The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Tuesday, November 6, 2018 — 5A

By Joe Deeney
©2018 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
11/06/18

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

11/06/18

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

Release Date: Tuesday, November 6, 2018

ACROSS
1 “__ Buddies”: 
’80s sitcom
6 Words on a 
check
11 Asian noodle 
soup
14 Lavender is 
similar to it
15 Hon
16 Toondom’s Olive
17 Frank McCourt 
memoir
19 “XING” one
20 Postcard view of 
a city
21 Hold the deed to
22 Sandy slope
23 Salacious
24 J.M. Barrie play
26 Sharp turns
29 Many, many 
years
31 Deli subs
32 Game with Wild 
Draw Four cards
33 Of an arm bone
35 Response to bad 
service
38 Shakespeare 
comedy
42 Wombs
43 Mar. parade 
honoree
44 Genetic 
messenger
45 Starr knighted in 
2018
48 Nine-digit ID
49 Antiprohibitionists
50 Gillian Flynn 
novel
53 “In that case ... ”
55 Discovery cries
56 Blossom buzzer
57 What discreet 
acts are done on, 
with “the”
61 Big Apple paper, 
for short
62 Portmanteau 
for a collection 
containing 17-, 
24-, 38- and 
50-Across?
64 Sticky stuff
65 Joe of “Casino”
66 “__ to 
suggestions”
67 California’s 
Big __
68 Second-string 
squad
69 Fork points

DOWN
1 Camp bed
2 Wild party
3 Wizards’ 
castings
4 Skateboard leap
5 Have good 
intentions
6 Smartphone 
predecessor, for 
short
7 Greek storyteller
8 God, in Judaism
9 Jacque’s “thirty”
10 Cries of worry
11 Temporary retail 
space
12 “Laughing” 
scavenger
13 From days past
14 Faux __: social 
goof
18 Arizona resort
22 Crave, with 
“over”
25 Dadaism 
pioneer
26 Z, in a pilot’s 
alphabet
27 Playing an extra 
NBA period
28 Ahnold’s political 
nickname
30 Captures

33 Employing
34 Decays
36 “Money __ 
everything”
37 School orgs.
39 Great Lakes 
natives
40 Silver lining
41 Fled
46 Thanksgiving 
gravy ingredient
47 Ultimatum 
words

49 Chinese 
dumpling
50 __ up on: unites 
against
51 “What a kidder!”
52 High-end 
German camera
54 Hindu guru
58 Rapper __ Fiasco
59 Mining hauls
60 Benign cyst
62 BOLO kin
63 Apple CEO Cook

CONCERT REVIEW

The music industry is and 
always has been inherently 
jaded. It seems that most 
audiences 
need 
something 
either wildly out of the norm or 
blatantly terrible to jostle them 
out of their typical listening 
cycles. And then, there are acts 
like Tomberlin. These artists 
and bands serve as fascinating 
bright spots on the face of new 
music, using existing genre 
norms 
to 
form 
something 
pure, 
intense 
and 
brutally 
honest that cuts to the core. 
Though unassuming at face 
value, these acts hold a veiled 
power that comes through in 
every song. At Ann Arbor’s 
own Blind Pig on Sunday night, 
Tomberlin stunned the crowd 
with this very candor, seizing 
their attention completely for a 
fleeting hour.
Tomberlin, the moniker of 
lead singer and writer Sarah 
Beth 
Tomberlin, 
performs 
with only a guitarist and 
keyboardist — a spare ensemble 
that works to enhance the pure 
emotion of her music. Sunday’s 
performance was a date on 
her 
first 
tour 
supporting 
alternative rocker Mirah.
“I am so excited to be 
touring for the first time,” 
she giggled at the beginning 
of her set. While Tomberlin 
may be green, her intensity is 
old, evident in songs from her 
debut album At Weddings that 

have been percolating since her 
high school years. Raised in 
southern Illinois by a minister 
father and homeschooled until 
the age of 16, the religious 
influences in her music are 
clear but not contrite — the 

only 
obvious 
similarities 
to 
hymns 
are 
Tomberlin’s 
piercing clarity and smooth 
choir-girl voice, which serve 
to carry emotionally-complex 
lyrics in a peaceful haze.
Tomberlin took the stage 
in black jeans, an oversized 
grey sweatshirt and her long 
blonde-brown 
hair 
pulled 
back in a large scrunchie, 
standing at the mic with the 
same calm I imagine she would 
have standing in line at the 
post office. She is obviously 
a natural performer, and it’s 
not because of any crazy stage 
antics — her presence speaks 

