What is ‘lowercase’ music? A look at ambient’s most extreme form
It’s not just hard to keep up with genre terminology in this day and age; it’s borderline exhausting. Can’t we just go back to simpler times when rock was rock, jazz was jazz and pop was anything that was vaguely marketable to a mass audience?
There are simply too many ways to describe the tastes we have these days, and while it’s sometimes good to add a touch of specificity, there are times when this just feels plain unnecessary.
The trouble is, we as humans have an innate desire to categorise things to the extreme, and there’s no stopping us as a species from further splitting hairs on how to classify our preferences. If that means that metal fans get a sense of satisfaction from debating whether something is grindcore or noisegrind, or if it helps you avoid embarrassment in your trap-loving circle of friends when you mislabel a rage record as plugg, then so be it, I suppose.
Sometimes, a distinction so minute in detail comes along that you have to wonder whether it was necessary to separate it from its parent genre. There comes a point where you’re being pernickety for the sake of it, and you start to feel like Amol Rajan on University Challenge when he made his infamous assertion to a bemused contestant that “we need jungle, I’m afraid” when they offered up “drum and bass” as a response.
However, one such musical neologism that arose around the turn of the century is ‘lowercase’, and if you thought that some of the other subtleties were overly particular, then this might be an even greater stretch. Yes, you might be forgiven for thinking that’s a distinguishing feature of bicameral scripts, which of course, is correct, but it’s also the name given to a genre of music that’s both rarely heard about, and frankly, hard to hear in practice.
So, what is ‘lowercase’ music?
The term ‘lowercase’ is used to describe a form of reductionism, which in itself, is a sub-genre of ambient and experimental music. Its first usage as a term was coined by Steve Roden to describe his 2001 release, Forms of Paper, but as with all emergent genres, there had been other releases in this style prior to it having a name.
So, why is it called lowercase? Roden himself said of his creative practice that “it bears a certain sense of quiet and humility; it doesn’t demand attention, it must be discovered,” adding that he believes “it’s the opposite of capital letters—loud things which draw attention to themselves.”
But what does it actually sound like? It might be useful to think of it initially as the ASMR of music, seeing as it focuses on small sounds that are used to trigger a cognitive response. Some of the noises might feel familiar; Forms of Paper, for example, is a recording of Roden handling sheets of paper in different ways, whether that be scratching a pen on it or scrunching it up. Others will focus on sounds that you’ve never heard before, such as Jana Winderen’s The Wanderer, which is the sound of microscopic aquatic lifeforms such as plankton moving around in their natural habitat.
I know what you’re thinking – this isn’t music. Well, if harsh noise is music, then so is lowercase. If anything, noise is the ‘UPPERCASE’ of the world, and if it required a process of composition, then you’ve got to allow it the privilege of being classified as music. Just because it doesn’t necessarily follow a structure in the same way as a conventional pop song might, and because it relies on the digital amplification of things normally inaudible to the human ear, doesn’t mean it should be thought of any differently.
Granted, if you wanted to put on a record to impress your friends at a dinner party, then the works of Bernhard Günter aren’t going to get you far unless you’ve exclusively invited a bunch of chin-scratching freaks over for tea. However, as a form of sonic sculpture and musical inventiveness, there aren’t too many genres that utilise technological advancements in a more novel way than lowercase.
