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I first started listening to ambient music because I thought it would help get me to a meditative state where I could create a tulpa. I won't get into it too much here, but by the time the concept of a tulpa reached my eyeballs, it referred toa voluntary hallucinatory companion that you painstakingly and deliberately cultivate. I was a lonely kid.
So I sat in my room for an hour every single day listening to one of the four Ambient albums (or Thursday Afternoon, or Apollo, or The Pearl, or Music for Films) and sat comfortably on my bed and concentrated on the concept of a girl named Ava with long, straight black hair and a personality initially borrowed from Twilight Sparkle (though she would grow into herself over time).
Step one of this process (so the forums said) was to painstakingly envision every single part of your tulpa's body and keep it fixed in your mind. I mentally panned up and down her still form, much like the video for Thursday Afternoon or like I was Dr. Frankenstein surveying the parts I'd assembled. I had a persistent problem with her face; you know that old saw about how you can't imagine a human face you've never seen? I don't know if that's true, but my experience seemed to confirm it. And it's a big no-no to give your tulpa the face or body of a real or fictional person! That sets them up for an identity crisis as they grow apart from your expectations for them. So the compromise I reached was that I'd give her a mask, and I'd let her take it off whenever she felt ready.
At around that point in the process I'd stopped listening to Eno during my contemplations (the community called it "forcing". I told my mom I was "meditating"), since I'd read some nonsense about special sound frequencies that unlock my unconscious mind and loaded an hour of specially prepared static onto my ipod nano. But sitting here and remembering those early sessions, I feel touched. Years before I allowed myself femininity, I spent countless hours contemplating it into existence for a being neither separate from nor identical to me. Although I wanted a friend, what I became was more like a parent. I have many more memories about that time in my life that I'll probably share here some other time, but right now I'm playing them back for myself and hearing Brian Eno in the background, and I feel grateful to him for accompanying me in those days.
Accompaniment might be the right word for it. Ambient music, a term coined and explicated by Eno, was supposed to be music that sat in the room with you, that spoke to you without overwhelming you, that didn't put you to sleep but instead became a dynamic part of the environment. Eno called it music that gives you room to think. He was reacting to muzak, which at that point was still a brand name, which was background music in a stultifying sense; music that was so familiar and unthreatening and unsurprising that you hardly hear it, but provides some kind of shallow comfort. Muzak was primarily music to shop to or to wait to. Today, we have "background music." Backgroud music is music to work to. YouTube playlists of it boast boosted productivity and focus. Lo-Fi Instrumental Hip Hop is presented by its most well known emissary as having two purposes: studying and relaxing. In other words, for productivity and for restoring the body to a state where it can be productive again.
I'm no musicologist, but I see it like this: you put muzak on the elevator to stimulate people just enough that they don't have to cope with the fact that they're in an elevator. If you put ambient music on an elevator, the music doesn't give you enough to push out the elevator with. You are 100% in the elevator. It's also a weirder and more interesting elevator.
Eno's work has such a way of *speaking to your surroundings*. I'm writing this now because I recently re-listened to Ambient 1 on a car trip with my girlfriend, and I was amazed to rediscover how strong this effect was. I normally pay enough attention to the highway not to crash, but not much more than that. On this trip, it felt like the landscape was breathing. I noticed where I was and what it was like. The view out the window illustrated the music and vice versa, sometimes with miraculous conjunction. All the melancholy and muted pleasure of the irreversibly transformed American midwest, with its wind turbines lonely against the sky and unthinkably vast agricultural plots, green and rolling factories that are no more natural or innocent than a skyscraper. The singing on "1-2" sounded like an uncertain lament bearing the crushing but quotidian weight of knowing that the apocalypse has already happened. Not a wail, more like a perpetual sigh. A despairing and tired question endlessly posed. Fatiguing, yes, but persistent. Resilient. What now?
Thank you, Brian Eno. You have a way of gently calling forth what is repressed in me. I want more of that in my life. I want to break the cycle of diversion and unbearable fiery reckoning. I want to sit by your still waters and see my reflection, unflinching but unashamed.
I trust you. You teach me how to trust myself.