Ampbuzz: This Is My Ampbuzz

It’s almost too obvious to point out that the objective of most music is to be listened to. But Brain Eno — if not the grandfather of ambient music, surely the populizer — explored the concept of creating music specifically designed not to be listened to. Challenging the normal musical premise, Eno concentrated on musical auras and sonic colors — anything but the prototypical time signatures, note readings, and guitar chords.

Carrying a similar ambient torch, Ampbuzz drones, ebbs, and dissolves in a sea of guitar-centric tranquility. This Is My Ampbuzz, the solo offshoot from Kinski’s figurehead, finds Chris Martin (Kinski’s lead guitarist; not Coldplay’s crooner) abandoning his space-rock explosions from his first-string band for cosmic soul searching and astral ambience.

Despite a name like Ampbuzz connoting musical ferocity in the form of slaughtering guitar distortion or scathing noise, Martin strikes serenity with gentle guitar whispers and swatches of soft, multi-hued loops and effects. Dripping in delay pedals and creating guitar a sound so malleable it feel as freeform as oxygen, “Bubbles” introduces Ampbuzz with a fitting title for a song that exits earth’s atmosphere and slowly disperses into the vastness of our universe. The track offers itself as a table of contents for the rest of the album: vacant of vocals, awash in tremolo effects and submerged in psych-guitar dreamscapes.

As “Bubbles” establishes an ominous mood, an extraterrestrial existence and a formless direction, This Is My Ampbuzz rests comfortably in a dark, lonesome corner of ambient’s imperative realm of subtlety. But where Ampbuzz’s parent genre tends to rely on stagnant minimalism, Ampbuzz distorts the edge of ambience just enough to lend a compelling listen when the ethereal textures wear thin and the drifting soundscapes succumb to mere sonic wallpaper.

Although This Is My Ampbuzz‘s aural chemistry experiments mesh into one cohesive 43-minute excursion, its six tracks fail to define themselves with their own textural character and ambient personality. However, where the majority of Ampbuzz’s bliss-out favors liquidating guitars and pumping them through the veins of an ambient body, certain moments dissolve and vaporize this formula just enough to tilt the emphasis from complacent to compelling.

As an example, “Soft Currency” finds Martin’s guitar tones evaporating in place of warped, drifting waves of keyboard. As that track eventually builds up to a crescendo drowning in synthesizer tides and subtle details, it arrives there only after amounting for a number of minutes to maximize affect on the listener. Similarly, “Diving Instructions” captures the solitary instant where Martin tosses looped percussion into his guitar-drone commix to channel the ominous qualities into stark blackness.

But apart from these few swashes of diversity, This Is My Ampbuzz is essentially a continuous flow of droning ambience that lulls to sleep everyone but the most adept fans of the genre. This Is My Ampbuzz is like a space-exploring dream: during which it’s gripping and emotive, but after you wake up it fully vacates your mind as if it never existed.