If Land Art was art that which made ecology a new context for post-War human experience, then other new media for living were being invented as well. Electronic ambience was one such medium.
Ambient reconciled the solitude and singularity of the new human subject with sensational wordly connect. The electronic had four great virtues—depth, embodiment (creating objects out of sensations), which then allowed things to be mixed into complex figures and autopoiesis (things could be mixed of their own accord). In the electronic immersive ambience, we were alone yet soaking in vibrations from life around us like aquanauts in oceanic depths.
Such perception in depth would tame the psychosis of atomisation of post-War life. If life did not make sense in grammatical communication, then at least traces of life could be recorded electronically and orchestrated back to a nonsensical web of sense that kept a wildly individuating society just about sane.
Electronic outreach
Fifty years ago, the pastiche of sounds and stories that Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band streamed through the ambient electronic silence—which Paul McCartney referenced from John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen—was the first shot fired in this direction.
How quickly things would move towards this was proven by the cosmic electronic outreach of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon made in 1973 at the same Abbey Road studio where Sgt. Pepper’s had been recorded (Land Art and cosmic electronica would be reconciled in Floyd’s music for Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point and their Live at Pompeii concert film). Ambience became shorthand for the cultural—artificially created in electronic machines, but as vast as the cosmic, given its powers to resonate to the corners of the universe.
Between mythic pastiche and a blip-ridden cosmos, ambience let loose the great revolutionary force of our times—dance. Vague sensations that the ambient caught and signalled to bodies would incite figures to move in mysterious ways in space. Genres of performance of the proto-ambient electric period—avant-garde dance and theatre, jazz, early rock and roll—would now be given electronic depth, mystery and resonance. Saturation by collective experience gave way to saturation of the senses, doing away with the need to make the individual feel profound.
Individual and collective
A plethora of terms are to be found from the 1960s onwards for wild performance in ambient perception—Happenings by the Conceptual Minimalist artists (including Cage’s infamous 4’33” performance), pop, funk, disco, punk, post-punk or rave. Over time, new collectives would be formed—dancers grooving to electronic sound.
All through this, the individual and the collective would be kept in tight tension. A cyclical loop was set up between stripped-down monochrome, white, noisy psychotic performances about the pains of being alone in an insensate world, and dance in polyphonic, deep, ambient sound.
Punk would revolt against disco, but would fall back into dance music in the 1980s to take advantage of electronic depth, polyphony, and the inclusive democracy of dance. And so on… all the way to our contemporary radical pop-dance forms of rave and whatever has happened after. Multiracial, omni-sensational, omnisexual funky disco would keep winning the day against White avant-gardism of noise while absorbing energies from it.
Miles Davis’s journey from hard bop through the Stockhausen-inspired sensational ‘On the Corner’album of1972 to his appreciation of Prince would tell us a lot about the fatal-sweet pull of the revolutionary democratic values of disco funk. As would the journeys of hip-hop caught between the avant-garde rapping of the Black Panther-Nation of Islam-Last Poets musicians of the early 1970s and the sound of ex-Black Panther Nile Rodgers who is widely acknowledged as the great figure of disco.
At the heart of ambient dance was the power of music to transform the individual into a mythic animal. Electronic dance became more ambitiously ambient, absorbing the powers of performative avant-garde, the cinematic and video into a spectacle of wild tribal transformations of bodies throbbing to music. David Bowie’s shape-shifting career in electronic pop is an example of this. Starman Bowie showed up the cosmic as trashy kitsch dancing to ambient pop.
Cinematically, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner perfectly caught what the ambient had to offer in the post-World War period. In 1979, three years before the film, Brit New Romantic pioneers, the Gary Numan-led band Tubeway Army, released the industrial electronic dance music classic, Replicas , based on Philip K Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? on which Blade Runner is based.
Perfect, robots
Of course, the title of the album is itself resonant of the Replicants of the Scott film. But the crucial point the album made was that in dancing to electronic pop we became perfect, robots. Smilarly, the pop electronic ambient setting for the film was the medium for fantasies of transformation between human and android. Blade Runner can thus be read as a post-punk pop classic.
Vangelis’ score for the film looks back at New Romance and looks forward to rave (His 1977 Spiral album, in which he used the Yamaha CS 80 synthesizer for the first time, the one that gives the Blade Runner score its distinctive sound, is an important proto-rave thing). The look of the film’s protagonists and its emotional tenor morph with New Romantic music video content of the time.
Equally important was the New Romance-inflected vampire thriller The Hunger ,made in 1983, a year after Blade Runner , made by Ridley’s brother Tony Scott, featuring the shape-shifting Bowie himself. Dance was pushing cinema towards its destiny—Virtual Reality.
The ideal world from now on would be Robert Smithson’s land art reverberating to the mythic-savage, science-fictive transformative potential of dance music. Cosmos and history would thus be reconciled.
The writer is Associate Professor in Cinema Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University. When not ordering food on various apps, he is writing about cinema and art.
