Ambient electronica has always seemed hit or miss. On one end, ambient is the mixing of sounds, creating music outside of meter but holding a certain rhythm. Music, itself, becomes sound. Ambient is inherently deconstructionist, music becoming its bare elements. On the other end, sometimes the results are just noise. Chaotic noise that means absolutely nothing.
Beat Hollow is an ambient album in the truest form. According to the press release, Brian Siskin-recording under the name Fognode-collected various samples, loops, and sounds from other members of the Infrasound Collective label. Various samples — including the flute work of Mark Fauver — were collected over the Internet, condensed into digital files and mutated by Siskin. Interestingly enough, Siskin never met the people he was working with. Thus, each sound on the record is, itself, the music whole. There is no individual, fragmented sound existing by itself over a loop of beats. The sounds collected by Siskin (those not from the Infrasound Collective were recorded live on a single microphone) are woven seamlessly together, creating, as Siskin himself says, “environments as much as true songs.”
And this is the aim of ambient music: to create environments through the music itself. Beat Hollow creates the back alley world of Nashville, 4 a.m. Just as his first album, Urban Passer, recreates the soggy northwest, Siskin’s second album recreates the southeast, but with an absence of bodies. Beat Hollow speaks of fog drenched docks, dusky sidewalks interspersed with the periodic beam of streetlamps, circles of white enclosing cracked sidewalks, discarded cigarettes and empty shopping carts, but not a body to be seen. Instead, mood becomes more important than presence. Haunting flutes mingle with a sporadic beat, hinting at dissidence but never quite tipping into the realm of chaos. Siskin’s environment remains intact, but always threatens to splinter. An electronically created beat morphs into a clacking snare, real in its imperfections, while a pedal steel guitar drifts into radio crackles. The bass is real and then it is not. The transition is seamless and smooth. The ear can barely tell the transition into artificiality. And Beat Hollow plays into the realm of nature and artificiality, blurring both lines.
The environments created by Siskin become those of street corners, cracked sidewalks, with grass and weeds yellowing under a halogen bulb. Nature, itself, becomes artificial. And, in turn, the artificial becomes natural. Rain soaked docks become more natural than the rain itself. The docks belong there whereas the rain, pouring down, is a construction of mood. The rain doesn’t mean anything without the docks. The docks, themselves, mean everything. The grass growing through the cracked concrete is artificial, a created mood, dependent upon the concrete and the halogen light from the streetlamp for existence. The concrete belongs there. The grass, however, does not.
Beat Hollow is a complex work of sound. Unlike a lot of ambient albums I’ve listened to, which are discordant and chaotic thereby distancing the listener him/herself from the environment, Beat Hollow manages to create a seamless, smooth environment that draws the ear inside. The album swallows the listener, taking him/her on a tour of Nashville devoid of blinking lights and honky-tonk bars. Instead, the environment becomes real through the artificial nature of ambient music. The back-alleyways, the dank puddles, and the cracked sidewalks become real through the artificial nature of sound.