Ambient Architects in Collaboration with Ambient Works

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We plan to use this blog to help keep you up to date on our latest projects, as well as to give a bit more background about what we do and why we do it. We have quite a bit planned for the next year so please subscribe here or to our newsletter, or just check back from time to time to catch the latest. 

Now on to the news: we're very happy to announce a new Genre Bundle called "Ambient Architects." It is the first of hopefully many times we will be collaborating with sound designers to feature their work on our platform.  

For this project we are thrilled to be collaborating with our great friend Robert Soma-Lewis from Ambient Works. Rob has a wealth of experience covering the entire spectrum of audio, taking in Engineering, Mixing, Mastering, Music Production, and Sound Design. His vast knowledge and exceptional talents have been brought to bear on an outstanding collection of presets which display the very best of what our creations are capable of.

This bundle includes LION, Silo, and his preset pack "Spectral No. 1 - 72 Ambient + Textural Presets for LION." We wanted to shine a spotlight on his work, because in our opinion it is some of the best in the industry, and it is the second of hopefully many packs we will add to our website through collaboration with sound artists in the scene. Moving forward we plan to use this webstie to showcase more of the work being created with our tools, besides the tools themselves.

Groundwork

The name "Ambient Architects" was not chosen simply because of the opportunity for alliteration and the appealing interplay of the t and c sounds. We do like that, but it was a secondary motivation. What we were most taken with was the concept of pieces of music that have a physical place or, perhaps, physical places that have music.

The tools we make are nothing unless they are used to sculpt and create sounds. An instrument gathering dust in the corner of a room may be a beautiful object but it needs a human collaborator to give it life; our creations are no different.

Inspiration

Hiroshi Yoshimura ‘Music for Nine Post Cards’

Initially we contemplated using this bundle to highlight the anniversary of an ambient release we loved and was important to us - not something in short supply - but as time went on we felt that we needed to connect with the term as a whole and not just the ambient part of it. Enter: ‘Music for Nine Post Cards’

One of Hiroshi Yoshimura’s earliest compositions, “Clouds for Alma”, was written on a postcard and consisted of just a single measure of music. The piece was intended to be played repeatedly, with its form changing in small (often imperceptible) ways as each repetition slightly differed from the last, depending on the player.

He found enjoyment in this format and had assembled a collection of them by the time he paid a visit to Tokyo’s Hara Museum of Contemporary Art. Hiroshima was so taken with the building that he felt it was the perfect location in which to experience the series of miniature compositions he had created, suggesting to the curators that each of his pieces could play on a loop at different points around the building.

From there, his first album was conceptualised, alongside his theory of environmental music: the marriage of sights and sounds as if they had always been meant for one another.