Ambient music

One could argue that all musical forms are essentially incomplete until the listener joins the party, but ambient music seems more needily co-dependent than most. Given that a typical sound bed is a blank canvas of amniotic electronica, much depends on the interpretation of whatever is laid over it: the drip and the drift; the scrape and the scratch; the arbitrary beauty of found sounds and field recordings. The meaning can be as banal or as profound as desired. Is that distant clanging the bells of mortal dread tolling for us all; or simply next door’s bin lid clattering on to the pavement? Since releasing his excellent debut album, Behind

Soon after the launch of Classic FM in 1992, the then controller of Radio 3, Nicholas Kenyon, asserted that his high-minded station was not in any competition with its commercial rival and certainly not lurching into ‘some ghastly descent into populism’, even as he hired Classic FM’s presenters and fiddled with the programming to create ‘access points’ for novice listeners. Classical music once had a higher calling than to be this subdued That argument is now over, the pretence dropped. The current controller of Radio 3, Sam Jackson – appointed last year – was previously the actual boss of Classic FM, as well as Smooth and Gold. Earlier this year,