brettworks

Same Walk, Different Music. Actress, Suzanne Ciani, Concrète Waves London B2 (2026). I’m always looking for music that merits obsessive listening, but I rarely find it. There’s a lot of good music, some excellent music, but little I want to return to. This raises the question, What is it in music that keeps us listening? Sometimes it’s complexity and intricate structure. Other times it’s a mood conjured, or saccharine catchiness. But we could also make the case that it’s ambiguity that keeps our ears delighted. Why? Because ambiguity has mystery and enchantment built into it.

Ambiguity can be a rhythm felt two ways, a timbre between acoustic and electronic, a harmony suggested not stated, or a melody with an uncertain direction. Musics with these and other kinds of ambiguities ask something of the listener besides admiration or overstimulation. It’s to musics without certain answers that we keep returning, trying to figure them out.

This dynamic characterizes my recent listening to Actress and Suzanne Ciani’s collaboration, Concrète Waves (2026). The hook of the six-minute section, “Concrète Waves London B2”, is a beguiling two-chord figure in C minor that seems to move between A-flat/C and F/B-flat. I say seems because I hear a G as much as the A-flat and F. The G is like a phantom tone, there but not there, but still somehow there. Rhythmically, the bass note alternates between C and B-flat every four beats, the higher notes hit on the fourth sixteenth of beat 3 on the first half of the phrase, and on the 3rd sixteenth of beat 2 on the second half. This rhythm difference is so subtle you hardly notice it, but significant enough that you feel the sequence’s asymmetrical beauty.

Joining the chords are just three other parts. A 4/4 kick drum pulses away, its sound thin with just a whispering of bit crushing, while an offbeat 8th-note hi hat ticks alongside it. Floating above this pulsing texture are fragments of plucky keyboard arpeggios and textures from Suzanne Ciani’s Buchla modular synthesizer, suspended in delay effects and panning back and forth from the center to the left of the stereo field. Here, the panning itself becomes a part of the melodic phrasing.

The ambiguity of “Concrète Waves” manifests itself as restraint, by which I mean that each musical element is shaped into a minimalist expression of itself. The chords have their high frequencies rolled off, which makes them gossamer and ghostly. The kick and hi hat occupy precious little bandwidth, sounding like a sample of a sample, distant in their lo-fi’ness. The keyboard lead makes brief statements then leaves space for its tones to linger. And while the track is fast, north of 120 bpm into dancing’s territories, it feels laid back, almost half-time, reminding us that the feel of a tempo depends on what’s going on within the musical frame.

The cumulative effect of these restrained parts leaving spaces for one another is to grant the listener space too. During my 20x listens to this track I found my mind drifting in and around the music’s ambiguities, but also wandering amidst my own memories. Perhaps then, a music’s negative space keeps us listening by leaving room to add ourselves to the mix.