An Uncanny Review of M. Sage's The Wind of Things
musings on memory, ambience, and meaning
Disclaimer: this is not a conventional album review. Much of the material is only tangentially related to the album, being the silly musings of a man twiddling his thumbs away in a Chicago winter. This piece is a form of cerebral housekeeping, tidying up my own thoughts while hopefully still being a stimulating read for others.
The Wind of Things is an index of life on the water—the LP is full of the sounds of lapping waves and evening moorings, not to mention its nautically themed track titles. And as a musical index, I should be flipping this record as one tenderly flips the pages of a scrapbook, experiencing the past within the pleasantry of memory.
However, some memories are not always pleasant, but neither are they bad. Some lurk just beyond the cerebral horizon, their presence felt like an uncanny sensation on a midnight walk. Each cautious footstep anticipating the revelation of some sinister creature lurking in the shadows, its opaque, inky shroud stopping its precise identification. Despite this anxiety, we continue on, justified by our faith that the reliable mundanity of reality—an ironically slippery term—will unmask this uncanny memory. This faith rests upon an implied intersubjective agreement: we must all be able to agree that certain things can’t occur—aberrations that defy the laws of physics, science, and biology—which we confirm by our collective adherence to a single, immanent reality.
Uncanny moments—the disturbing recognition of the unfathomable—results in an anxiety caused by the dissolution of this tacit agreement. For just a moment, reality ceases to be real. We are face to face with a true aberration, neither able to be confirmed or denied by the presence of another. At that uncanny moment, there are two paths: the previously mentioned brisk march towards the regulated void of objectivity—getting assurance our faculties have simply (and momentarily) malfunctioned—or to engage with this surreality and presume some reason for its existence. This confrontation is not easy. It is a groping in the dark, clumsily searching for how this circumstance ceases to be familiar, and in the process, revealing the terrifying porousness of reality. The uncanny moment is a freshly bored hole in the psychic bucket of your mind, tainting the world with the indecent imposition of the subjective, an affront to our own peace of mind as it is to the precariousness of objective reality.
The pleasantry of memory, in all its subjective glory, is rather like a wild west ghost town—its novel anachronisms can quickly turn into supernatural encounters. But, it does not have to be so terrifying. As Freud theorized, the uncanny is actually a recognition of the repressed, an exhumation of unsavory thoughts and feelings, the past recycled back into the living. Old friends exist within fleeting glances across the street, a screeching automobile has our heads turning for poor Sparky. These events act as impertinent psychic guides haply strewn across reality, giving us glimpses into our subjective worlds. Brian Eno, in connection to ambient music, has made his own pithy remarks on the subject:
“Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities.”1
Preserving the doubt and uncertainty of ambience is to destabilize our relationship with reality, providing instead a disconcerting, but potentially cathartic, encounter with the subjective uncanny. Don’t get me wrong—to feel an exuberant pulse beneath the dear, withered corpse of the past is not a comforting experience—but, looking past those unsavory feelings, uncanniness can be experienced as a rebirth. It provides us the rare chance of reframing our past, vesting its vague, slippery memories with a comfortingly obstinate purpose.
The Wind of Things is an uncanny moment within the ambient canon. When I grab an ambient LP out of the digital record bin, It’s usually because I want to escape—to catapult myself out of the living room and into a numbing abstractness—a complete absence of any strong thoughts or emotions. When I grab Wind, I’m still looking to escape—but into a viscerally uncertain past. I’m sleuthing for the elusive mnemonic moss flourishing in the damp corners of my psyche, unlit by the prying light of the conscious self. It’s practically a fantasy for how foreign it feels, but despite that we still recognize the residual feelings it evinces as our own. A remembrance long gone stale still hints at what it once was; it is an experience as deeply rooted in the past as it is in our current encounter with it, and makes palpable the ripening effect of time.
