Self-comment on Echolocation IX. Aquarius

2020.11.25.

It’s been quite a few decades since we first heard the designation ambient music style and, of course, the music marked with the name Brian Eno associated with it. The term ambient can relate to music in two ways. One way is to make the music part of the environment and also appear in places where it would not otherwise be typical. The other connection is when the ambient sound heard in nature is incorporated into the sound of music. Unfortunately, this connection has since been pushed to the level of kitsch by the ambient genre.

Echolocation IX builds on the latter connection, avoiding the typical pitfalls of this connection, because I by no means wanted to create background music for minimalism. I had to create a complex artistic concept, where the ambient style features that can be used for me are integrated into the original Echolocation sound concept, which in short means that the sounds of music appear in the closer and deeper layers and depths of space, and musical events are much more depicted, and as a result, we will have a three-dimensional sound experience in stereo space. I supplemented the musical and sound concept outlined here by drawing sounds taken from nature in the process of a story, to draw a path from somewhere to somewhere. Compared to the usual static ambient music, which typically sounds continuously and allows only minimal musical change, often unpredictable modulations can be heard here. Between the parts of the pieces, silence also appears in the dynamic fabric of the sounds. With these differences, this music does not belong to ambient background music anymore.

The album consists of three tracks. The first two are Aquarius I and II. They are about water. Not only did I visualize the sound of water, but I formed music and rhythmic fabrics from the sound of water drops. The two pieces follow the path of the water from the dripping through the thunderstorm to the roar of the sea. The third piece titled of Day of Birds and Forests is also about birds and the forest. The special feature of the piece is that the 1.6-second-long bird song of Hylocichla Guttata collected by Dr. Péter Szõke, slowed down to 1/16 speed, sounds four octaves lower and sounds like a song with a perfect intonation. (I dedicated a separate chapter to this natural musical phenomenon in an expanded edition of my book, The Metaphysics of Music.) I played a musical accompaniment to the song of a bird using electric guitars and harmonizers. As a song emerged from the slowdown in the bird’s voice, I used a reverse process in my music. I placed the guitar solo behind the guitar at fourfold speed, making it feel like we were hearing a chirping “electric bird” song deep inside the stereo space. This brought about a kind of dialogue between bird and man, forming a gateway between natural and human music.

Here, too, the music tells a story, followed by a forester wandering through the forest from morning to night, who sometimes stops and wonders at the miracles of the forest. From the second third of the piece, we can feel in larger and larger outdoor spaces. As the forester occasionally hits one or another of the trunks of a large tree with his stick, the sound of the blows evokes swelling echoes stretching between mountains and valleys. These unusual sounds in music have now been given a dramaturgical role here, as they have a permanent natural presence to illustrate the space of the environment.

Music performed on electric guitars, guitar-controlled synthesizers, and percussion instruments sits into this ever-changing atmosphere. In recent years, a so-called cinematic ambient style branching can also be observed, which can perhaps only be called the background of videos and movies, somewhat supporting the spectacle. With the Aquarius album, I tried to go beyond and surpass the original cinematic term with the fact that this music is not a video or film-supporting piece of music, but in itself an internal visual and imaginative piece of music, while some of its parts would certainly stand their ground as soundtracks. I started this essay with reference to the ambient style just because I also use style elements that are characteristic of it, although it is not yet considered that style.

The album was made in accordance with today’s modern age. We sent the music basics to each other online with my Estonian composer and guitarist friend Robert Jürjendal. We played to overdubs in our studios and then I did the mixing and finishing. It was extremely exciting, and so far it has been the most complex musical and studio work of my career, where all the parts that make up the pieces were made in a separate session and ended up being put together into a final composition in a summary session. My colleague Balázs Major and I live in the same city, so making sound recordings was not a problem. This time, the creation of the sound went far beyond the extensive use of effects, as the spatial layering and harmonization of soundtracks was already a real sound design work. The background harmonies were all made of guitar tones and thus realized another important element of the Echolocation concept, the rethinking of electric guitar tones. In this I found an excellent partner in the person of Robert Jürjendal who thinks in similar concepts.

Finally, as a simple “instruction manual,” I can suggest you listen to this music, paying attention to the effect of the music that captivates you, and if possible, – like all Echolocation albums, – you should listen to Aquarius on a high-fidelity system, because the atmospheres embedded in the spatiality give a real sense of space only on a high-fidelity system. I believe that just as music, sound creation must become art and that is what we are working on.