Notes on “Ars Nouveau”
There is a single feeling under “Ars Nouveau”: a long look at forests.
I kept the takes that sounded like weather and cut the rest.
Made small, on purpose.
Let it pass through.
piano
Art Nouveau as a creed: beauty in the organic line, refuge from the noise.
This is contemplative ambient: the piano used as a way of listening rather than speaking, tuned toward Art Nouveau and the thresholds beyond it.
The recordings — “Ars Nouveau”, “Partial Wisdom” — are stations on one continuous passage.
Made for headphones at midnight, or a room with the lights down.
There is a single feeling under “Ars Nouveau”: a long look at forests.
I kept the takes that sounded like weather and cut the rest.
Made small, on purpose.
Let it pass through.
Ambient work asks you to be patient in a world that isn't. That's a strange way to spend your twenties, thirties, whatever this is.
There's no roar of a crowd in contemplative ambient; there's a person, somewhere, listening alone at midnight. I try to make it for them.
It's a quiet life. Mostly I'm grateful for it.
“Partial Wisdom” started the way these do — the idea of Art Nouveau, at an odd hour.
Between the notes I left in as much forests as I could.
That is all it wants to be.
I don't choose eloquence; it keeps choosing me.
I wrote it at the piano, mostly late, mostly by deleting.
If it slowed you down for forty minutes, it did its job.
In the lineage of Erik Satie · Claude Debussy · Ludovico's quiet school · Federico Mompou · Harold Budd