Q&A by Artists

Simon Ansing: Neoclassical and ambient music has become more and more popular and broader in the past decade. New artists are joining the scene all the time and the spectrum is expanding more and more from mass-market film music to experimental noise. Everything is somehow quickly labelled as “ambient”… What is ambient for you and what do you see coming in this direction?

For us it’s more about a basic feeling of freedom, a natural need to experiment, than the definition of genre boundaries.

Each musician should be put in a position where they feel so comfortable in their environment that they can, using their understanding of contemporary music, say that which moves them in their deepest inner being, even if it’s just having fun playing with sounds. There are still many secret places here to uncover. For us, and presumably for many, “ambient” had rather the sallow aftertaste of the inconsequential, background music of everyday life. Maybe that’s the only reason this underrated genre could lead to a flowering mix of other musical styles trapped within themselves and become the liberating blow that we’re experiencing now. And we’re just at the beginning of this development. Maybe we finally have the chance to recognise the real essence of ambient music and the, from our perspective, almost transcendent, communicative as well as pragmatic task of opening up its musical content.