Amazonia Ambient Project

The Young Gods are best known as an explosive live act, tracing their origins back to 1982, but for this project, Music for Artificial Clouds (2004), they are ambient and dreamlike. It is meditative music for relaxation. It draws listeners into a state of availability and seeks to link them to the world, rather than to extract them from it. As Brian Eno put it: "Ambient music is intended to induce calm and a space to think. Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting." The album is also environmental music, based on a composition initially played at the Arteplage of Yverdon on the shores of Lake Neuchtel, during Swiss national exposition Expo.02.

The band approached composing the piece by looking for sounds generated by computer, which they then mixed with a bank of natural sounds recorded by Franz Treichler during a recent trip to the Amazonian rainforest. The resulting musical landscape is inhabited by imaginary animals, resonant plants, electronic breezes, distant melodies and artificial clouds. The live performance features the anthropologist Jeremy Narby, who talks about his explorations of shamanic cultures in Amazonia. He is a doctor in anthropology from the University of Stanford, who has worked with indigenous people in the Western Amazon for two decades on questions of territorial rights and bilingual, intercultural education. He has written several books, including "The Cosmic Serpent, DNA and the Origins of Knowledge" (1998, Penguin Putnam, New York), which breaks new ground in showing connections between indigenous knowledge and science. He also co-edited with Francis Huxley the first-ever anthology showing the evolution of Western attitudes towards shamanism on a worldwide scale, called "Shamans Through Time: 500 Years on the Path to Knowledge" (2001, Penguin Putnam, New York). He works as coordinator of Amazonian projects for Nouvelle Planète, a Swiss NGO.