Album "Newfangled Hotel Ambience"

Notes On Album "NEWFANGLED HOTEL AMBIENCE"


Tracks:


1: Evening In The Rain

2: Rhapsodic



The Newfangled Hotel Ambience Series


(TM writes:)

The album called "Newfangled Hotel Ambience" was released via the music subscription services in June 2022. In prior to that, the first two tracks out of the album were released on SoundCloud in August 2021. After that the third to eighth tracks were released sequentially until March 2022.


It came from my thought that music played in hotel lounges or bars tends to be very similar and have nothing musically new. Although there should be few needs for an alternative, what if FMT create music for the sites? "We love to listen to completely different music there like these." That is the starting point of the album "Newfangled Hotel Ambience".


In other words, the Series is what I hope to create for some particular atmosphere with FMT's musical uniqueness including dyads, scales, counter-points, atonality, polyrhythms and their combinations with funk or other grooves, which I believe FMT have developed. 


I like to create the tracks hearing some background noise typically in a hotel like this video. It inspired me a lot when I started to make the first track "Evening In The Rain". I love such noise so much that I researched on "The Pleasure of Noise" for my undergraduate dissertation. 



Steve Reich and Brian Eno etc or Ambient / Environmental Music are some of my favourite music and for sure they have greatly influenced me. But in fact, these tracks are not necessarily directly related to them. TI and I have created something different from Ambient Music, rather. Each track came from my own hotel-related memories.


We planned to make the whole album consistent as well as to contrive the pairs in a similar way. NHA1 and 2, the first-released pair is something we would like to propose as alternative hotel ambience -- the introduction to the whole album. The next pair of 3 and 4 was made groovy in a way that hotel music in general hardly has. Another one of 5 and 6 is deviation from the Series, whereas the last pair of 7 and 8 is purely my favourites.




(TI writes:)

The "Hotel Ambience" series and the ongoing "Orche" series, which started last year, are TM-driven projects that follow a common theme and are more conceptual in nature than FMT's previous compositions.


The concept of the "Hotel Ambience" series has been explained by TM, but I have also created my own arrangements for the production, which are as follows:


- The music should have the feel of a live performance with live instruments*. The sound image should have a common atmosphere throughout the track.

*These will deviate somewhat as we create the music.


Specifically, the composition and arrangement should be in the form of a band or orchestra that can perform live, and the phrases should be playable.


The composition process is a virtual session, where I play the phrases live on the foundation created by TM. In regular FMT music, I've been creating phrasing and harmonies that I wouldn't actually play, or that I couldn't actually play, but in this series, I'm creating as if I'm playing live. It's a kind of improvisation, and I'm also trying to reproduce the habits of hand playing.


The mix is an easy-to-understand mix from the 70s. Specifically, I was thinking of the mix of the LP record of the "Electone Instructional Book" that I used to have at home. The left and right sides are well separated, and the acoustics are well reverberated, with the midrange emphasized and the treble slightly diminished.


The number of tracks is also much smaller than the conventional FMT. The effects are basically just reverb, delay, and chorus.


However, as the song progresses, the sound image changes momentarily, and filters are used, making it somewhat more complex.


An atmosphere like a background painting. Something that can be listened to. But if you listen carefully, you can feel various mechanisms and tricks.


The music in this series can be heard as "easy listening" at first listen, and is a type of music that can be categorized as MUZAK.


Like the title, the concept is influenced by Brian Eno's environmental music series.




In addition...

In June 2022 the album "Newfangled Hotel Ambience" was also released on subscription services of major music distributors (as listed below) including Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music. 

(Alibaba, iHeartRadio, Napster, Saavn, Sound Exchange, TikTok, Google Play / YouTube Music, Boomplay, Claro Mùsica, NetEase, 7digital, Twitch, AMI Entertainment, Deezer, KKBox, Pandora Plus, Tencent, VK, Anghami, Facebook / Instagram, Melon Plus, Resso, Simfy Africa, Tidal, Yandex) 

 

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