A few years ago, William Tyler wrote a very smart piece in Aquarium Drunkard magazine. My previous radio gig, Afterimages on WHUPfm, leaned into the same musical connections that Tyler wrote so eloquently about.
“What I hear in these artists is an unspoken aesthetic alliance. When Brian Eno began making ambient music, his purpose was two-fold. It was instrumental music that could necessitate active listening, but could also work the exact opposite way, as sonic wallpaper used for relaxation and contemplation and none the worse for it. Eno was at the forefront of a group of artists in the 1970s trying to unite the modernism of pop with the theoretical and compositional approaches of modern classical. It’s no wonder that when Eno himself started a record label of his own, Obscure, he championed a fresh mix of avant-garde classicism (Harold Budd, John Cage, Gavin Bryars) and instrumental chamber pop (the peerless Penguin Cafe Orchestra). While the label itself was short-lived, issuing ten releases from 1975 to 1978, its influence on Windham Hill is clear—note the uniform artwork, the wide range of exploratory music, and the value put on inter-label collaboration between artists.
On the other side of the English Channel, a similar blend of aspirational aesthetics and sonic clarity was being championed by Manfred Eicher’s ECM Records. While a bulk of what ECM released in the 70s and early 80s was certainly progressive jazz, it’s always been easy for me to hear a sonic kinship between Jarrett’s Koln Concert recordings and the piano work of George Winston, whose Windham Hill-released Autumn was a mega-seller, or a direct connection between guitarist Pat Metheny’s New Chataqua, itself a solo guitar record, and the explorations of Michael Hedges and Alex De Grassi. What is key to me as a listener/student/consumer is less so the aspect of ECM being a platform for jazz or new classical per se, and more the way a sonic and visual aesthetic established a brand identity—a tactic Windham Hill would go on to owe a great debt to. When you bought an ECM album, you didn’t just perceive the fingerprints of Eicher—you knew the record would sound a certain way, look a certain way, bear a mark of high fidelity and visual clarity. It inspires the desire to possess all of the titles in the catalog, almost like baseball trading cards.”
As i begin this new project, i still keep these thoughts as a foundation to my programming choices. Sounds of the Sea, of course, draws on my current living environment, literally on the banks of the River Blackwater, where it meets the Celtic Sea. There’s perhaps a little more pop music in the air here than in North Carolina, but also a much longer tradition which i am just starting to explore. I hope you can join me occasionally on this voyage. In the meantime, read William Tyler’s piece, and keep it pinned for easy reference.
sounds of the sea 