My addiction to ambient music stems from its ability to create or influence an environment; altering the feeling of my rather cramped, over-priced room. I can make the room feel inviting, off putting, open or oppressively closed-off merely by choice of record. It’s “select-a-mood,” almost like ingesting a drug, taking a vacation, remembering a dream or drifting into fantasy and distant imaginings at work.
Olli Aami’s Auringonnousu Pikseleina takes me nowhere. Not that it is boring, or a failure as ambient music, or even as minimal an album as something like Kevin Drumm’s Twinkle Toes. There is content here, and it captures the moment after; the silence when you finally turn the car off after an extended drive, the first minutes when you step back onto the street after a concert, the second when you turn the water off before getting out of a shower. This is the grey, drained feeling after an expenditure of energy; post-party, post-drinking, post-vacation, post-orgasm, post-work, post-accomplishment. Good and empty, quite and content, tired and satisfied. Auringonnousu Pikseleina allows the moments where everything has been done, where there can be true emptiness and balance, before you come back to responsibility, life and the real world.
More about: Olli Aami
