Ambient music with true meaning

Seattle-based electronic ambient music producer Briana Marela has just released her newest album, You Are a Wave. The album combines lyrics and ambient sounds and effects to create a soothing and poetic effect. 

The first song, “You Are a Wave,” uses wave-like patterns and words to convey the speaker’s message about someone being their “anchor” and a “wave” in the sea of life. The sound effect is staticky, but paired with a piano-like synth and distorted vocals it creates a song that is easily deciphered from the various incongruent sounds. 

“Uncertainty and the Unknown” contains the sounds of melodic percussion and a beating drum underneath vocals, which help to exemplify the title’s meaning through the randomness of the percussive instruments’ sound and the ominous beating of one drum throughout the entire piece like a countdown to finding out something unknown. 

“Silver Tongue,” which comes next, starts off with an ostinato of bells, adding in shimmering synth sounds afterward. The piece is instrumental, and is a nod towards Marela’s ambient career. The song grows in intensity until the middle section, where things take a quiet pause before suddenly bursting into excitement, which makes this music different from other types of ambient styles that are more monolithic. 

Later in the album is “Self,” a piece constructed of the sounds of a broken sentence. Literally the sounds of a line of song are broken into many smaller pieces and played, and the song sounds like what it would look like to look at a broken mirror, the self shattered into many parts. The title of the track could suggest that people are made of many contrasting and otherwise diverse segments. These segments are all conglomerated into one being like the sounds of the line of singing coalesce to create this song. 

One of the lighter pieces from the album comes in the form of “In the Garden.” This song is bright and airy, made of colorful-sounding synths, evoking the beauty and excitement of being in a flourishing garden. Marela even adds the sounds of birds chirping, crunching leaves, and water flowing to her piece, which intensify the ambient aspects of the project. 

The last song on the album is live recorded. It is called “Two Colors,” and it starts off with strings that evoke a sense of nascency, in quite a cinematic style. The strings continue, two parts intertwining as the song develops. Then other instruments are added: a resounding low-frequency bell or gong, and percussive instrument with a papery, flat timbre. The whole piece, especially because it was live recorded, sounds wonderfully organic. 

This album was a really enjoyable listen. Marela combines her natural-sounding artistic style with an organic ambient sound to create work that is very thought-provoking yet soothing.