‘Clouds’: The lost ambient masterpiece that became a sampling sensation
The genre known as ambient is a wieldy and mammoth terrain flush with numerous records that dwell in new age silliness or arid, staid exercises in cerebral snooze. When done right, however, ambient’s extended suspensions and meditative wanders can truly whisk one away to an evocative realm charged with a transportive and stirring energy.
Whether Brian Eno’s pastel sketches on Another Green World, The Orb’s comedown house languor that shone over the early 1990s’ dance charts, or the arcane drama unearthed by Glasgow’s Iona Fortune, ambient music can serve as a key to new and mysterious aural worlds.
One such sculptor of electric soundscapes is Italian artist Gigi Masin. Born and raised in the famous canal city of Venice, a love of classical music and the 1960s’ pop charts that scored his boyhood drew Masin to forming local band Zero as a youth, indulging in a love of rock at odds with the city’s progressive and jazz musical trends.
It was at his day job as a theatre audio technician that he first discovered his potential for stripped-down, hypnotic music, as he told Resident Advisor in 2017: “There I discovered the pleasure to create music with loops and electronics, where you could create a mood and make something more than a love song. I started using loops in the late ’70s, trying to create sounds for the theatre. It was not easy at first, but with experience, I slowly learned to do it better.”
Playing with audio and manipulating sonic character would prove formative, but ambient’s lightning bolt truly struck when encountering the Korg-Poly 800 synthesiser in his local music store. Intending to buy an acoustic guitar, Masin became enamoured with the Korg’s rich and inviting tonalities and easy sequencing capabilities: “…its sounds were really strange, but they had soul to them”.
Privately cutting 1986’s debut album Wind and issuing to friends and the local radio, Masin’s reputation quickly resulted in regular phone calls and letters from newfound fans and even fellow musicians eager to snag their own copy.
This led to 1989’s follow-up Les Nouvelles Musiques de Chambre, Vol 2. A split with This Heat drummer Charles Hayward, who occupies the record’s whole second side with the 20-odd minute ‘Thames Water Authority’ piece, Masin’s masterful command of percolating piano drops and pulsing synths would dazzle on the album’s ‘Clouds’. A lilting and echoing ambient gem swaddled in muffled poly synths and subaqueous reverb that casts an enchanting stillness over the listener across its five-minute natural wonder.
Making little critical splash, Manis released 1991’s The Wind Collector with future Unfolk Collective director Alessandro Monti before spending the next two decades working for the country’s Poste Italiane service and raising two children, music pushed to the sidelines in his life.
Yet, a generation of DJs and artists discovered ‘Clouds’ during his interregnum. Berlin post-rockers To Rococo Rot sampled ‘Clouds’ on 1999’s ‘Die Dinge des Lebens’, and Icelandic artpop queen Björk lifted its sonic bubbles for the glitchy ‘It’s in Our Hands’ three years later to promote her Greatest Hits package. Following dozens of artful borrowings in the electronic underworld and leftfield hip-hop, current country-rap superstar Post Malone smattered ‘Clouds’ butterfly flickers on his 2016 debut, Stoney’s ‘Big Lie’.
With such a resurgence in Masin’s work, it would be tempting to rest on his laurels. Yet, ever the restless artist and not one to be bogged in nostalgia, he quit his office job and pursued music full-time, dropping 2014’s Talk to the Sea retrospective with Dutch indie label Music from Memory and forming the Gaussian Curve trio with producers Jonny Nash and Marco Sterk. Playing as recently as 2024 with jazz composer Greg Foat on the live The Fish Factory Sessions collaboration, Masin’s finally catching up with the ambient legacy ‘Clouds’ had so unwittingly forged nearly 40 years ago.
