by Aly Muilenburg (@nuclearwessels9)
Everyone is searching for a reprieve, for a form of peace within the self and the world. The cathartic rush of music can serve as a slight panacea, offering up a taste of what we strive towards. Both ends of the loudness spectrum serve this purpose. Usually, individuals are drawn to either one or the other. But on some pleasant occasions, there’s someone who bridges that gap. In this case, that person is Amar Lal.
Before releasing Gardening in September 2019, Lal was best-known as a guitarist/multi-instrumentalist for one of the best post-hardcore bands of recent memory, New York’s Big Ups (RIP). You never would have guessed it based on the music of Gardening. He recently moved to Oakland, CA and went through his exceptionally varied logs of field recordings and mixed audio, to be codified into what would become this album. Consisting of compositions from 2015 to 2018, Lal runs the gamut of what ambient music can be.
In lieu of screaming guitars and thrashing, Gardening evokes the image of meditating in front of a sun-licked pond at dawn. Reflection, of the self and of things of greater consciousness, is more than a simple through-line – it is a whole-hearted lifestyle. Lal is a companion more than he is an artist. He gently encourages you to consider your “Privilege” and arrive at a place of quiet “Stasis.” A friend taking you away from the wall-to-wall insanity of modernity and vanishing together into a bath of nature’s resplendency.
Lal manages to sidestep the easy tropes of a great deal of ambient music by picking bits and pieces like humming berries from an ancient tree. Classic Eno-esque keys are matched with the gentle rustle and thrum of a field recording on “Sunday I: Eyes Closed.” The pair of “Timescale Etudes” offers a sampling of a skewed music box and a transfixing piece of synth work, almost echoing the mellowness of C418’s Minecraft soundtrack, respectively. Best of all is Lal’s perfect embodiment of the drone work of Stars of the Lid on “Learning to Surf.” Tone cascades like the dappled purity of a bubble in sunlight; it floats to heaven, narrowly avoiding a grove of trees on its ascent, shivering as it reaches its peak. The bubble never pops. It merely dissolves from our eyesight and leaves behind hope for the infinite.
Never Content, the label that released Gardening, included a quote from Voltaire on its Bandcamp page that encapsulates the worldview Lal puts forth (as well as likely giving the album its title): “Il faut cultivar notre jardin” or “We must cultivate our garden.” It is a call to be good caretakers of the planet we have been allowed to live on and to challenge and to tend to our own hearts and minds. Lal is on a quest for clarity and starts to find it with Gardening.