Today marks the thirtieth anniversary of the release of a compilation album I put together while working as a product manager in Virgin Records' Commercial Marketing Department: 152 Minutes, 33 Seconds - A Brief History of Ambient (Volume 1). This was the mid-90s, remember, and "ambient" had become something of a catch-all for a range of electronic and generally spacey music being spun in, er, chill-out spaces at raves. Or so I gather; I guess you had to be there (I wasn't). As it happened, Virgin's storied 70s catalogue had a lot of rich ambient-related pickings: kraut rock, prog and early electronica. The label also owned Editions EG, the "art" imprint of the EG label, which was a rich seam, not least of course for the four albums released by Brian Eno that effectively launched the very term "ambient". And there was plenty of stuff going on at the label contemporaneously that provided compilation fodder. So the collection was a no-brainer. (I should also point out from the get-go that it was not my idea - I was charged with putting it together by my then bosses, of whom more in a mo.)
Anyhow, one way or another, the release ended up being the first of a series of both compilation albums and new releases that somehow ended up, 20 years later, with its own Wikipedia page, Virgin Ambient Series. The series ran to 24 releases and came to an end in 1997, the year I left the company. For a while at least, the series enjoyed something of a cult status and acquired a bit of an afterlife on the web, so I thought this might be a good moment to share a few random thoughts about it, although as the title of this post indicates, this was a long time (and several careers) ago, so some of my recollections might not be court-worthy.
The key thing that needs to be said is that this was never conceived as a series - or at least not the one it turned into. Yes, the first release featured the teasing "Volume One", but I think that simply suggested that we might flog the dead horse at least a couple more times. Anyway, the first record sold well enough to follow it up with two more, which mined the same catalogue (with somewhat diminishing returns, truth be told), again riffed on John Cage titles, and featured graphics by Buggy G Riphead, who'd been working with the Future Sound of London, at that time one of Virgin's apparently coolest acts.
Things took a very different turn with the series' fourth volume, 1994's Isolationism, compiled by Kevin Martin, now perhaps best known for his work as The Bug, and whom I'd known since his days with God (I'd encouraged the Virgin imprint to release God's "Possession" a few years earlier). Kevin had written about the darker music around the edges of ambient for The Wire magazine, and (again, if memory serves) coined the term "Isolationism" to describe it; the compilation was Kevin's idea and broke with the series template not only stylistically, but in licensing new tracks.
Albums then came thick and fast, and broadly fell into four categories.
"Historical" compilations The legendary journalist and musician David Toop released several compilations for us, starting with 1996's Ocean of Sound (to accompany David's groundbreaking book of the same name), continuing to the series' last release, 1997's Guitars on Mars. In a similar vein, Kevin compiled the psych-jazz survey Jazz Satellites.
Artist releases This was perhaps the most unexpected area of activity for us, and the series ended up including several releases by Toop himself, Australian composer Paul Schütze, Kevin again under two soubriquets, Techno Animal (with Justin Broadrick of Godflesh and Jesu fame) and The Sidewinder, and Rudy Tambala's Sufi.
Compilations of new material Following Isolationism, Kevin went on to compile further collections of new material for the series, the two volumes of Macro Dub Infection.
Existing planned releases At least two artist compilations that would have gone ahead anyway ended up under the Ambient series banner, a collection of work by Tangerine Dream founder Edgar Froese, and the Penguin Cafe Orchestra's compilation Preludes, Airs and Yodels.
Although more releases were planned for 1998, I left Virgin at the end of the previous year and the series ended there. So... that's the history, again as I recall it, and what follows are a few brief observations (file under "wanting to get off my chest for three decades").
The real heroes of the series get nary a mention on any of the album credits: my then bosses Steve Pritchard and Pete Duckworth. It was they who had suggested the first compilation and from there on out they were nothing but supportive of my work on the series. Given how esoteric things got at times (remember, they headed up the Commercial Marketing team), they let me get on with it and supported me throughout. In retrospect, I think I was pretty bratty about the whole enterprise and not sufficiently grateful at the time. So let me put that right now: Pete, Steve - thank you for your patience with it all!
