Last Updated on April 9, 2024, 5:07 PM | Published: April 9, 2024
It’s hard to write about ambient music.
Not because it isn’t intellectually rich (it often can be) and not because it’s clinical or devoid of emotion (it can be powerful and even staggeringly heartfelt in its own ways) and surely not because it’s too simplistic or minimal (some ambient can be harmonically dense and deeply layered.)
It’s difficult to write about because the best ambient music creates its own liminal space far removed from all the usual descriptors and explanations we use to discuss and define music. There’s really no established vocabulary for reviewing or describing it.
More than maybe any other sound or style, the nature of ambient music is to bypass our words, our expectations, and our minds entirely, disregarding our thoughts and instead creating an environmental accompaniment that slips past our brains, but sits heavily in our ears and ultimately in our hearts.
It’s a strange and delicate needle to thread, but it’s one that Justin Wallis – the man behind OKC/Norman-based electronic ambient project Bird Drugs – navigates with shocking success on brand new surprise release “Nothing is Real,” a full-length album compiled, mixed, announced, and released in just five days.
Weaving together the darkly foreboding minimalism of Aphex Twin with the dense electronic soundscaping of Flying Lotus and sporadic shades of the melodic rhythms of experimental pioneers Steve Reich and Phillip Glass, “Nothing is Real” is as much a crash course in the genre as an exploration of Wallis’ own meditative psyche.
“There aren’t any rules,” Wallis told me. “I like organized chaos. I like the idea that instrumental music can evoke feelings and paint a picture without words.”
Those pictures range from the rainy, electrified hardscapes of cyberpunk and neo-noir to the lamp-lit freeways and late-night, empty airports of our real world.
These pieces (it’s difficult to call them “songs”) are a ready-made soundtrack to pre-dawn mornings and half-awake nights where the only lights are artificial and the boundaries between dreams and reality feel thinner than usual.
“I think I largely deal in the realms of nostalgia, childhood, innocence lost, duality, nature vs. manufactured landscapes, our lost connections, the whole range of human emotions,” Wallis said. “I’m not sure if that comes through in my work, but those are my background programs that are always running.”
The attempt to do it all so quickly came as something of a lark and a personal challenge after a period of waiting for motivation to strike, and after launching his own independent ambient/experiment label, DISSOCIATION, as a way of cultivating and showcasing the state’s surprisingly robust experimental scene.
“I started the label this year and knew I wanted to get a release out there soon,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to release something new for a long time now, but my problem is I have ADHD and I struggle to finish things unless I have a firm deadline.”
That deadline was originally planned to be an experiment of its own, a ticking-clock challenge to create an entire album’s worth of new music from scratch in just a matter of days.
But we know what they say about best-laid plans.
Instead, “Nothing is Real” unexpectedly came to represent a more poignant study in the human tendency to return later to our cast-offs and disregarded ideas with fresh eyes and ears, only to find with the benefits of distance and deadline that they’re just what we needed.
“Most of the tracks are evolutions on older sketches,” Wallis explained. “I did set out with the intention of producing all new tracks, but I pretty much hated everything that came out, which is common when I try to force something. I started scrolling through recordings from earlier sessions and I really liked a lot of them, so I went that route.”
The result is a practically perfect encapsulation of everything that makes the best ambient music both effortlessly evocative and almost impossibly indefinable.
It’s consistently interesting enough to pull you in and hold your attention, and yet it’s hypnotic and spacious enough to get lost in the environment of a room and absorbed into the unacknowledged passage of time.
Without realizing it, I’ve listened to the entire album four times through on repeat while writing this.
There’s the famous, inescapable quote attributed most often to the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat that says “art is how we decorate space, and music is how we decorate time.”
Music like “Nothing is Real,” against all odds, can do both.
“Nothing is Real” by Bird Drugs is available now exclusively on Bandcamp at birddrugs.bandcamp.com through the DISSOCIATION label.
Follow Bird Drugs on Instagram at @birddrugs.
Brett Fieldcamp has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly 15 years, writing for several local and state publications. He’s also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.