Earnestly confronting the uncanny’s sordid anachronisms transforms ill-defined, repressed memories into cathartic relief. However, many popular ambient tracks do not prepare us well for this confrontation; these tracks employ a viscous aural field, obscuring both our external and internal environments. This fog of sound numbs our passions and shrouds our memories, granting us instead a feeble nostalgia. Like the uncanny, nostalgia is a feeling that refuses to be buried, being perpetually exhumed, reanimated, and disfigured in our mind’s eye. The difference lies in nostalgia’s placid average, a feeling that relies on a vaguely pleasant recollection of the broad past (giving a blind eye to the actual diversity of feelings felt at the time) juxtaposed with a drab present. Nostalgia is a shroud on the past that covers its speaking subjects while still emitting an alluring din to the crowd—a confounding, feeble average of the actual scene played out behind the curtain. Ambient legend GAS composed a quintessential example of the textural side of this nostalgic continuum in his “Pop 1” (2000): stuttering waves of water drown the melancholic synthesizer motifs like a heavy curtain obscures its speaking subject, and conversely, the motifs sideline the splashing water as their sad tones continually grasp for our attention. In the pursuit of maximizing texture, GAS has superimposed so much sound and movement that he’s effaced the precise affects of its constituent components. What is left is an impotent average of them all, a perfect representation of nostalgia’s feeble environmental din of the past.
The term “environment” is necessarily reductive, which nostalgia naturally makes full use of. It abstracts the specific experiences we may have with a space and makes it commensurable to all—an abstract concept representing a common reality. These universal terms marginalize our current and past connections to a space, particularly as we seek to express it to others. The environmental concept emphasizes the potential actions encouraged by a space, abstracting it away from the realized history it already contains. This now empty abstraction, devoid of history and its concomitant sense of time, houses the boundless eternity of imagination. This imagined sense of space, and with it its imagined sense of being, offers a vacuous transcendence: the promising escape from the confines of the material leads to a universal, timeless emptiness—ironically, to indulge too much in the subjective realm of the mind is to revert to the meaningless objectivity of the universal.
The congealing of motifs, harmonies, and musical textures into the aforementioned ambient “commons” of abstract space finds its foil in the uncanny. The uncanny gestures towards a lucid history while still maintaining a sense of the unknown. This requires some degree of clarity with the music, which the Wind of Things accomplishes through a light, acoustic approach to ambience. It is a sort of stripped down “back to basics” approach, with “basics” not being a rehash of an Eno track, but some third, primitively confounding thing. The lack of obvious reverb, delays, and sequencers on the LP completely disregards the electronic music technology that made modern ambience possible—the project seems to exist outside of Eno’s lineage of using the studio as a “compositional tool.”2
Our treatment of technology as a tool, something in which we can master and manipulate towards our selfish ends, makes us ignorant of its incidental relationship to the concept of ambience. Tools toil transparently towards a rationally determined end and are naturally judged through this teleology. For example, a woodworker judges their chisel in its effectiveness at carving a piece of wood, not the chisel in its “chiselness.” Perhaps the ideal chisel is not at all chisel-like, but whatever device that may carve wood most effectively (observing the evolving constituents of a humble tool shed elicits this point clearly). The same is true of ambience—there has existed an arsenal of instruments and musical devices for creating ambience, with electronic music technology being only the most current iteration. The total historical set of tools—whether it be digital reverb or a didgeridoo—are obviously all capable of creating ambience because it is ultimately an aesthetic; it has been, like any other musical aesthetic, continually repackaged through new developments in musical theory and instrumental advancements. As Music from the Hearts of Space radio show creator Stephen Hill said, ambience is not a genre of the post-war Western world, but a sensibility as old as art itself.3
Seeing ambience as an aesthetic rather than through its technological developments helps one draw through lines that would otherwise be difficult to make. Placing Eno, Krautrock, and the post-war experimentalists as the historical fulcrum point of the ambient genre (another reductive categorization) emphasizes the material conditions that begot it. This historical understanding is an essentially forensic endeavor—to trace the footsteps and swab the pillows of a musical murder scene, never shifting focus from the artist’s beautifully macabre corpus. This approach works backwards and around the creation of a work—it’s materials orbit as naturally as celestial spheres, their teleology justified by their very movement. This historical perspective can actually mystify the very subject it seeks to uncover.
Better to think of modern technology—the tape loops, reverbs, and sequencers of the studio—as materials of a system, where it is the relationship between said materials and the listener that is necessarily ambient, not its materials. At it’s most basic level, ambience is a network of sounds that waver around the thetic threshold—the dynamic point at which something is grasped consciously. This wavering is not entirely undirected, as our mind analyzes entire scenes of activity in order to determine which sounds(s) deserve conscious attention. This probing focus perpetually realizes new relationships, demonstrating the kaleidoscope of meaning inherent in a diverse musical system. For example, a tone can be emphasized or understated by the timbrel, melodic, and harmonic relations of its neighbors—a tonic chord quickly becomes a dominant, a strident tone is darkened by an even more brilliant one, and so forth. Ambience is therefore defined in how well it balances these components around the thetic threshold, to elicit certain affects by creating new permutations of sounds.
