The Ambient Artist
“It was transcendent. Like you forgot you were sitting on the floor in a tiny grungy cafe on a college campus. You forgot your sense of space and time,” says my friend, who was among a crowd of enchanted college students swaying to Ami Dang’s dreamy, electronic folk-inspired tones last fall at Duke. I had the opportunity to speak with Ami on her way to Pennsylvania, one of many stops on her tour across the United States performing her album Parted Plains.
The daughter of Indian immigrants, Dang’s first impression of the world of music was, at best, lukewarm. Later in high school, though, after ricocheting from piano and violin to sitar, she truly immersed herself in music, and eventually majored in composition through technology.
Dang describes herself as an “ambient artist,” a mysterious term to anyone who has ever attempted to understand the murky depths of ambient music. For Dang, it’s all about creating a world for the audience and herself: “I think ultimately I hope it’s a healing experience. I hope it’s a meditative experience, but I’m not really, like, pretentious about it. If people fall asleep to my music that would be great. I don’t expect people to do or be anything.”
Dang’s singsong sitar is meant to heal, to level the mental playing field, and to let her audience leave their lives behind at the door—no expectations. Her music seems to act as a voicebox, communicating a sense of meditative peace. For many, ambient music seems to coax the mental vortex of anxiety into a lull, and for some, the effects are even more literal. “I have this really bad allergy and I sneeze so bad every morning, but what I noticed is that when I play music, my body doesn’t do that,” says Dang. “A friend of mine, a cellist who has Crohn’s disease, said that when she comes to rehearse, even if she’s in pain, when she starts playing the cello, she doesn’t feel the pain.” This revelation speaks to a larger millennial/Gen Z trend: wellness has permeated every sphere of life, even the musical. Dang seems to keep that in mind, confessing, “As far as my personal journey, I made a conscious decision—especially with my last record—to make more deep-listening music.” And listeners today seem to make conscious decisions with what they want to listen to: music that medicates.
Dang works hard to deliver. Her music is the result of meticulous oversight, a “meditative study of sitar and electronics” compiled as a result of jam sessions layering her sitar over production. The sitar pointedly evokes an older time, a decision that is mirrored in the titles of Dang’s songs. “I devoted Parted Plains to stories and the interpretation of stories,” she says, citing her exploration of traditional Punjabi folklore as an inspiration. Punjab, or the land of two waters, straddles both Pakistan and India, and has birthed some of the richest folk literature of the subcontinent. Western historians’ orientalist, exoticised interpretations of literature from the Middle East (e.g. 1001 Nights) and South Asia prompted Dang to probe further, drawing parallels between the folk tales and her own life. Engaged to a partner her parents disapproved of, Dang found relief in the tale of Sohni Mahiwal, a tragic tale chronicling the unhappy love story of two star-crossed lovers, which has transcended time to bemoan the perils of traditions.
“To the West they [traditional values] seem really antiquated, but there’s a tendency, especially among immigrant communities, to want to hold onto culture and religion.” This dichotomy between the antiquated and modern is layered within Parted Plains, even down to the song titles. The songs “Raiments” and “Souterrain” are both outdated words, and “Enquiry” is the British way of writing inquiry. “Bopoluchi,” the second track on the album, is named after what Dang sees as a uniquely feminist tale featuring a strong female protagonist. Musicians today, especially those like Dang in their interdisciplinary approach to songwriting and production, are multifaceted. They act as archaeologists and historians, their albums almost like galleries in a museum. This is how Dang weaves a story from the various histories she belongs to, fossilising the romances of the Punjab in the rockbed of ambient music today.
Context places every musician at a specific locus in history, and Dang is aware of this. “It means you can make music on your own,” she says regarding today’s digital revolution heralding a new age for musicians. In her documentation of storied histories, Dang acknowledges how times have changed to allow people like her access to an industry long inaccessible to people of color.
“I definitely feel a kinship with other musicians, especially with those who are nonbinary/POC,” she says. Many would argue that apps like Garageband and the social media explosion have democratised the music industry, with the limelight on people of color and other marginalised communities previously silenced. The rocky history of mainstream music marks the appropriation of musical forms specific to marginalised communities—take the appropriation of rock-and-roll music, a genre rooted in black traditions, turning it into a space dominated by white male musicians. Historically, the racial segregation of American society spilled over into the music industry, and this impact spread globally given the hegemony of American media. As a response, “race media,” music created by and for African-Americans, exploded, cementing the identity-based divide between audiences, and similar phenomenon materialised for other minority communities.
Today, however, the lines are blurred, and musicians like Dang contribute to the haze, softening the edges of the industry and letting the stories of the archaic and the alternative diffuse in. After all, her Facebook bio does read “music from everywhere and nowhere,” a curiously political approach to branding. Maybe in a way, Dang’s sitar and synthesizer do fuse together as emblems of democracy, like prophets heralding in the new era of music for all.