Not unrelated... In some of the contemporary coverage of the series, there was definitely something of a "major label ripping us off" kind of vibe. As a Quietus review of my own alt-rock compilation Monsters, Robots and Bug Men says: "One of the bands on here used to have a website whose discography advised people not to buy this album, because it was released by Virgin and everything on it was already available on smaller labels." Indeed, in the Wikipedia entry on "Isolationism", Jim Plotkin is quoted as saying that "Isolationism was a Virgin compilation and it needed a marketing angle". Really, a marketing angle?!
Honestly, I get it. But this is definitely not what was going on. After the initial spate of catalogue-mining compilations, the whole shebang consisted of me constantly hustling Steve and Pete to let me put out collections of old material and releases of new work that I wanted to get more attention. If there was anything nefarious going on, it was me trying to build a personal reputation; I don't think even that was the case (and in any case it didn't work), but I'm prepared to concede it. But I can say categorically that it was not a major label "cashing in". If only!
A clear shortfall of the series is that it clearly relies on too small a circle of musicians and journalists - although they were all great, of course. The truth is that I simply wasn't well enough networked, knowledgable nor proactive for it to have been otherwise. As painful as it is to admit it, I think that a smarter, better-connected and, well, more knowledgable "overseer" (as Kevin termed me on the liner notes for Jazz Satellites) would not only have produced (overseen?!) a stronger series, they would have been able to create the attention it deserved.
I'm particularly proud of the limited-period licensing approach we took to new work. Alongside all this activity, one of my roles at Virgin was to "look after" the deeper back catalogue. Part of this entailed making what in retrospect were often entirely specious arguments for keeping low-selling titles in print. (This is one of the reasons I fell so hard for Chris Anderson's "Long Tail" distribution argument, although I admit that it didn't pan out as some of us had hoped. More on that another day.) Seeing (albeit subjective) masterpieces constantly in danger of deletion made me determined that any new work we released should have its release rights returned to the artist at some point after release.
I don't claim that the series created a template for playlist culture. For one thing, mixtapes had of course been a thing for a decade or more before this sequence kicked off. But it is striking to me how popular thematically-arranged, fabulously niche playlists (complete with crossfades!) have become in the age of Spotify, bringing me neatly on to...
The series has definitely had a bit of a strange afterlife, not least on Spotify. I embedded a playlist based on David Toop's Ocean of Sound series earlier. But it gets weirder. Only a couple of years after leaving Virgin I started to see online speculation about the second iteration of Kevin's Jazz Satellites compilation. As I mentioned earlier, we'd already scoped this out before I left the label, and had even distributed sales notes (sadly I can't find a copy of these in my threadbare archive). Somehow these notes had made it into the hands of members of online mailing lists (rmember them?), leading one list member to suggest that there were "definite plans for the second volume when corporate changes sunk the project." Yeah, right: "sunk", and "corporate changes"!
After the initial three catalogue-scraping compilations, I personally put together only one more, the aforementioned Robots. For the longest time, I felt this to be the weakest of the entire series, not least as it got a complete kicking in the press at the time (and a completely reasonable letter of complaint from the brilliant Simon Reynolds pointing out that I'd entirely ripped off his concept of "post-rock" without attribution). But even this release has had its own afterlife and even re-appreciation, with a contributor to AllMusic describing it as "a real peach", and adding, "attempting to condense a genre that encompasses everything into 155 minutes is a thankless task". Honestly, after all these years, I'll take that!
Finally, a word on the composer and trumpeter Jon Hassell, who sadly died a little over two years ago. Jon's amazing work as a composer and band leader naturally featured heavily in the AMBT series' first three releases (again, a by-product of Virgin at that point owning the catalogue of Editions EG, who'd released several of Hassell's key albums and his collaborations with Brian Eno). He then went on to play on Techno Animal's Re-Entry (recently re-issued on Relapse) and Toop's Pink Noir. I regret that the series doesn't feature one of his own records, but again, a better series "overseer" would have made that happen.
So that's it. In the spirit of this post's title and, I hope, its general tone, I would welcome any feedback, observations, and perhaps most of all, corrections. Again: recollections may vary; it now all feels like several lifetimes ago.
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