for itself, devoid of any glitter. 
Her 
gravitas 
silenced 
the 
sparse crowd at The Blind Pig 
on Sunday, while they settled 
into their seats anticipating 
the headliner. As soon as 
Sarah Beth Tomberlin’s mouth 
opened, everyone else’s closed. 
There’s a special kind of magic 
in 
her 
intonation: 
While 
her songs are beautiful and 
emotionally 
poignant, 
they 
cover bases that have been run 
a million times before — love, 
loss, tears, family struggle, 
confusion, life struggle. What 
makes 
Tomberlin’s 
music 
stand out is that incredible 
voice, and everything that 
seems to hide behind it. It 
seemed as if she was able to 
project every emotion at once 
through that club microphone, 
enhanced by the atmospheric 
guitar and synth of her modern 
arrangements.
Tomberlin 
effortlessly 
played through the entirety of 
At Weddings throughout her 
hour at The Blind Pig, leaving 
the audience slack-jawed with 
her quiet power. On songs like 
“Tornado” and “Any Other 
Way,” the songwriter’s voice 
soared 
and 
dropped 
with 
equal 
measure, 
all 
within 
the net of her beautifully 
plain presentation. She is an 
example of what pure talent 
can really do in a space where 
it is allowed to run free: In that 
sparsely populated club, under 
a slowly turning disco ball, 
Tomberlin was the brightest 
spark there. 

Tomberlin’s new talent 
shines at The Blind Pig

CLARA SCOTT
Daily Arts Writer

Courtesy of Tomberlin

MUSIC NOTEBOOK

“Ambient” is an adjective 
increasingly used to describe 
music of all kinds, and the 
boundaries of the genre the 
word 
used 
to 
signify 
are 
becoming more porous all the 
time. The primary criterion 
for “ambient” music is that it 
doesn’t go anywhere, and in its 
immobility it becomes akin to 
an object or a presence. Most 
non-musical sound is like this: 
Sounds indicate some kind of 
activity outside of the frame, 
giving subliminal information 
about the environment. Ambient 

music zeroes in on these small, 
typically ignored sounds and 
takes them as a compositional 
model, using musical techniques 
to create the sensation of an 
enveloping background, a stand-
in for organic acoustic ecologies.
It’s an interesting approach, 
and 
more 
than 
a 
little 
paradoxical. By its very nature, 
we generally don’t pay much 
attention to the “background,” 
or whatever borders the frame 
of 
human 
sonic 
perception, 
so making music that focuses 
intently on sound-as-landscape 
is almost contradictory in and of 
itself. Ambient music is the art 
of the afterthought, or else an 
invitation to pay a deep attention 

to the edges of perception. This 
leads to a certain confusion about 
the function and intentions of 
ambient music — is it music 
that’s intended to be put on in 
the background, for blending 
with the sounds of a situation, 
or is it music that creates the 
sensation of a new background? 
Can it be a little bit of both?
The composer and producer 
Brian Eno once described the 
difference between conventional 
and ambient music like the 
difference between architecture 
and 
gardening. 
His 
music 
exemplifies this sonic garden, 
and in many ways he has led the 
development of the form from 
the ’70s onward. He wrote in 

The paradoxical nature
& way of ambient music

EMILY YANG
Daily Arts Writer

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

the liner notes to his 1982 album 
On Land that, “what qualified a 
piece for inclusion on the record 
was that it took me somewhere,” 
and he means that both literally 
and 
specifically. 
Titles 
are 
references to real or abstracted 
places where the listener can 
imagine the sounds living in 
— for example, “Lizard Point,” 
“Lantern Marsh,” “A Clearing.” 
The music in On Land doesn’t 
really go anywhere — tracks 
simply fade in, camp out for nine 
or so minutes and then fade out.
The liner notes for On Land 
are interesting to compare to 
the notes for the earlier Ambient 
1: Music For Airports, where 
he alludes to the idea of sonic 
landscape but seems to suggest 
that the intention of Airports is to 
live alongside spaces: “Whereas 
conventional background music 
is produced by stripping away all 
sense of doubt and uncertainty 
(and thus all genuine interest) 
from the music, ambient music 
retains 
these 
qualities.” 
In 
1978, Eno was still conceiving 
his music as essentially living 
in the background, but later 
moved to music that supplants 
environmental 
sound 
(and 
therefore a sense of place) 
altogether. The notes for On 
Land conclude that, “as the 
listener, I wanted to be situated 
inside a large field of loosely-knit 
sound, rather than placed before 
a tightly organised monolith.” 
Airports “retains” its context, 
On Land “takes” the listener to a 
new place via sound. The space 
between Eno’s approach in 1978 
and 1982 is encapsulated in the 
difference between “for” and 
“on.”
And indeed, the sound-world 
of Music For Airports is much 
more conventional than On 
Land, with its foregrounded 
piano lines and gently sweeping 
cadential gestures. There is 
little noise, whereas On Land 
is full of field recordings and 
various 
non-pitched 
burbles, 
often deeply submerging any 
recognizably “musical” material. 
Music For Airports, its materials 
basically 
being 
tones 
and 
silence, seems to suggest that 
the surroundings will provide 
plenty of site-specific noise. On 
Land provides all the noise you 
would need for a soundscape, 
and is thus more a stand-in or 
proxy for the background and all 
its environmental noise.

