Aquaboogie: International Travel
Aquaboogie is Stuart McDonald, a resident of Wellington, New Zealand, who has been dabbling in ambient electronica for a while now and has gotten around to making an album.
'International Travel' takes in Stuart's interest in drones, flutes, voices, burbles, echoes, environments, and slow, thick beats, and makes for a varied and relaxed listen.
Check out International Travel at Last FM.
More about the album
Basically I wanted to do an slightly psychedlic ambient album that was fairly accessible - something similar (in terms of effect rather than style) to the KLF's Chill Out or the Orb's UFOrb.
The skeleton of the album was created from sample loops of world music - mostly material from Asia. I like exotic sounds, although I wouldn't say I was a world music fan in the 'have kaftan, will shop at Trade Aid' mould. What I do like is ethnological collision music like Holger Czukay's 'Canaxis'. At a very basic level I like being able to take two or more pieces of music from different parts of the world, and fuse them together.
As for the flesh of the album, it's all about space generated by environmental samples - birdsong, aircraft, shortwave noise, train stations, that kind of thing. Some of these sounds were recorded in Hong Kong and Japan, hence the 'International' name. These sounds are pretty minimal, and the crusty drums and drones stagger along at very slow tempos. Unsurprisingly, I often fell asleep mixing the album. This is not music to rave by.
Nor is International Travel a cutting edge piece of electronica. Probably rusting edge is more like it. However, I'd like to think it embodies some of the imagination of music that I admire such as early 90s ambient and 'IDM' music, and 1970s Krautrock a la Can, Cluster, and Kraftwerk. At the very least, it's a start!
