Life, the Universe and Everything by Amungus is “a 42 minute ambient piece created for the 2005 Music is Art / Rockin’ at the Knox festival,” according to the back of the CD. I resisted buying this release for a while, because I don’t generally have the attention span to sit through 42 minutes of anything, but I finally relented.
This instrumental piece has a lot of delicate elements, interspersed with some sounds that are more synthetic and techy. The overall impression is that of an organic, sci-fi symphony, or a wire sitting in a puddle, just sort of lazily crackling the day away. Actually, a lot of the sounds made me think about water, like a really sparse watercolor painting, or those water lilies that only bloom at night. There’s a slenderness about it, a nebulous outline that suggests at things without being brazen.
This is an awful lot of pretentious words for an unassuming piece of music. Basically, it was created to accompany some visual art. It goes behind something else, to enhance that experience without distracting from it. I didn’t see the exhibit, but I can imagine that it was an effective collaboration. I really enjoyed listening to this, and it definitely had sufficient character to block out the silence, but it was deferential enough not to hog the spotlight.
Oh, and that 42 minute claim is a bit inaccurate. It actually runs 42:42. Get it, get it?
Related links:
amungus myspace
amungus website
amungus twitter
slender fungus store
Music Is Art