Ambient and Otherworldly Music

From the moment that music became a recorded medium- a sonic event fixed in time and space- artists have sculpted musical sound into worlds that one can inhabit, wander through and linger in; imaginary landscapes that are unknown and even unknowable.

This class will explore a range of artistic practices and concepts that evoke the otherworldly, the eerie or the audiotopic; including psychogeography, the derive, and urban exploration; acousmatic field recording and ethnographic surrealism; outsider, psychedelic and hauntological pop music; cinematic spaces from Tarkovsky's Stalker to Sun Ra's Space is the Place; and Mark Fisher's notions of the weird as "something which does not belong" and the eerie as a crisis of presence ("something here where there should be nothing") or absence ("nothing here where there should be something"),

We will look at how sound can not only establish territory, but can also be used to disrupt or "deterritorialize" existing boundaries, leading to the possibility of audiotopias--liberatory sonic spaces that listeners inhabit for the duration of the record.

This class will alternate lectures and listening sessions with practical workshops that use the recorded sonic event as autonomous musical material that can traverse the nexus of electronic and ethnographic sounds, evoke the eerie in the evacuated landscapes of dub and ambient music, and engage in trans-cultural collision in the 4th world.

While working with strategies of defamiliarization, transmutation, collision and subliminal haunting to transport listeners to unfamiliar places, students will experiment with acoustic and synthesized sound design techniques that integrate field recordings with sonic mimesis, tape loops, reverb, and spatial effects.

By the end, participants will have created original compositions that navigate the otherworldly, the eerie, and the post-geographic possibilities of sound.