THE PHILADELPHIA AMBIENT CONSORTIUM (MUSIC AND NOISE) An ambient music consortium of Philadelphia? A website devoted to new and hard to characterize sound art in Philly? Why do we exist at all?  Ambient sounds are unique and special, but their veritable ubiquity hides them from casual perception. Ambient artifacts are obscure because a minority of perceptive people have reflected long enough on the various stimulus feeds to discern their existence and not take them for granted. This obscurity has had the additional effect of creating a certain esoteric charm to the genre of music called Ambient, and this has been a charismatic force binding many of us to study ambient sounds and Ambient music more actively. For those of us who would share with one another our interests and knowledge of the Ambient, it is sometimes difficult to find out what's happening when our perceptions are occluded by the immediacy of our unique and trusted ambient experiences (whether such experience is achieved through listening to a treasured digital/analog recorded media or whether it be going to a special place like an airport or a railroad track). Whether it is finding out what possibilities for new experience are occuring during the week(end) or whether something new is being spun over radio frequencies and webcast over the internet, some medium is necessary to communicate this information to the Ambient initiate. We humbly seek to be that medium. The members already existed, we are only here to connect them to each other and inform them of each other's art, activities, and opportunities. Here at the Consortium website we've tried to connect everyone involved in the local scene. By everyone we mean those of us who listen to, sell, create/remix, broadcast, or otherwise promote ambient/ experimental/ spacerock/ psychedeic/ abstract/ intelligent/ concrete/ and yet uncharacterized music. If you dig this scene but you're not yet a member of the philly_ambient listserve or the Artist Directoy, please let us know because in our minds -- you are already a member of the Consortium. Have you missed a local event or only just heard of a radio show that's been on the air for the last two years? Are you an artist who feels isolated and friendless in this so-called "City of Brotherly Love"? The Philadelphia Ambient Consortium seeks to remedy this situation by unifying the city's dedicated space, ambient, chill drumnbass, intelligent, improvisational, drone and experimental electronic audiophiles by providing a centralized information resource and the kernel of a community. We hope that through this activity, the scene may grow strong and large enough to make our work largely irrelevant. By joining the Philly_ambient discussion list you can actively network with the core of freaks who are trying to build the psychedelic infrastructure within Philadelphia's ferro-concrete jungle. What is Ambient? There are a number of articulate essays at http://music.hyperreal.org/epsilon/info/  worth reading. Also consider checking out (or purchasing) Ocean of Sound, the brilliant book on ambient music by philosopher/artist David Toop. For what it's worth, we'll take a crack at it. Ambient was first used in the Middle Ages as an astronomical term describing the circular orbit or cycle of celestial bodies. I think ambient music contains this non-linear idea in its core. Such non-linearity is found just as naturally in the ambient sound of the street and the forest, as it is in the warming up of symphony orchestras and the subtle sounds of fluid swimming through our headspace. For the artist, ambient means a certain freedom from all traditional musical structures and expectations. For the listener, ambient has all the power of the abstract to resonate the less articulate elements of our psyche. Certainly, these ideas can be found in jazz as well as in world music. The more the merrier I say. This music is too important for cliques. Ambient sounds don't depend on electronic or acoustic instruments for its form or lack thereof. However, much of new ambient is being made with or accompanied by electronic and computer instruments, combining found sounds in a collage of acoustic and electronic drones, tones and beats. This, I think hardly reflects a dependence on electronica but rather the flexibility of ambienteers to experiment with the potential of sound in anyof its forms.  A frequency, a texture of drones, a strangely recursive sample subtley changing pitch stands on its own merit. Ambient, in the end, represents a living tradition of free structure in sound composition first promoted by the Dadaists, and the great jazz artists. Somethings just can't be revealed about ambient because the experience or discipline of listening to ambient sounds is analagous to a portal or doorway to another lucid state of mind. I am absolutely serious and to speak of it is not desirable...there is a real aesthetic of magic and wonder here and the boundaries of subjective cognition must be respected. The power and beauty of the abstract is that however obscure the sound, the mystery of the experience emanates from something within us, in those strange memories, thoughts and feelings, those designs patterned into our sentience which resonate within these frequencies. We can become the soul of the music, an abstract body possesed briefly by our disembodied spirits. Yeah!

 

The Philadelphia Ambient Consortium (Music and Noise) is maintained by the Occult Masters of the Cosmographic Design Initiates.  PAC(MaN) is the acronym for the Consortium. All pop culture references are used to indicate that potent communications are actually hidden within the "innocent" models of the Pantheon of pop culture's symbolic representatives. The pacman, for instance, may be understood as an ideal model of the young capitalist, who devouring with insatiable gluttony material goods in the ferro-concrete jungle of the modern marketplace, is threatened at every turn by the ghosts of the impoverished and the needy, spectres of his own lost soul. However, "[the Occult Powers] directed me to speak thusly: 'Everything [shall be written] in the garment of Idealistic Philosophy.'" Hence, I assert that the pacman "protagonist" is only a distraction from what is really significant: the maze itself and its ghostlike denizens. When we commune with the abstract we become the maze within which its ghostlike inhabitants chortle and play. Friendly solipsists are we. I mean, am I. The Magic number is . This site contains weird fonts which you should download and install on your operating system. Many of these fonts came from the fabulous larabiefonts.com web site. Hello Kitty appeared on this site mysteriously, as if Ambient music needed or wanted a popular celebrity to stand up to the world and scream "I AM A STRIDENT CHILL AMBIENT PURIST!" Ha! The significance is much deeper however...Why Hello Kitty? Don't be fooled by the red hairclip! It is actually representative of the pineal gland ruptured through the skull of the enlightened initiate. Hence, HK is an appropriate indexical signifier of the PAC(MaN) hidden agenda. Please don't tell anyone whose Pineal gland has not yet been liberated from their brain sheath. Please Email the Occult webmasters for whatever reason. I, i mean They, are very lonely and like email. The Consortium is a non-profit organization devoted to strengthening the Philly ambient/experimental psychedelic music scene, and influenced by the ideas of Hakim Bey's Temporal Autonomous Zone. Special Whisper-Ins to Sean O'Neal and Erin Anderson at the Fuzzybox HQ, Damien Leri and August R. Wohlt, Rob Cantagalo of tbtmo, Windy and Carl, Andy Wing, Rob Kopki, Ben Morgan, John Schenk and Gloria Justen-Schenk, Mark Baechtle, Mike Benedetti, Charles Cohen, Toshi Makihara, Will Scofield, Chuck Van Zyl, Jeff Towne, Andrew Eisenberg, Collette of Relache, Ian Nagoski, Naseema Sami, Chris Crasta, Mike Harrington at Structur, Jeff Wagar, Julian Greff at EDK, and all the other folks making Philadelphia psychedelic. Lastly, simpletone.com is hosted at Datarealm If you're looking for quality web hosting, choose Datarealm.