ambient attention
The song is “Gloria,” the first track on Shabason, Krgovich, Sage, a record that pools together sounds, moods, and objects. Woodwinds, windchimes, synthesizers, birdcalls. Rollerbladers, limes, airplanes, swimming lessons, beer bubbles, a dropped wallet. Krgovich’s lyrics take inventory of the quotidian in an almost documentary fashion, like first drafts of haikus, while Joseph Shabason and M. Sage combine saxophones and analog synthesizers into a kind of smooth ambient jazz. It sounds like the inside of someone’s head as they wait in the stripmall parking lot, the mind a rolled-down window swept by a saxophone breeze.
Each of the album’s eight tracks is named for a different person, though each narrator has similar fixations: small pleasures, childhood memories, scenery, details. On “Bruce,” the narrator finds himself “Holding open the door for an old dad / With his teenage daughter and her friend / At a Vietnamese restaurant / On an overcast spring break afternoon.” And wondering, over a bowl of Phở, “Am I helping anything / Treating life like one big joke? I don’t know.” “Joe” is a catalogue of memories that gain specificity as they reach farther back into childhood: “I remember having to pee / Squirming in the middle seat / And the piano tuner / Calling and rescheduling.” “Don” sees a magpie raiding a mourning dove’s nest and finds himself a “Bit too soft for this and I don’t know why / I just do what I can.” “Patti” is a voicenote set to music, a blasé catalogue of junior-high memories: a cherry tree, boot treads full of goose poop, a jukebox that the cafeteria ladies unplugged because the kids wouldn’t stop playing “Red, Red Wine” on repeat.
It’s familiar territory for Shabason and Krgovich, who spent their past two records together constructing a sophisticated sound from the spare parts of unfashionable genres: soft rock, lounge, M.O.R., New Age—music for lobbies and spas. 2020’s Philadelphia (and its instrumental version, Florence, both recorded with Chris Harris) set diaristic scenes of contemporary life to soothing synthesizers. On “Tuesday Afternoon,” Krgovich sings of walking around, seeing “the chongo working construction / Holding a vape pen / Sipping on Gatorade / Exhaling drifts of white smoke that smell like grape.” In the music video for “I Don’t See the Moon,” he stands in various suburban settings—a parking lot just off the freeway, a field near a substation—singing and serenely striking a woodblock. The penultimate track of Philadelphia is a cover, without a trace of archness, of Neil Young’s eponymous piano ballad from the 1993 film Philadelphia.
Two years after Philadelphia came At Scaramouche, which included many of the same sounds, if a little less of the earnestness. Shabason’s saxophone and Roland synths returned, as well as Krgovich’s listless lilt. The thematic universe expanded from a muted Covid-era domesticity to a frazzled suburban concern. “In the Middle of the Day,” a bass-heavy brain-fog groove, has Shabason scattering the pitch of his Roland JX-8P to match the narrator’s addled thoughts. “I Am So Happy With My Little Dog” glitters with adult-contemporary flourishes, romanticizing middle-class inertia with a disarming, almost concerning, delight. The zany midcentury lounge riff of “Soli II” disguises feelings of fatigue: “Oh, ain’t it funny, willy-nilly, hanky-panky / But nobody’s really having any fun.” Though playful, the record is no mere sophisti-pop pastiche. Shabason and Krgovich use genre conventions typically associated with chintz and coziness to elaborate confusion and tedium—gray feelings that are not quite melancholy even if they come awfully close.