A pivot away from materiality—or sound as texture—towards these compositional musical relationships opens up the possibility of clearer, more concise realizations of ambience. The viscous melange of sounds in works like “Pop 1,” as noted earlier, construct sonic environments that feel timeless and abstract—an emptiness that elicits tepid nostalgia or vacuous transcendence. The Wind of Things, in contrast, is a lithe network of musical utterances that articulates space through activity.
Listen (here) to Sage’s ambient nugget “Starboard Reach.” Piano, strings, and bowed glockenspiel collide in a chirping cloud of discourse. Each instrument is a discrete interlocutor occupying their spectral niches in the composition. Unencumbered by sultry reverb or stuttering electronics, their concise interactions fill one’s ears with dynamic history rather than timeless space. A wonderful, haphazard precision results—like the elation one feels when they discover the face of a loved one eroded into a piece of granite. The passage of time, while always containing the devastating potential of inevitable decay and destruction, is yet capable of a special sublimity unnatural to humans—systemic design. Systemic design is an alternative to intelligent design, namely that creativity and memory can also be dispersed across whole systems of feedback, not just in a brain. To listen to The Wind of Things is to find oneself in a forest of firing neurons, experiencing intelligence as embodied systems of active space.
Time within these systems is not quite teleological—we don’t get a sense of grand narrative or evolution. An active space maintains a consistent identity while still allowing some freedom of movement. In “Starboard Reach” instruments stray from the global tempo, are inconsistent with timbre and volume, and generally feel improvisatory. However, this playful meandering occurs in a precisely defined musical space—there are a few recurring motifs and pitches, a consistent instrumentation, overall a memorable and consistent identity to the track. Allowing instruments this freedom, while still having them adhering to a macro logic, is to grant the music a systemic creativity—it continually spins its own meaning without devolving into an amorphous mass of noise.
The playful permutations of discrete musical elements through time also has the potential to engage with memory in more precise fashions, such as through the uncanny. Take the track “Harbor Dive” for example: the slow meanderings of zither, flute, piano and harmonium are superimposed onto a recording of lapping waves. Like “Starboard Reach,” the instrumental portion concisely outlines ambience through an active space, its composition allowing for improvisational freedom while still adhering to a consistent identity. The inclusion of unmanipulated field recordings, almost ubiquitous across the LP, adds an explicitly mnemonic quality—the meaning inherent in the composition of the instrumentals collides with the our own memories of water. “Harbor Dive” contains a visceral precision of the past unattainable by tracks like “Pop 1.” It’s concise, emotional, and clear—a potent mnemonic aid in rendering our forgotten maritime memories.
My own maritime scenes take place in Chicago, along the shores of Lake Michigan. The lake’s horizon is a needle perpetually knitting the yarn of tangled waves into an infinite quilt of clouds and stars; its watery expanse the primordial mirror to the celestial. Feeling its limitless breadth is the closest I’ve felt to feeling the infinite. The enlightening murmurings of the lake, however, are often inscrutable. They are the viscous drippings of a bloated, watery soundscape—an empty, timeless ambience of the world.
Despite this, I get an uncanny feeling when I listen to The Wind of Things. These pieces feel too familiar, arouse a too visceral reaction—they seem to spin a semiotics of lapping waves and retreating tides, lending me an understanding of the lake as meaningful as it is personal. Previously an opaque emptiness of feeling, memories of my lake meanderings blossom into a beautiful uncanniness made meaningful by the network of circumstances that brought me there in the first place. It complicates these soundscapes by injecting the emotional circumstances of its confrontation: the anxious pacing by the shoreline; the pensive, searching eyes; the crashing waves felt as the unending tides of time. These uncanny nodes are not meant to be interpreted, but instead contribute to an awareness that there is an inherent meaning to the world precisely because we occupy it—in other words, an active space is a meaningful space. The ancients believed that music was a governing force in our universe—the music of the spheres, as they called it. While this was disproved by the existential objectivity of science, I think we still have a duty to vest our own spheres—the network of memories, relationships, and feelings that compose the self—with a purpose as obstinately profound as the tides of the lake.
From the liner notes to his famous 1978 album Ambient 1: Music for Airports.
From a 1979 lecture given by Eno called “The Studio as Compositional Tool.”
From Victor Szabo’s book Turn on, Tune in, Drift Off (2022), page 150