Lillian
New member
With her latest album, Clear Light, StephanieSante has created something a bit unusual. It would be fair to call this a mostly ambient album (which, these days,is a sub-category of new age music). And, yes, Sante makes all the music using synthesizers (like so much ofambient music). BUT there are a LOT ofrhythms in this music so that you might want to call it Rhythmic Ambient orsomething like that. And like virtuallyall ambient music being created, there ARE melodies, but Sante is adept athiding them. They float in and out, theycreep in the backdoor and steal a chocolate chip cookie off the counter andthen are gone, they are buried in the mix under layers of beeps, swirls,pulsating padding like a nervous cat, and soaring sweeping majestic leadlines. I stand by my earlier statement. This is ambient music, but it is out there onthe cutting edge somewhere, not sounding quite like much of the ambient musicbeing released (even though ambient is quite a creative and ground-breakingcategory at the moment).
On top of the interesting musical sounds that Sante makes, she also dedicates this album to the oceans that make up themajority of the surface of our fair planet. Yes, we are screwing up the oceans bigtime (floating plastics alone areenough to make you cry in your rum punch), and when we aren’t doing that we aremessing with the atmosphere creating climate change which also affects theoceans. But let me get off thenegativity of how we run sewage lines right out into the ocean or take bargesof trash out and dump them (so that the hypodermic needles wash right back toshore -- want one of those in your eye when you bodysurf?). Let’s get back to this beautiful music.
Some of it is slow, soft, peaceful, spacey,drifting (especially the piece “The Color of Coral” -- coral changes color whenit dies). Other pieces are morefast-paced, or they sort of bound along with pulses or a bounciness. One moment you might hear something thatsounds like a siren, and the next it is some sort of underwater fish sound oreven the human voice submerged in the sea. So a few pieces get your heart pumping while others are simply perfectrelaxation music. There is a variety, soif you go online and listen to samples from this recording, check out a bunchof them to give you an overall sense of the variety. This music is highly recommended for any newage music lover who likes something a bit out of the ordinary. More information is available at her website:stephaniesante dot com.