Music in general seems greatly concerned with evoking emotion. Consider how many musicians blatantly aspire to accurately convey their own ups, downs, and in betweens. Consider how much music would cease to exist without such habits in place. Ambient music is something of a willful detachment from that. In fact, the best ambient composers and producers aren’t the kinds of people to get caught up in a trivial fashion like emotion. They prefer their palette faceless and stoic. Such notions of emotion are replaced with atmospherics and, well, ambience.

A lot of us may misinterpret the moody atmospherics as frank emotion, but the purpose of ambient music is to tame and suppress the wild sentiments conjured up by the art form at large. And thus, if you hear an ambient piece drenched with intense, cavernous emotion, chances are its respective composer/producer lacks a firm grasp on the art. (That’s not to say he/she isn’t good at something, but that something apparently isn’t ambient music.)

Sound artist Gregg Kowalsky (aka Osso Bucco) manages to successfully employ polite melodics without abandoning the ABCs of ambient music. The occasional “touching” chord, riff, or progression doesn’t go unnoticed, but it also doesn’t meander too far into heartfelt territories.

Kowalsky evidently hasn’t forgotten the essence, but he’s also not afraid to push it forward by inviting warm static hum, rattling digital echo, and other laptop-friendly elements into the mix, as heard on “Ashes from Evermore.” The Florida-raised producer’s debut full length, Through the Cardial Window, hit shelves in April.

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Italian post-rockers 3/4 Had Been Eliminated embrace similar sensibilities. The sporadic drum set brush taps and guitar fuzz cast the track into more organic territories from the get-go. The melodies on “In Every Tree a Heartache” are more frequent and wander further (but not too far) than those on “Ashes from Evermore.” The same aesthetic is accomplished. The four piece’s full length, A Year of the Aural Gauge Operation, dropped in December of last year on Swedish label Häpna.

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“Alto Tune” is unique in that it relies on neither atmosphere nor emotion to claim its existence. The piece contains one note. Its variance comes by octave alone. That note is sustained (via alto saxophone) throughout the entire 20-minute-plus episode. Niblock relies almost entirely on human error to communicate the character of “Alto Tune.” The shortcomings of a person’s mouth on a reed and breath into a brass pipe come to the forefront, while timeliness and variance (and other things musical) are decidedly secondary. This theme remains consistent throughout the 73-year-old composer’s new three-disc release, Touch Three.

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