Endless Falls  (Kranky; 2010)  By Calum Marsh | 13 April 2010
When I reviewed Loscil’s The Strathcona Variations late last
year, I wrote that it benefited ambient music to be explicitly
conceptual, because concept records could “transcend the
perceived simplicity of the craft by turning abstractions into
arguments about something.” What I meant is that while the
aesthetic itself is fundamentally pleasant, alone it’s a pretty
shallow pleasure—comforting, maybe, but ultimately bland. This
narrow sense of satisfaction is so consistent across the genre
that I’m not even sure what an especially “bad” ambient record
might sound like, short of something introducing enough
radically different elements that it no longer even qualifies as
an ambient record. I see this as a problem because if everything
is good then nothing is; how do we laud someone for succeeding
where they couldn’t possibly have failed? How do we craft a
canon for a genre with no full spectrum of quality? How do we
describe music that all sounds mor