The State of Ambient Music

One person I talked to was Ben Seretan, who makes records in a rock mode and also in a more ambient mode. He made this record called Cicada Waves, which is basically a field recording he made while on an artist residency of himself playing quite minimal piano improvisations, with nature sounds around him making their way onto the recording. And despite the fact that his previous record was a very acclaimed rock record, Cicada Waves, which is relatively low-key, became by far his most popular release on streaming, because it got put on playlists like “Music for Plants.” He had just gotten his royalty check from Spotify for the past like six months when we talked, and even though some of his tracks have been played hundreds of thousands of times, he made around $400. 

Patel: What do you think are the very bad sides of ambient playlists?

Cush: The biggest thing that I did come to as a criticism of this whole kind of ecosystem is that some of these playlists are focused on enhancing your mood or providing a soundtrack to these mundane daily tasks, and they run the risk of putting people who have very complex bodies of work as musicians into a box in which they don’t necessarily fit. Or provides a really skewed view of their music to somebody who might be encountering it there and only there. 

An example is Lucrecia Dalt, who makes some music that could be categorized as ambient but then also makes really wild songwriter music and stuff that’s more like noise. To me, she is one of the most singular and exciting artists working today. Her most popular song on Spotify is a track called “No tiempo,” which is definitely on the more beautiful, palatable, ambient-adjacent side of her work. And the reason it seems to be the most popular is that it gets put on these playlists like, again, “Music for Plants.” Some of the other stuff on that playlist is literally stock music that’s titled like, “Background Music for Watering Your Garden” or whatever, so it would be a shame to me if someone encountered Lucrecia Dalt there, and then went on to think of her as, like, that nice plant lady, rather than someone who’s capable of conjuring awesome power with her music. 

Patel: I mean, you can be both. 

Cush: You totally can be both.