rhythmic variations resulted from the brief percussive quality of each loop's beginning and end; tempo of repetition corresponded to pitch, with higher pitches producing faster repetitions.

"Voice Memo: meditating26--put your phone down" combines long-form improvisation with instructions to the listener. I find it a very rewarding experience.


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