Does New Age Ambient even exist?

Here things become a bit tricky – and pretty much controversial.

When going through all – well, not all, but a lot – of the stuff that´s written about New Age, New Age Music and New Age Ambient two little nonsense “one-liner” from my younger days came into my mind:

“What kind of an apple is a butterfly?”

and

Some of you may have been surprised to learn that there are so many sub-genres of ambient music. Sub-genres that are actually relatively clearly distinguishable from each other and have specific characteristics.

I´ve checked and organised presets of 11 Cherry Audio Synths in order to make a sonic “canvas” to “paint” on.

I´m currently working on the chapter about the sub-genre "Dark Ambient". The projects whose making I describe in detail here cover musical styles of Dark Ambient from the late 1970s up to those of today´s. 

In the first finished chapter I set up a project - I call it a "stem cell" - from where you can develop any kind of ambient music. The musical "DNA" of the piece contains sections (sequences of musical "nucleotides"), which built the starting points from where they can be developed into each of the 14 directions, from ambient dub over dark ambient etc. to chill out and more.

I´ve started working on this new e-book, which is scheduled for being published in June (2025), Brian Eno said in an interview some time ago, that he didn´t even recognise (his) ambient music when listening to all the sub-genres of ambient that have occurred since the end of the 1970s.

In this series of videos I teach how to make music - all kinds  and genres. From beginner to professional. There are no preconditions. Below this short message you´ll find the links to download the files, which are mentioned in the videos.

And here are the links to the video, which are online by now:

Link to video 1: https://youtu.be/hXNkumeiwXo

Making Generative Music With Voltage Modular - Volume 2

This e-book crosses – breaks, destroys - all borders one can possibly imagine when thinking of and about generative music and modular synths.

The stats first:

The book is written! Completely!It is done!

The date of publishing, 15th November, is definite now.

The book has got 333 pages,there are 393 pictures and graphics in the book, and there are 141 embedded videos.

The number of patches – which are part of the download – has grown to 173 all in all.

But there´s more this time:

It´s been a while since my last report. It´s a health matter, which is to blame. I´m undergoing a quite brutal chemical treatment. It seems, that some insect bit me a rather long time ago, because a fairly advanced stage of Boreliosis has been diagnosed. The doctors don´t believe me that I hadn´t sensed any problems before. I don´t care.