FTAL 024 - July 2014
Robert Scott Thompson – Arcana
Relaxed Machinery CD/DL
![[Image: a2818215949_2.jpg]](http://f1.bcbits.com/img/a2818215949_2.jpg)
There is no "art" in "ambient" – the two don't commingle. For Robert Scott Thompson, a third-generation California native, he's questioning this idea. And just as "art" and "ambient" bookend identical letters, so Thompson's music environments conclude with comparable genre descriptors. "Electronica, ambient, computer and electroacoustic" his Bandcamp header writes elaborately. I'm not a fan of pretension in diluting genres until they become nebulous entities. But with the widescreen vistas of Thompson's music to date, including the very Steve Roach-esque "Upon The Edge Of Night", the additional "contemporary art music" becomes less Emperor's new clothes language. It represents the sound palette only as well as categorisations can.
"Arcana", Thompson's latest LP, is ambient music seen through a hazy, watery lens, as if the subject matter is always distilling itself down into something pleasant. This applies to the amount of drift in the soundscapes too. Take "Last Hours Of Ancient Sunlight", where a lolloping back-and-forth rhythm interplays over chimes, found sounds and tipsy synthesiser melodies. Sound design is a primary focus, with the koto-ish guitar chords of satisfying closer "Waning In The Glow Of Unknowns" beckoning thought this could soundtrack Tai Chi classes. However, Thompson's grasp and insertion of eerieness occasionally rocks the boat, like a tortured soul with a bleeding heart. You can feel a coarsing emotiveness in the work, yet with a shortening schematic for the tracks in comparison to earlier LPs on his own label Aucourant, sharper honed ideas.
These condensed soundworlds, like anything given chance to come to the surface, displace discords (as on the opener "Liminal Worlds"). This is done through a reductionism of the elements in the shorter tracks. In the context of your everyday errands, it is less meditation, more incidental music mixed with active listening. In this nature, Thompson can be placed on a pedestal as an innovator in the widely diluted ambient field in 2014. Having had releases on Aucourant further back than 2002, "Arcana" marks Thompson looking to the past to fork out the future, making a case for art and ambient as parallel lines on the same path.
Mick Buckingham
http://robert-scott-thompson.bandcamp.com/album/arcana
Robert Scott Thompson – Arcana
Relaxed Machinery CD/DL
There is no "art" in "ambient" – the two don't commingle. For Robert Scott Thompson, a third-generation California native, he's questioning this idea. And just as "art" and "ambient" bookend identical letters, so Thompson's music environments conclude with comparable genre descriptors. "Electronica, ambient, computer and electroacoustic" his Bandcamp header writes elaborately. I'm not a fan of pretension in diluting genres until they become nebulous entities. But with the widescreen vistas of Thompson's music to date, including the very Steve Roach-esque "Upon The Edge Of Night", the additional "contemporary art music" becomes less Emperor's new clothes language. It represents the sound palette only as well as categorisations can.
"Arcana", Thompson's latest LP, is ambient music seen through a hazy, watery lens, as if the subject matter is always distilling itself down into something pleasant. This applies to the amount of drift in the soundscapes too. Take "Last Hours Of Ancient Sunlight", where a lolloping back-and-forth rhythm interplays over chimes, found sounds and tipsy synthesiser melodies. Sound design is a primary focus, with the koto-ish guitar chords of satisfying closer "Waning In The Glow Of Unknowns" beckoning thought this could soundtrack Tai Chi classes. However, Thompson's grasp and insertion of eerieness occasionally rocks the boat, like a tortured soul with a bleeding heart. You can feel a coarsing emotiveness in the work, yet with a shortening schematic for the tracks in comparison to earlier LPs on his own label Aucourant, sharper honed ideas.
These condensed soundworlds, like anything given chance to come to the surface, displace discords (as on the opener "Liminal Worlds"). This is done through a reductionism of the elements in the shorter tracks. In the context of your everyday errands, it is less meditation, more incidental music mixed with active listening. In this nature, Thompson can be placed on a pedestal as an innovator in the widely diluted ambient field in 2014. Having had releases on Aucourant further back than 2002, "Arcana" marks Thompson looking to the past to fork out the future, making a case for art and ambient as parallel lines on the same path.
Mick Buckingham
http://robert-scott-thompson.bandcamp.com/album/arcana