The kind of ambient music in 
On Land seems to have caught 
on. It’s rare to find an album of 
slow, filmic, largely empty music 
like Airports in the 2000s and 
2010s, but it’s much easier to find 
the enveloping omnipresence 
pioneered in On Land. The 
work of William Basinski, for 
example, is generally as close 
to the Airports model as 2000s 
ambience gets, and he much 
more often suggests deep, thick 
soundscapes. 2007’s Shortwave 

Music uses a kind of Lynchian 
mode, with vaguely orchestral 
tones 
submerged 
under 
crackling, hissing and humming. 
The work of Sarah Davachi 
is less noisy than Basinski’s, 
but her approach is similarly 
immersive. She conjures slowly 
moving textures out of long, 
overlapping tones, and the sort 
of microscopic details she uses 
require a lot of focused attention 
for the music to pay off. The 
tracks on the recently-released 
Gave In Rest have the quality of 
a world made of tones. Davachi’s 
conventional ensemble (strings, 
a monophonic synthesizer and 
occasionally a piano) is placed 
inside the “field of loosely-knit 
sound” 
Eno 
describes, 
like 
people milling about in a room 
together, 
sometimes 
having 
conversations but usually just 
thinking out loud.
It’s unsurprising that ambient 
music evolved from a genre of 
music that stands behind an 
environment to a genre that 

supplants 
an 
environment, 
because the form Eno had in 
mind for Airports and the earlier 
Discreet 
Music 
is 
unstable. 
It’s ambient music’s refusal to 
go anywhere, to simply make 
statements, that makes it so 
unsuitable as actual music to 
put on in the background of a 
business or a social situation. 
Music invites attention, and 
music that has a low level of 
activity or progression invites 
a deeper, almost meditative 
engagement, 
the 
kind 
best 
done alone. In my experience, 
putting on an album of recent 
ambient music in a room will 
make 
conversation 
peter 
out pretty quickly, but most 
anything else, from Mozart 
to Young Thug (depending on 
context), is paradoxically easier 
to ignore. Ultimately, I think 
ambient music doesn’t work in 
its professed role, because by its 
very nature it overreaches.
What is the appeal of music 
like this? It seems to make sense 
that in a moment of accelerated 
technological advancement and 
media saturation, contemplative, 
immobile 
music 
is 
an 
appropriate response, a place 
one can go to retreat. However, 
music is also never entirely 
effective at putting up a front to 
society, always bringing pieces 
of the past and present with it. 
The writer Meghan O’Gieblyn 
argues 
that 
meditation 
and 
contemplative practice — what 
she calls the “Eternal Now” — 
represents a continuation of 
the logic of the internet rather 
than a repudiation of it: “In 
lieu of context, in lieu of vista, 
one is forced to find meaning in 
the microscopic details which 
must eventually come to seem 
intricate and endless … To exist 
within that room of perpetual 
updates and endless opinions 
is to believe that history can 
be divided not by centuries 
but by seconds, that every idea 
must lead to finer sub-points 
and infinite distinctions that 
eventually 
contradict 
one 
another.” 
Ambient 
music 
is 
perhaps sort of a record of 
cultural exhaustion, of being 
caught in situations that seem to 
demand a collapse of context. It 
seems to say — if we have found 
our present cultural landscape 
unlivable, the best we can do 
is create miniatures of it for 
ourselves.

Her gravitas 

silenced the 

sparse crowd at 

The Blind Pig on 

Sunday

Ambient music 

is the art of the 

afterthought, or 

else an invitation 

to pay a deep 

attention to 

the edges of 

perception

