Electronic Music and
the Face of the Deep
The Ambient Church and Process Theology
Ambient Church is an event not a building.
It occurs in a special setting, a church for example,
on evenings as people enjoy radically meditative music,
often electronic and minimalist, combined with light shows,
for the sake of solace, consciousness expansion, social change,
and an exploration of spiritual moods that can enliven a life.
For many in our time, with or without religious affiliation,
Ambient Church is an immersion in the face of the deep.
It is theopoetics in sonic and visual form, evoking a shamanic
yet contemplative moment in an otherwise crazy world.
"Ambient Church is a nomadic experiential event series dedicated to working with artists to bring new ecologies to architecturally unique spaces through transcendent audio and visual performance. It was founded by Brian Sweeny in Summer 2016 in Brooklyn, and is based in New York and Los Angeles." -- from Ambient Work
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Spiritual Moods (potentially) evoked
in Ambient Church Events
Ambient Church and the Face of the Deep
If you go to Wikipedia you will find a list of hundreds of genres of electronic music. Only one of them is called Ambient. Here is what you will read:
Ambient music is a genre of music that puts an emphasis on tone and atmosphere over traditional musical structure or rhythm. A form of slow instrumental music, it uses repetitive, but gentle, soothing sound patterns that can be described as sonic wallpaper to complement or alter one’s space and to generate a sense of calmness. Intended to relax, the genre is said to evoke an "atmospheric", "visual", or "unobtrusive" quality. (Wikipedia, 9/20/2018)
The music performed in Ambient Church events is not all "ambient" in this slow, soothing sense. Some of it is more boisterous, and especially as combined with light shows, shamanic. But all of it helps generate a mood and atmosphere, and all of it turns to the listeners (not the artist) as its ultimate frame of reference. They are taken into one or some combination of the thirty-seven spiritual moods offered in the diagram below.
Ambient Church a happening, an experience enjoyed among people at an event, not a building. Its communicants come to ambient church “services” to experience touches of transcendence through electronic music and light shows. Often the events occur in houses of worship (churches, synagogues) where the acoustics are excellent and the very setting hints of spirituality. But the belief systems and particular practices of the church are absent in the service. All are welcome, religiously affiliated or otherwise. In this sense it is an interfaith event, and the faiths themselves include humanism and atheism and paganism as well as the more traditional kinds of faith. In the moment at hand, the buildings are re-purposed for the ambient service. This does not mean that an ambient service is 'secular." It is instead a different kind of spirituality than is ordinarily experienced in church services: contemplative yet shamanic, involving all the senses. You might imagine them as electronic Quaker meetings with a shamanic overtone.
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The communicants in an ambient happening typically have an experimental frame of mind, but are also seeking some kind of depth that combines individuality and community. Their ambient church-for-the-evening may or may not be the only “church” to which the communicants belong. But they find themselves walking into an ambient church event for something they do not find elsewhere. They are stepping into a space where, often, institutional religion has failed.
How to think about this theologically? I find process theology helpful. I suggest that they are making connection what the philosopher Whitehead calls subjective forms through sound, light, and a sense of community: electronic communitas. For process theologians influenced by Whitehead, the subjective forms are as real in their way as are physical objects in theirs. Indeed, say process theologians, the subjective forms evoked by light and sound, in combination with other factors, can be a language of God: that is, a way that the very Soul of the universe speaks to and within them as they seek to make sense of their lives and take a step forward, in community with others, for the sake of people, other animals, and the earth. The sounds and sights are themselves, in the moment at hand, sacred texts, albeit in aural and visual form. Like Psalms in the Bible, the messages received from the sounds and sights are not all pretty. But they are all human, and they reveal to us, in their ways, the fullness and complexity of a universe filled with mystery and feeling.
This is very important. We live in an age where so many are out of touch with the depths of their lives: the places in the heart, conscious and unconscious, where the holy speaks. So many are trapped in the trivia and violence of ordinary waking consciousness, thinking it the "real world." But the real may be more than this, and deeper than this. Ambient Church makes the best of post-modern technologies to help us reclaim our sense of connection with others and, truth be told, with ourselves. They can b one way in which people reconnect with what Catherine Keller and others call "the face of the deep." (Jay McDaniel)
If you go to Wikipedia you will find a list of hundreds of genres of electronic music. Only one of them is called Ambient. Here is what you will read:
Ambient music is a genre of music that puts an emphasis on tone and atmosphere over traditional musical structure or rhythm. A form of slow instrumental music, it uses repetitive, but gentle, soothing sound patterns that can be described as sonic wallpaper to complement or alter one’s space and to generate a sense of calmness. Intended to relax, the genre is said to evoke an "atmospheric", "visual", or "unobtrusive" quality. (Wikipedia, 9/20/2018)
The music performed in Ambient Church events is not all "ambient" in this slow, soothing sense. Some of it is more boisterous, and especially as combined with light shows, shamanic. But all of it helps generate a mood and atmosphere, and all of it turns to the listeners (not the artist) as its ultimate frame of reference. They are taken into one or some combination of the thirty-seven spiritual moods offered in the diagram below.
Ambient Church a happening, an experience enjoyed among people at an event, not a building. Its communicants come to ambient church “services” to experience touches of transcendence through electronic music and light shows. Often the events occur in houses of worship (churches, synagogues) where the acoustics are excellent and the very setting hints of spirituality. But the belief systems and particular practices of the church are absent in the service. All are welcome, religiously affiliated or otherwise. In this sense it is an interfaith event, and the faiths themselves include humanism and atheism and paganism as well as the more traditional kinds of faith. In the moment at hand, the buildings are re-purposed for the ambient service. This does not mean that an ambient service is 'secular." It is instead a different kind of spirituality than is ordinarily experienced in church services: contemplative yet shamanic, involving all the senses. You might imagine them as electronic Quaker meetings with a shamanic overtone.
*
The communicants in an ambient happening typically have an experimental frame of mind, but are also seeking some kind of depth that combines individuality and community. Their ambient church-for-the-evening may or may not be the only “church” to which the communicants belong. But they find themselves walking into an ambient church event for something they do not find elsewhere. They are stepping into a space where, often, institutional religion has failed.
How to think about this theologically? I find process theology helpful. I suggest that they are making connection what the philosopher Whitehead calls subjective forms through sound, light, and a sense of community: electronic communitas. For process theologians influenced by Whitehead, the subjective forms are as real in their way as are physical objects in theirs. Indeed, say process theologians, the subjective forms evoked by light and sound, in combination with other factors, can be a language of God: that is, a way that the very Soul of the universe speaks to and within them as they seek to make sense of their lives and take a step forward, in community with others, for the sake of people, other animals, and the earth. The sounds and sights are themselves, in the moment at hand, sacred texts, albeit in aural and visual form. Like Psalms in the Bible, the messages received from the sounds and sights are not all pretty. But they are all human, and they reveal to us, in their ways, the fullness and complexity of a universe filled with mystery and feeling.
This is very important. We live in an age where so many are out of touch with the depths of their lives: the places in the heart, conscious and unconscious, where the holy speaks. So many are trapped in the trivia and violence of ordinary waking consciousness, thinking it the "real world." But the real may be more than this, and deeper than this. Ambient Church makes the best of post-modern technologies to help us reclaim our sense of connection with others and, truth be told, with ourselves. They can b one way in which people reconnect with what Catherine Keller and others call "the face of the deep." (Jay McDaniel)
introduction to sound synthesizers |
worship through light and sound |
more examples of Ambient Church
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A Mentor for the Movement: Robert Rich
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