VAN MAGAZINE: The Ambient Influence on Contemporary Music
VAN MAGAZINE: The Ambient Influence on Contemporary Music
BY GEORGE GRELLA
“Daniel Wohl uses electronics and acoustic instruments together as equal elements. The sound he creates is a seamless emulsification of the two, like Evan Parker’s Electro-Acoustic Ensemble in experimental jazz, with tactile quality that intertwines with a sense of time as an extended stillness. He thinks of the use of ambient music as an experiential one, different from what he calls the “directed quality, a part of minimalism,” where the music tends to dictate how the listener is supposed to respond. Wohl goes even further, with a focus on recordings, like ‘Holographic’ (2016) and this year’s ‘État,’ rather than concerts. ‘When you come to a performance, your sense of time is directed,’ he tells me, by the starting time and the intermission. ‘Talking about albums, not performances, I try and create one general mood or world that the piece stays within.” Wohl aims to compose ‘without emotional highs and lows, or surprises, or provocations. That’s not what this world is all about.” Instead his aim is to fill the space ‘with a fine mist of music.’”