The last decade has seen the rise of a loose clique of ambient musicians enamored by barely there beats, vaporous pads, and big, dubby bass subductions. Many of them are Midwestern, including Huerco S. and Mister Water Wet, whose short-lived Secret Musik party at Kansas City’s Niche club in 2011 and 2012 focused on unreleased remixes and edits from their own circle of friends. Though the crew has expanded to encompass artists like Michigan’s uon and Philadelphia’s Pontiac Streator and Ulla Straus, it’s maintained a remarkable level of insularity and sonic uniformity. Combine that with the cryptic monikers of some of its participants (uon, mdo, tcs, Pil) and you might wonder at first if these people aren’t all the same person.
Picnic is the first full-length collaboration between Kansas City’s Ryan Loecker (aka mdo, co-founder of the C Minus label) and Melbourne, Australia’s Justin Cantrell (aka ju ca, founder of the Daisart label). Loecker came a little late to the Midwestern scene, releasing his first music in 2016 and forming C Minus in 2017. But the communal spirit of Secret Musik lives on in Picnic, which doubles as an international ambient summit welcoming Australia’s Daisart into the fold. Heavy on guest features and bundled with more than 80 minutes of remixes, both on the digital album and the limited-edition Bonus CD, Picnic is a celebration of ambient music as a social phenomenon.
The vinyl version of Picnic runs eight tracks and 41 minutes, including a remix of C Minus co-founder Pil’s “Plush Hooves.” Cantrell’s solo output is typically heavier on percussion than Loecker’s, and the two artists’ music can be thought of respectively in terms of solids and liquids (or gases). But Picnic delights in the way these materials interact. “Bunnyville” is built around what sounds like a bundle of necklaces being untangled, around which all manner of soupy effects slosh and swish. “Drops in the Water,” a collaboration with Detroit artist Theodore Cale Schafer, is permeated with fiery crackles that emerge from a deep, droning house chord. There’s an appealing sense of grit throughout Picnic, suggesting sediment flowing downstream or embers leaping from a bonfire.
Picnic offers few moments of uninterrupted ambient pleasure. When there’s a melody, it’s tentative, like the pearls of guitar on “Dewey” or the clarinet on “Elkhorn,” played by Daisart signee Haji K. Synth pads simmer evilly at the bottom of the mix rather than swooping through the stereo field. The bulk of Picnic’s real estate is taken up by percussion, which means both actual percussion instruments and the digital clicks and cuts that saturate nearly every inch of the record. Picnic deserves credit for managing such a rough and organic sound without being too hard on the ears, but it’s tough to just sink back into this stuff and relax, and ambient fans who like their music a little more amniotic might find the terrain too rugged for their liking.
That’s where the remixes come in. Many of them are by lesser-known Midwestern or Australian artists, with Huerco S. and the Postal Service’s Dntel the only names a casual fan will be likely to recognize. The remixers invariably guide these tracks in either a clubbier or more ambient direction, and Bonus is by far the more accessible of the two discs. But this second disc feels less like a correction to Picnic than a demonstration of another way ambient music can be played, perceived, and enjoyed. If Picnic is like walking barefoot across the rocky bank of a river, Bonus is a plunge into the deep end.
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