Shabason, Krgovich, Sage continues this project with the addition of M. Sage, whose ambient records are lush and riparian rather than roomtoney and mechanical. If At Scaramouche placed itself within a semi-urban or suburban context, Shabason, Krgovich, Sage is wilder and dreamier, with more textures of nature, an outside world that blurs with the interior one. While the album’s characters never fully form, they do create a slippage of perspective that’s more dynamic than the still lifes of Philadelphia. The final track, “Bridget,” is a lively showcase of this, with Krgovich’s impossible-to-transcribe, bouncing-ball enunciation dropping each syllable into a steady current of consciousness:
Rollerblader in the breeze
Boring plans to get coffee
That’s a no from me,
Honey
Instead the smell of concession stand ketchup at the beach
By myself
Cherry blossoms fall
Chestnut blossoms fall
Seaweedy green waste at the seawall
Rather than merely showing off their ability to emulate old styles, Shabason and Krgovich (and Sage) have built a peripheral pop with a Late Modernist soul, in which syllables, objects, thoughts, sensations, and sounds are gathered and held as equals in even the most banal moments. That line from George Oppen’s famous poem comes to mind: “There are things / We live among, ‘and to see them / is to know ourselves’.” For the characters of Shabason, Krgovich, Sage, however, to see things is more often not to know things—thanks to that “big dumb hat” or to one’s own ignorance. On “Don,” for instance, the narrator wonders about the nocturnal animals outside: “What they gettin into / While we’re asleep?”
These moments of vague curiosity may seem at first to have little to say, taking inventory instead of action. The closest thing to anguish in this dreamy suburban imaginary is the lowgrade disaffection of a midlife crisis. Many of Krgovich’s lyrics are lists and descriptions, proper nouns and shards of songs and sayings. They remind me of a 2018 essay by Fredric Jameson about Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle, the six-volume autobiographical novel infamous for its unsparing and unflattering observations. Jameson describes Knausgård’s “seemingly endless and relatively homogeneous stream of detail” as “itemization.”
No surprise, coming from the popularizer of late capitalism, that “itemization” here is a pejorative, late-stage poetics:
We have, in postmodernity, given up on the attempt to ‘estrange’ our daily life and see it in new, poetic or nightmarish, ways; we have given up the analysis of it in terms of the commodity form, in a situation in which everything by now is a commodity; we have abandoned the quest for new languages to describe the stream of the self-same or new psychologies to diagnose its distressingly unoriginal reactions and psychic events. All that is left is to itemize them, to list the items that come by.
For Jameson, various attempts to grapple with reality have given way to a banal and bland memoirism, in which things “have not been transformed, or lent some higher meaning; […] Nor are they lifted into the timeless eternity of classical literature, posterity and the canon.” Shabason, Krgovich, Sage has a similar quality: its lists are made by apolitical observers who have little use for metaphor or transcendence, and who have mostly yielded to confusion, consumption, or age.
But music is not literature, and Krgovich’s airy intonation is itself a transformation of daily life, if not an “estrangement.” Many of Shabason’s musical influences are recognizable as commodities, relics of a consumerist white noise that now seems both comforting and alienating. Rather than merely “list[ing] the items that come by,” Shabason & co. have made waiting-room music that explores what it’s like to wait.
Itemization, after all, is not a bad description for what happens at the beginning of thought, rather than at its worn-out end. The world is full of ambivalent intervals in which the mind can only idle: traffic jams, checkout lines, subway platforms, DMVs, carpools, restaurants, beds and couches before sleep. There is often a wide space between noticing something and enlisting it into the sterner categories of opinion, conclusion, and belief. The function of Muzak is to fill that space with familiarity, to distract customers or put them at ease. Shabason, Krgovich, Sage, on the other hand, dignifies aimless thinking in its own ambient idiom, a mood music of eccentric particulars rather than generic emotional clichés.
While writing this, I realized that, with a few exceptions, I don’t hear Muzak that much anymore. Or smooth jazz, mood music, and all those minor subgenres of Shabason’s anachronistic palette. Playlists are generated on streaming platforms; much of our idling now happens online; out in the world, we wear headphones and earbuds. Muzak, it turns out, declared bankruptcy in 2009.
If there is a Muzak of today, it is not music at all but video. Our ever-present smartphones, of course, but also all the muted screens recently mounted on subway platforms, by gas pumps, in elevators, even on the sidewalks. Often the best we can do is refocus our attention, itemizing and incorporating minor things that stir our memory and curiosity.
On “Bruce,” Krgovich sings:
This world is dumb
And so many other things
I can smell the spring flowers
Atop the forest fire smoke
To find new ways of rendering the world, one has to notice it first.
ben tapeworm