Ambient music doesn’t occupy a lot of my shelf space, and probably less of my listening time. There’s always been something about it that seems, for lack of a better term, lazy. It falls under a category, to me, that means easy listening. Much of what I’ve heard amounts to aural wallpaper. It’s never struck me as art so much as a splash of color because let’s face it, plain white or off-white is boring.

Both volumes of Disintegration Loops though have been more engaging for me. They catch me deep down someplace real. They are what I needed to hear because they describe what I was feeling from the time I walked out of work yesterday. Their own story is quite compelling also but I’d prefer to put it aside and just realize the sounds as they relate to my emotions.

They are distant and alienated, like listening to music coming from a church down the block, or filtered through the plaster and lath of an old pre-war when you’re sitting on the sofa maybe, half-reading a book and listless. You know something is going on next door but it doesn’t involve you but maybe you want it to.

They are a half-formed memory from a long time ago. Something you heard but can’t quite recall how far back. The sounds loop over and over in your memory and become more dim and removed as they go. They decay into space.

And the space: Even on the laptop speakers it is wide open spacious. A lot of ambient music, to me, sounds flat and claustrophobic. This drifts out into open air like smelling someone else’s dinner cooking while you’re walking down the street on an autumn evening. It’s not exactly pretty. It’s kind of lonely. It’s wonderful.