The Listening Mind

The Delicate Balance:
Remembering the Past, Listening in the Present and moving toward the Future

One of the gifts of having listened to music for nearly sixty years is memory. There are albums I can hear today that immediately transport me to another place and another version of myself. Music has accompanied me from my earliest encounters with The Beatles through years spent working behind a record store counter, through my discovery of electronic, world, new age and ambient music, and eventually into the years I've spent writing about that music through Ambient Visions. 

But memory can be both a gift and a temptation. 

The longer we listen, the larger our personal musical history becomes. Eventually there are decades of favorite albums, artists and discoveries behind us. It's easy to begin looking backward more often than forward. We remember the excitement of discovering music when we were younger and sometimes unconsciously conclude that the music itself must have been better then. 

Perhaps it was. But perhaps some of what we're remembering isn't simply the music. We're remembering who we were when we heard it. 

That distinction matters. 

Music becomes intertwined with our lives in ways that make objective comparisons nearly impossible. An album discovered at eighteen carries experiences that an album discovered at sixty or seventy can't possibly duplicate. The older recording has had decades to accumulate memories and associations. The new album has had perhaps a few weeks. 

That's hardly a fair contest. 

And yet remembering yesterday remains enormously important. Music doesn't exist without history. Every generation of musicians inherits ideas, technologies and possibilities from those who came before. Ambient and electronic music are particularly rich examples because their histories stretch through experimentation in classical music, early electronic instruments, tape manipulation, minimalism, synthesizers, studio technology and countless other influences that gradually created the enormous musical landscape we occupy today. 

That's one reason I've devoted space on Ambient Visions to Founding Artists and Resonant Memory. Looking backward isn't an exercise in nostalgia. It's a way of understanding how we arrived here. 

The challenge is knowing when appreciation of the past becomes residence there. 

I've encountered listeners over the years who seem to have decided, consciously or otherwise, that their musical collection is essentially complete. They know what they like. They have their favorite artists and albums. New music may occasionally slip through the gate, but it faces a considerably higher barrier than the music already inside. 

I understand the impulse. After nearly sixty years of listening, I could probably spend the rest of my life listening only to music I already know and never run out of things I enjoy. 

But what would I miss? 

That question may be one of the reasons Ambient Visions continues to be so important to me. Every week, new music arrives from artists I've known for decades and from people whose names I've never encountered before. I don't know which recording will surprise me until I listen to it. 

And that places me firmly in the present. 

Listening in the present requires something different from remembering the past. Memory is comfortable because we already know the destination. New music asks us to surrender that advantage. We have to meet it without knowing where it's going. 

That's becoming increasingly difficult in a culture where enormous quantities of music are immediately available. The problem that confronted listeners when I was young was access. Finding music required effort. Records cost money. Radio programmers, record stores, magazines and friends helped narrow the field. 

Today the problem is almost exactly the opposite. 

We have access to more music than any person could hear in several lifetimes. Streaming services, Bandcamp, YouTube, internet radio, social media and countless independent artists can place something new in front of us every minute of every day. 

Abundance sounds wonderful until we realize that abundance creates its own form of scarcity. 

What's scarce now is attention. 

To genuinely listen in the present means resisting the urge to treat music as an endless conveyor belt. There'll always be another album, another track, another recommendation waiting. If we're constantly wondering what's next, we may never discover what's already playing. 

Ambient music makes that particularly obvious. Much of this music needs time. A twenty-minute composition can't reveal what it has to say if we're already deciding whether to skip it after thirty seconds. An album designed as a continuous journey loses something when we treat it as a container from which individual tracks can be extracted and shuffled into playlists. 

Listening in the present therefore requires presence. 

But the present can't become our only concern either. 

Music is changing again, just as it has changed repeatedly throughout my lifetime. I've watched formats appear and disappear. I've seen vinyl dominate, cassettes rise, CDs replace records for many listeners, downloads challenge physical media, streaming challenge ownership, and independent artists gain the ability to distribute music globally without needing the traditional infrastructure of the record industry. 

Now we're entering another period of transformation involving artificial intelligence, new methods of creation and distribution, changing economics, and perhaps even changing definitions of what a musical recording is. 

I don't know where all of this leads. 

Neither does anyone else. 

That's why moving toward the future requires something more useful than either unquestioning enthusiasm or outright rejection. It requires curiosity tempered by experience. 

There are things from the past worth protecting. Human creativity matters. Artists being compensated for their work matters. Albums matter. Independent labels matter. Curators matter. The relationship between musician and listener matters. The sense that someone created something because they needed to express an idea, an emotion or an imagined world matters enormously to me. 

But protecting those things doesn't require freezing music at some preferred point in history. 

The future has never asked our permission before arriving. 

When synthesizers entered popular music, they changed what musicians could create. Digital recording changed the studio. The internet changed distribution. Streaming changed listening habits. Bandcamp changed the relationship between independent musicians and audiences. Some changes brought enormous possibilities. Others created problems we're still trying to solve. 

The next changes will probably do both. 

Perhaps that's where decades of listening become useful rather than restrictive. Experience can become a wall that keeps unfamiliar things outside, or it can become a foundation sturdy enough to let us explore without losing our bearings. 

I'd prefer the second. 

The purpose of remembering where music has taken us isn't to find our way back there. It's to better understand where we are when the next piece of music begins. 

That's the delicate balance. 

Yesterday gives us perspective. It reminds us of the artists who opened doors, the recordings that changed our understanding of what music could be, and the moments when discovery altered the direction of our listening lives. 

The present asks for our attention. It asks us to stop comparing every new recording with something we've loved for thirty years and allow today's musicians enough room to speak in their own voices. 

And the future asks for curiosity. It asks us to move forward carefully enough to recognize what shouldn't be discarded, but openly enough to recognize possibilities that couldn't have existed before. 

Perhaps that's one of the responsibilities of being a lifelong listener. 

We become custodians of musical memory without becoming prisoners of it. We remain participants in the music being created around us rather than merely observers looking backward. And we approach whatever comes next with enough experience to ask difficult questions, but enough wonder to keep listening for unexpected answers. 

At thirteen, I couldn't have imagined most of the music that would eventually become important to me. The vocabulary didn't exist in my life yet. Neither did the technology, the artists, Ambient Visions or the enormous musical world that would eventually open around me. 

If I'd stopped somewhere along the way and decided that I'd already heard everything I needed to hear, much of the music I've loved most would never have entered my life. 

After nearly sixty years, that may be one of the most important things music has taught me. 

Remember yesterday. 

Listen deeply today. 

And leave the door open for tomorrow.

Michael Foster, editor Ambient Visions