How ambient music affected my mental health journey...
A playlist to accompany this article
At a time when my mental health was at one of its lowest points, ambient music changed my life for the better.
It was September 2020. The UK was emerging from the depths of the COVID 19 pandemic and I had started an undergraduate degree in English at the University of Nottingham.
I felt a lot of anxiety at the time, a cliché of course for people of my generation, but no less true. It wasn’t only due to the fact that I’d spent months confined at home under lockdown restrictions but was also an as-of-yet undiagnosed autistic guy jolted into a totally unfamiliar environment and routine.
It’s a universal experience for most autistic young people in that when they’re thrust into an intensely social environment they find that they have little to no say in the subject or style of communication. Everything feels completely out-of-their control, as it did for me. I struggled many times to speak to anyone, even if they were directly speaking to me. My body often wouldn’t do what my brain told it to.
Just as I later used music to improve my mental health, so too did Vice journalist Ryan Bassil. He writes that ambient helps reduce his anxiety and panic attacks, referencing musicologist Luke Jaaniste who describes ‘the ambient mode’. This is a state of total focus on the ‘here and now’, during which you could be engaging in a variety of ‘mindful’ activities, from listening to music, to exercising, to cooking, to meditating.
As September became October I found my ‘ambient mode’ in two ways: making lasting friends and starting an electronic music show on the student-led-radio. A routine emerged: planning for my Sunday night radio show each week, then walking across campus that night to host it with an intricately curated selection of songs on the USB in my pocket.
I already knew a lot about electronic music and its history. For a while it had been a hyper-fixation; a subject about which I liked to read and proudly demonstrate my knowledge. While doing the radio show my passion for electronic music became all-the-greater.
One week in November 2020, I decided to plan a chilled-out, ambient-music-themed show for that Sunday. Sitting downstairs in my hall library, on my laptop, autumn leaves falling outside of the frost encrusted window, I pored over Spotify recommendations and Pitchfork articles, making sure that I knew who the most interesting ambient artists of today were.
These artists soundtracked my growing self-confidence. Before the weekly parties in my flat I would walk 10 minutes to buy beer at the co-op while listening to Jamie xx’s 2015 ambient house masterpiece In Colour. For me this album still evokes the dreamlike, romanticised emotions that emerge while partying with friends. I felt intensely engaged with my surroundings and ambient music had become the driving force for that feeling.
Beyond its links to mindfulness the positive effects of ambient music on the brain have been demonstrated by neuroscientist James Kilner.
Speaking to DJ Mag, Kames Kilner says,
“There has been this subconscious idea over the last 20 or 30 years that the body carries the brain around. But now we have finally got back to the idea of a two-way interaction that influences we think about things, or how we perceive things in the world.”
He continues, “It’s a much more direct connection between those signals. This is why things in our environment that can change our bodily signals, either directly or indirectly, can change our emotional state.”
When Spring 2021 came around, the weather became warmer and the UK government eased COVID-19 restrictions. My friends and I were now able to travel more in-and-around the city.
Ambient electronic music soundtracked these habits of travel, movement, parties and, most importantly, exercise. Nearly every day through April, after dinner I would run 5 minutes to Wollaton Park, arguably Nottingham’s most well beloved and famous green space.
San Francisco ambient producer Tycho’s 2019 EP Weather soundtracked these daily bouts of exercise, the warm synths and skittering drums encouraging me to run faster and get as much benefit from these evening runs as I could. I felt very, very happy at the time.
Someone more scientific would say that physical activity was what made me feel good at that time. I would partially disagree and respond that ambient music was inseparable from those benefits.
Brian Eno, the musician and producer often described as the inventor of ambient, wrote this in the liner notes of his 1978 album ‘Music for Airports’, often described as the first truly ‘ambient’ record.
“An ambience is defined as an atmosphere, or a surrounding influence. My intention is to produce original pieces ostensibly (but not exclusively) for particular times and situations with a view to building up a small but versatile catalogue of environmental music suited to a wide variety of moods and atmospheres.”
Eno continues: “Whereas the extant canned music companies proceed from the basis of regularising environments by blanketing their acoustic and atmospheric idiosyncrasies, Ambient Music is intended to enhance these.”
Eno sets up ambient as a way of engaging you more intensely with the world; grounding you more in the present moment. When I look back at how the genre affected my own mental health, I realise that ethos couldn’t resonate more with me.
Science-wise, there is still lots of research to be done on how exactly ambient music improves our mental health. All the same as ambient music fans we ourselves understand its benefits and how, on personal level it provides us with endless joy.
With 'Night Bus Magazine', which you'll find on my portfolio, I wanted to capture that joy in magazine form. As the final assessment for my MA in Magazine Journalism, that dummy magazine I feel captures my first steps into the world of journalism. When you read it, I hope you glean some of the same joy from ambient music that I do.
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