Ambient music isn’t typically noted for being accessible. The sheer textures and static atmospheres often eschew the most basic elements of melody and rhythm in favor of defiant non-movement. Notes are stretched to infinity, filling a room with sound like a beam of light shining through a window. It is often, by very nature, devoid of emotional resonance or what the common man might consider musicality.
And by reading the descriptions of Amulets’ 2021 record Blooming, you might expect the same thing. There’s a lot of talk about manipulated art installations and endless sound scapes, tape loops manipulated and magnifying the imperfections of the technology.
But while Blooming is certainly a patient and cerebral bit of ambient music, there is a deep emotional core that gives these eight tracks more weight than your typical ambient fair.
Blooming was born out of the early days of the pandemic. Randall Taylor, the artist behind Amulets, would take solitary walks around his neighborhood in Portland to clear his head from the chaos of global events and his own personal life. On these walks, he was struck by both the beauty of the flower blossoms around him and their impermanence. He witnessed the cycle of life and death and rebirth in real time as he saw the same flowers day after day.
Blooming is a reflection of this cycle and the beauty inherent, even at a larger scale, and it is stunning. Unlike the bulk of ambient music, melodies and chord changes aboundin these tracks, layering over one another like branches of trees mingling with one another. Among the found sounds and buzzing drones are violins, strings, and electric guitars. The title track opens the record with a near explosion as a fuzzy bass tone lays a steady progression beneath loops of bird calls, static, and violin drones. It’s statuesque and expansive, the way the best ambient music is, but in a genre where the music is almost designed to be ignored, it’s incredibly engaging.
The rest of the record keeps pace with the title track, building elaborate displays of interwoven timbres and melodies before withering in on themselves. Each track plays out like a fireworks display in slow motion—or, more aptly, like flower petals blossoming and falling away. It’s consistently engaging and emotionally moving in a way that doesn’t need words to convey. And while I might have bought this record merely to get my Flenser cart over the financing threshold, I have the feeling that it will become a regular fixture in my wind down records.