Nashville Ambient Ensemble at Battle Tapes Recording
Composer, musician and Nashville Ambient Ensemble leader Michael Hix fell in love with experimental electronic music in the early 2000s, when avant-garde guru William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops came out. The four-volume series “blew my mind,” says Hix, who was a student at Belmont at the time. “Basinski was a big inspiration to me because he’d built up this big community in Brooklyn in his loft, which he called Arcadia. I felt like if I moved to New York, I could build that kind of thing there.”
Hix left Music City for New York City in 2011. He lived there seven years, and might’ve stayed if he hadn’t become a father at the end of 2018. During his earlier tenure in Nashville, Hix hadn’t managed to make inroads into the city’s experimental music scene, so on returning home with his wife and son, he was pleasantly surprised at what he found. “I knew I’d be reconnecting with old friends,” he says, “but I met so many new people making amazing music.”
Over time, Hix — who plays a modular synthesizer — formed a group of like-minded players called Nashville Ambient Ensemble, who release their debut Cerulean Friday via WXNA “Psych Out!” host Mike Mannix’s label Centripetal Force. The foundation for the outfit was laid one night in January 2019, when Hix shared a bill with electronic-acoustic songsmith Diatom Deli (aka Deli Paloma-Sisk) at The Crying Wolf in East Nashville. That evening, Hix also met Jack Silverman — a seasoned guitarist and regular performer in Nashville’s leading Grateful Dead tribute band The Stolen Faces, as well as a contributing editor to the Scene — and reconnected with an old friend, indie-rock axman Timon Kaple.
Envisioning “a nonhierarchical musical group, where no one person was the centerpiece,” Hix found a match in Kaple, who you might recognize from his main band Daniel Ellsworth & The Great Lakes. Describing that group as a “pop-rock, Phoenix-meets-Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky kinda thing,” Kaple explains that he welcomed the chance to engage a different side of his musical brain in Nashville Ambient Ensemble.
Michael Hix
“I wasn’t that experienced with the more exploratory world of music Michael is a part of,” says Kaple, “where you can play without pop conventions in a band that is comfortable with dissonance, noise and odd time signatures — but that you can still dance to if you want to. There’s no rules, compared to what I’m used to. I was like, ‘This rules.’ ”
With Hix composing and conducting, Paloma-Sisk singing, and Silverman and Kaple on guitar, the seven-piece coterie is rounded out by three fellow players with an inclination toward ambient music, but other fields of expertise beyond it. There’s Cynthia Cárdenas, a heavy-metal bassist and teacher who plays guitar synthesizer on the album; Luke Schneider, pedal-steel savant; and Kim Rueger, alias Belly Full of Stars, a found-sound artist with a classical piano background. Behind the boards for Cerulean: Battle Tapes Recording’s tireless Jeremy Ferguson.
The result is a collection of six lush, atmospheric soundscapes with shades of post-rock, dream pop and New Age music. With the exception of the Silverman-penned title track (which appears in an alternate form on his forthcoming YK Records solo EP Now What), Hix laid the groundwork for each one. But at rehearsals and in the studio, he explains, “We went in a round where each soloist could step out into the forefront.” That led to happy accidents like the unplanned call-and-response between Kaple and Silverman’s twin guitars on the album-closing “Coda,” mirrored by Paloma-Sisk’s wordless incantations dancing with Schneider’s quivering pedal steel. Hix calls that particular take of “Coda” his favorite moment of the sessions. “We were really in tune — the jitters were totally gone,” he remembers. “It was almost like we were all on the same recliner.”
Though the record was filtered through eight minds before reaching your ears, if you zone out enough, Cerulean can easily pass for one fluid piece. It’s geared at deep listening — “I mixed it with headphones in mind,” Hix points out — but soothing in any context. You’d never guess the ensemble had only two full-band practices before entering Battle Tapes and tracking with Ferguson right under the wire, pre-COVID.
It took leaving and coming back for Hix to finally find his own Arcadia in the form of the Nashville Ambient Ensemble. There’s a paradoxical quality to the moniker: Ambient music tends to be the domain of solo home recordists, and Nashville isn’t known as a stronghold for it. “There’s seven musicians involved, a lot of instrumentation, rhythms, melodic movement,” Hix says. “I don’t think those things are really a part of what purists would call ambient music.” Wherever one wishes to file it, Cerulean is a testament to the collective nature of Nashville music-making, and a time capsule of the city’s experimental scene as it continues to evolve.
