The term ambient has been used and abused a lot in recent years. The genre’s resurgence throughout the 2010s was largely driven by streaming platforms that used it as playlist slop with the vague promise of deceleration in accelerated times. This came fully to fruition when everything came to a grinding halt in 2020, since people turned quiet music louder in order to mask the deafening silence of a world in standstill. »El Sol de los Muertos,« the third solo album by Concepción Huerta and her second for Umor Rex, serves as a stark reminder that the best kind of ambient music subverts this wellness and mindfulness paradigm.
Over the course of six pieces, the Mexican composer and sound artist follows an approach reminiscent of Tim Hecker’s most gripping work, though she flips it upside down: Instead of drowning her minimalist, repetitive compositions—this music bears a certain kinship to William Basinski’s oeuvre—in noise, she buries eerie sounds deep in the mix, presenting her audience with music that on the surface sounds gentle and beautiful, but with each repeated, intent listen becomes more and more abysmal: under the melancholy, a pervasive sense of dread.
This, then, is ambient as something unheimlich, almost hauntological—the sound of suppressed violence, both ecological and political, as the sleeve notes by her label point out. »El Sol de los Muertos« serves as a stark reminder that Brian Eno’s definition of ambient as something that is »as ignorable as it is interesting« has always undersold the potential of this music. What Concepción Huerta achieves with these six masterful exercises in uncanny sound design reminds the world that it can be so much more if you really choose to listen. No easy feat to pull off, though she certainly makes it sound like it.
