Listen: mosaictheanimated – AREASCATTERBRAIN

AREASCATTERBRAIN is a slow boil about to get fast, a moment of change suspended, repeated, looping, spiraling. AREASCATTERBRAIN is a record is a mood is a place I keep coming back to. I want to be clear about something that this album is clear about. The beat is the past and the present and the future of ambient music.

There’s a theory about time that everything—past(s), present(s), future(s)—always already exists. Everything is floating out there in a big block of spacetime, unchanging, and what we perceive as the ever-changing present is only the movement of our consciousness like a spotlight across the surface of the manifold. The beat is like that spotlight, moving across the otherwise static raw material of the sample. It illuminates. It modulates. It arrives.

Like David Toop said, “sound places us in the real universe.” Like Sun Ra said, “space is the place.” Ambient music is whatever you want it to be, but to me it’s the whole history of music as a way of creating spacetime, the now amidst the always, a means of travel-as-placemaking. It lets me feel like I’m somewhere, lets me be there, lets me go back there again. A loop, the same but different.

If you slow a tone down enough you hear a beat. If you play two different tones at once you hear a beat. If you digitize the analog you make a beat. Ones and zeroes. Space and punctuation. The frame and the animation. Beat. Beat. The needle moves across the record like a spotlight.