Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self

by Paul Roquet

Ambient Media examines music, video art, film, and literature as tools of atmospheric design in contemporary Japan, and what it means to use media as a resource for personal mood regulation. Paul Roquet traces the emergence of ambient styles from the environmental music and Erik Satie boom of the 1960s and 1970s to the more recent therapeutic emphasis on healing and relaxation. Focusing on how an atmosphere works to reshape those dwelling within it, Roquet shows how ambient aesthetics can provide affordances for reflective drift, rhythmic attunement, embodied security, and urban coexistence. Musicians, video artists, filmmakers, and novelists in Japan have expanded on Brian Eno’s notion of the ambient as a style generating “calm, and a space to think,” exploring what it means to cultivate an ambivalent tranquility set against the uncertain horizons of an ever-shifting social landscape. Offering a new way of understanding the emphasis on “reading the air” in Japanese culture, Ambient Media documents both the adaptive and the alarming sides of the increasing deployment of mediated moods. Arguing against critiques of mood regulation that see it primarily as a form of social pacification, Roquet makes a case for understanding ambient media as a neoliberal response to older modes of collective attunement—one that enables the indirect shaping of social behavior while also allowing individuals to feel like they are the ones ultimately in control.

Genres: Nonfiction, Music, Japan

252 pages, Paperback

Published February 1, 2016

Reviews

[Nam Pham · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book introduces a lot of interesting concepts, though a little hastly and unclearly. Examples are drawn mostly from music, film and arts - which could have been comprehensive (and persuasive) if expanded to wider and physical mediums i.e. public (shared) space.

[Koji Yamamoto · Rating 5 out of 5]

Will likely keep returning to this. I could easily enjoy reading expanded versions of each chapter. I can imagine additional chapters about Terrace House, ASMR, YouTubers/parasocial relationships.

[Jake Rubenstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautifully weaves together media/visual studies, cultural critiques, critical theory, all under a blanket of calming atmosphere

highly recommend


Yeah, he's making sure that time's preserved well
We reap what we sow
We're always one step behind him
He's Brian Eno

[Devin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice to find this book at a moment of renewed interest in the music that is the focus of several of the chapters here (check out new compilation Kankyō Ongaku). Really interesting concepts and forms at play: "ambient subjectivation," "cosubjectivity/coobjectivity," ambient video. Reminder to self: read more on Foucault's "techniques of the self."

[Hebdomeros · Rating 4 out of 5]

(...)music composed for background use has a long and surprisingly distinguished lineage: Mozart made music for the dinner table, and Bach’s Goldberg Variations (1741) were written as a kind of insomnia medication for sleepless royalty.

Satie wrote in his diary he ate only white-colored foods.