Musician, heal thyself: how ambient music brought solace in 2020
“A balm to your soul” – so went the Observer review of Julianna Barwick’s album this July, which was inspired by the musician’s move from New York City to the wellbeing mecca of Los Angeles. Her one-woman choir of celestial vocals is as calming as the bit at the end of a yoga class where you get to shut your eyes and lie under a blanket, and the album, along with its title Healing Is a Miracle, had extra resonance in 2020. Music is so often a communal experience, but with those possibilities snatched away this year, many of us have looked to sounds like this to soothe us where human connection couldn’t. Another reviewer agreed, writing that Barwick’s new music was “a salve for the collective wound”.
Barwick wasn’t the only one. Earlier this year, I interviewed a collection of musicians, including the pop performer Robyn, about the music of Beverly Glenn-Copeland, a cult Canadian musician whose spirited, otherworldly incantations are only just reaching new audiences, decades after they were first released. A retrospective of GlennCopeland’s music, Transmissions, came out last month, and Robyn noted the particular reassuring quality of his songs, especially on his New Age lost treasure Keyboard Fantasies: “It’s the purpose of his music,” she had said. “We all need to release, feel and heal, and Glenn helps us to do that through his own experiences.”
It’s this idea, that music can restore us in times of distress, that the DJ and producer Richard Norris took literally with his sublime ‘Music For Healing’ series, released in March: twelve 20minute suites specifically designed for deep listening (ie ideally lying down on the sofa, immersed in sound) and “to aid stress and anxiety relief in these challenging times,” he said.
The interest in transcendental and New Age music – either contemporary artists, or someone released once on cassette in 1986 – has been gathering pace for a few years now, so much so that the work of once-ridiculed artist Enya has been cast in a new light, with musicians like FKA twigs and Weyes Blood recently claiming her as an important influence. The groundswell is clear in the sheer volume of releases that have been tagged as “ambient” this year. Amid the usual suspects including Brian Eno (and his brother Roger, on their Mixing Colours and Luminous albums) and the former’s old collaborator, the NYC mystic Laraaji (with July’s Sun Piano), these include Adrianne Lenker of the indie band Big
Thief, whose recent solo outing featured the 16-minuter Mostly Chimes, a patchwork of bells, rainfall and crunching leaves.
In 2020, airy ( or airless) soundscapes spoke to the claustrophobia and drift of isolation; ethereal singing, to my mind at least, suggested possibility in some untethered parallel universe. I found myself increasingly turning to music that blocked out the existential dread and doesn’t have the usual catharsis I look for in songs: axeshredding, tear-shedding, tearing up a dancefloor like I’m in an episode of Pose. I’ve hoovered up stuff that softens the edges of anxiety and elicits a feeling of – the only way I can really describe it – filling up my chest and weighing me down, rooting me to some sense of sanity. I have spent a lot of time Googling crystal singing bowls.
In dance music, the number of producers cranking out ambient albums on Bandcamp became a bit of a running joke. (Daniel Avery and Alessandro Cortini’s March lockdown record, Illusion of Time, was the blueprint for these – 43 minutes of gorgeous, galvanising drone to blast away the everyday scaries.) But who could blame them: this uptick in meditative music was a response to the changing environment for playing music, from clubs to bedrooms, and also surely to a growing need. The pandemic led to a surge in downloads of mental wellness apps such as Headspace and Calm, while many musicians turned to making meditation tapes. Even Dispea, the audio erotica app, recently launched a series of sleep stories and soundscapes to help block out your neighbours’ 4am house party.
The Welsh techno producer Kelly Lee Owens understands the healing properties of music more than most. Ahead of the release of her second album Inner Song in August, she created a Calm & Uplift mixtape. Designed for NHS and other frontline workers as a means of catharsis and destressing, the tracklisting featured music from Jon Hopkins and Nils Frahm to the late ambient pioneer Harold Budd and the odd four-minute ripple of chimes. Another great (and weekly) playlist came from Manchester jazzman Matthew Halsall, acting both as a roadmap to his Salute to the Sun album in November and a smorgasbord of spiritual jams.
Internet radio locked into musical mindfulness, too. The DJ Alex Rita presents the show Calm Roots on NTS, while over on Worldwide FM, the duo Lamaisonmusiq started a new weekly serving of “live meditation and music”, which was “their wish to generation a positive wave of energy in these fractured times”. The DJ and musician Auntie Flo, AKA Brian d’Souza, went one step further. Last month he launched a new digital radio station, Ambient Flo, through which listeners can space out to two channels: one music, one birdsong. A particularly encouraging element for the musicians who contribute tracks, Ambient Flo is also using a new profit model to pay artists fairly and more than, say, Spotify.
Perhaps the end of the pandemic will prompt a violent swing away from this stillness and towards mindless hedonism, and that may have its own therapeutic value. But if there’s one small consolation of 2020, it could be a deeper, lasting appreciation of the power of music to heal – just add windchimes.
Soundscapes spoke to the claustrophobia and drift of isolation … ethereal singing suggested possibility in some untethered parallel universe