Genre: Ambient

01 White Night

Think back, way back, to a snow-filled evening in 1974. Earlier in the year, ABBA won the Eurovision contest and, although Kraftwerk had released the monumental ‘Autobahn’, it was still music like Dolly Parton and the nascent Kiss that held centre stage. A young, idealist label by the name of Virgin Records were about to unleash Tangerine Dream’s ambient classic ‘Phaedre’ onto an unsuspecting (and vaguely stoned) public but not even the likes of Brian Eno had come to fully understand the power and appeal of entirely electronic music.

So, what happened on this snowy evening? Richard Lainhart turned on his equipment and, arguably, recorded one of the first pieces of electronic, drone-based ambient music.

This lost work has languished in Lainhart’s personal archives since then, only being briefly available on Richard’s website and in a shortened, remixed form until now. Re-released by the folks at Ex Ovo – fast becoming a haven for solid ambience – the entire piece is now available, unabridged and unaltered.

Given its provenance, ‘White Night’ is understandably simple in form. The liner notes tell us that it’s constructed from “a single, four-note chord, whose root waves were sent through separate sine wave oscillators” and then fed out into sequencers to fall in and out of synch with each other, dependent on the machines’ whim. The result is an eerily organic half hour of interweaving drones that lap and beat against each other with a subtle, hypnotic cadence. That such a nebulous and delicate piece should be created during a snowstorm is almost too apt but it’s coincidences like this that musical history is built on.

Yet it is still very much electronic music and for all the surface delicacy, there’s a certain inhumanity lurking within the sine waves. It’s hard for me to say whether this is a bad thing or not, I’ve been listening to the record on repeat now and each time I flick between being lost in the shifting, oceanic sounds and finding it coldly mechanical. The confusion is compounded by the fact that, if it hadn’t been recorded 30 years previously, I’d probably be complaining that someone had been listening to too much Stars Of The Lid. It takes a certain level of mental gymnastics to realize that Stars Of The Lid have possibly been listening to too much Richard Lainhart…

It’s the double-edged sword of re-releases, especially ones that you’ve not heard before. Groundbreaking albums have been broken down and re-hashed, innovative approaches have been copied and re-copied, the new becomes the old. The same year that this was recorded, the Forest Hills neighbourhood of Queens birthed a group of like-named freaks. They were called The Ramones. Punk was only a few years away and there would soon be no place for experimental electronics and indulgent noodling in the minds of a youth fixated on 3-minute blasts of isolation and anger. For me, this knowledge – a record so ephemeral that it was blown away almost before it was even born – adds a layer of melancholy to the listening experience, a requiem for all the music soon to be berated as outdated and pretentious.

Electronic music historians will no doubt have snapped this up already and fans of gentle, minimalist drone would do well to follow suit but, whatever you do, don’t approach this with a modern sensibility. Lie back, put it on repeat and drift back to that cold evening in 1974 as the twisting threads of Moog-sound float past you.