One of the nicest things about 2006 was that I became part of an informal online "club" devoted to electronic music. They meet through internet chat, a type of communication which allows "real-time" conversation over the Net. Members type their lines of conversation onto the screen, which everyone in the group sees on their own computer, and they can respond to anyone on that screen. The whole event is known as a "chatroom," though of course there is no real "room" involved. The "room" meets about four times a week, once on Tuesday evening and later at night on weekends.

Internet "chat" is mostly thought of as being a place for teenagers to flirt and connect. It also has a more threatening reputation for harboring stalkers and sex predators. But this electronic music group is far from that. There is none of that "hey baby how R U 2Nite" stuff going on. Instead, the talk can range from the music itself to aesthetics, movies, books, philosophy, and religion. The chat is not always serious, though; there's plenty of silliness and humor and bad jokes. But most of all, they talk about the equipment and software that they use to make their experimental music.

When it comes to electronic music, the technology has progressed incredibly much since my experiences with the Buchla and Moog thirty-five years ago. Those old "analog" synthesizers are now treasured relics, sometimes reproduced and replicated lovingly by modern craftsmen. But the edge of music technology has long since moved into the digital realm. A single laptop loaded with the right software can do just about everything that an old wall-size Moog used to do. Modern synthesizers, with keyboards or without them, create sounds from samples as well as electronic generators. Manipulations of sound which used to take hours on old tape machines can now be done in seconds. Sounds are "looped" digitally so they repeat; echoes and sequences and arpeggiations pour out of software into equally virtual sound-working devices. The output, in the case of this "community," is ambient music.

I've described ambient before, and as always I refer you to some of my first Electron entries of February 2004, where you may read my series of essays describing this kind of sound and the composers who make it. In this case, the online community is its own audience. Almost everyone in the group not only listens to ambient, but creates it as well. During the chat sessions, there is often a real-time concert, in which the host of the group plays about twenty minutes of live ambient sound from his home studio. With the marvel of the global Internet, we can hear live improvisations from a studio in Hawaii, Texas, Scotland, or even Croatia. While the improvisation is going on, the listeners in the chatroom sometimes comment. The unspoken agreement is that nothing harsh or rude should be said about the music. Most of the comments are either sympathetic and simple, such as "I'm really feeling this," or mildly constructive, such as "You have a nice sequence going on here now." The best of these improvisations are recorded and placed in an online archive where they can be heard again.

The membership of this chatroom is almost exclusively male, and also older than the usual group of internet chatters. Ambient music, like physics, continues to be a predominantly male field. There are a couple of women ambient musicians who stop by, but they don't stay very long. I am usually the only female in the chatroom, and I'm there not as a player but as a devoted ambient listener. I have none of the elaborate sound equipment that they talk about, so their "gear talk" is lost on me. However, I often share my own memories of working with the old synthesizers. Some of my friends in the group have suggested that I try making electronic music again, even after three decades and more. A modest synthesizer or piece of electronic sound software is not that expensive. I am tempted, but if I want to do sound as well as art, I would have to find the time to do it, and at this point I don't have enough time to do what I should be doing, let alone what I might want to do. So I am satisfied for now to listen and belong to the "Salon."

If you would like to hear and read what goes on in the Salon, drift on over to the Stillstream web site where you can find links to the music, the chatroom, and the archives. I must remind my more conservative musical listeners that ambient may not sound like "music" to them at all. It is more like "sound sculpture" or "audible wallpaper." It is not always meant to be the center of attention, as a conventional piece of classical music would be. Ambient is often there just to set a mood, a feeling, or evoke memories of places and times beyond our ordinary reality.

In my next entry, I'll introduce you to one of the best efforts of of this community, a newly released CD by two of its creative leaders.

Posted at 3:58 am | link