Povarovo and Ben Frost - Two Ambient-Experimental Musicians Blending Tradition with Technology

I love a good combination of the traditional with the new. In music that often means using classical instruments and mixing in new sounds with electronics and computers. Also it means playing conventional instruments in unconventional ways.

For me, this is a lot more interesting than just setting some synths to pump out beats (although there's a time and place for that too). I think it's because we've been listening to these instruments for thousands of years, and our brains are already wired to load their tones and timbres with all kinds of emotional meaning.

Spotify has grasped my predilection for mellow, ambient music. It's what I primarily play when I'm writing. (Can't handle the distraction of lyrics and driving beats, and the standard four-chord progressions of pop are too aggravatingly catchy.) Last night it offered up this slow, "dark-jazz" number by a group called Povarovo. From the cover, I was expecting more electronic fuzz. Instead, the haunting oboe melody in the first line drew me right in to a blissed-out, slowed down jazz lounge.

I can't find much about Povarovo online other than a Russian Facebook page and a few youtube videos with low view counts. One of them was this live performance, which does a great job showing how they blend their instruments into something rich and strange. It's a mellow as the above track, but with sounds hinting at something sinister and slightly off - great music for writing, in other words.

The rest of their album, called Tchernovik, gets a little more experimental. I think it's worth a closer listen, with passages that evoke the bleakness of the Russian steppe and the rich ruins of long-faded empire, but viewed with quiet melancholy and respect, rather than despair.

Musical discoveries always remind me of previous finds I want to share. Ben Frost is one of these. He's another who blends traditional instruments with electronics into ambient sound-scapes. I've been listening to him for years. Actually, that's probably where Spotify came up with last night's suggestion.

Below is an impromptu session with Ben Frost that turned out so well it became the final cut for "Leo Needs a New Pair of Shoes" on his album By The Throat. I love how it starts with a seemingly random collection of repeating sounds for several minutes before introducing a three chord melody that seems to emerge from the chaos as if it had been lying dormant the whole time, just waiting to be heard. It's another one of those hair-raising spine-tingling moments that come along so rarely in music.

The rest of that album is much more aggressive (It's called By The Throat after all) but is also worth a listen, and surprisingly evocative as either background noise or the focus of your attention.

He's also, more recently, written an operatic adaptation of Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory, which is worth another post on its own. (Have you read The Wasp Factory? I'd love to get a discussion of that book going, maybe with The Page Dwellers? Following a reading up with a listen to the opera would be magnificent.) I'm glad to see the operatic form coming back in the modern age - another thoughtful blend of the new and the traditional.

For now I'll just share one more Ben Frost video, for "There are no others, There is only us." Deep strings and waves of electronic noise set the stage for flocks of starlings, performing choreography as ancient and inevitable as migration.

I dare you not to be hypnotized by this performance.