In the liner notes of Brian Eno’s 1978 album Ambient 1: Music for Airports, the artist famously wrote that “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.” If we are to take this definition seriously, then I feel comfortable being wholly ambivalent about ambient and the confusing ways it’s used to categorize different types of music. In 2026, seemingly all music could be described this way. Such is the state of our contemporary moment—plenty is ignorable and plenty is interesting, often at the same time.

It’s perhaps due to this ambivalence to ambient at large that the successes one finds in the genre are exceptionally striking; Drumloop, the alias of New York–based artist Daffodil Meadow Scanlan, is one of those finds. Tracks like her cover of Moby’s “When It’s Cold I’d Like to Die” (2019), or remix of Isabella Lovestory’s “Whiskey & Coca-Cola” (2021), use the familiar techniques of ambient music against its supposed domesticity. The “slowness” of her music, a trope often associated with ambient, is used to draw out the arresting capacities of a referenced song—scouring it down to a radiant, emotional core. Spaciousness and repetition are used to exaggerate drama and tension, as opposed to inducing calmness or easy listening. Her approach is the opposite of Eno’s, instead creating intense soundscapes brimming with pathos. To me, the emotional stakes of her music are unignorable.

In this vein, Drumloop’s 2016 track “Tim Hecker’s Amps Drugs feat. Jazz Jennings” reformats ambient-music icon Tim Hecker’s track “Amps, Drugs, Harmonium” (2013) wholesale and layers it with a monologue from media personality, transgender-rights activist, and author Jazz Jennings.

Hecker was a leading pioneer of ambient music over the past three decades and is in some ways responsible for its confused and celebrated state in our current musical discourse. In a 2023 New York Times article titled “Tim Hecker Helped Popularize Ambient Music. He’s (Sort of) Sorry,” his music was described as having “helped make way for the recent bloom of lifestyle playlists and background music [but] ambient music doesn’t interest him in the way it once did.” Hecker’s discography does contain the longer durations and slower pacing that have shaped the ambient label. But his breakout album, Ravedeath 1972 (2011), and its multipart tracks such as “In the Fog” and “Hatred of Music,” showcase compellingly dark, claustrophobic stretches of digitally distressed sound. The album’s use of pipe organ is processed into a mood of devastation that could hardly stay in the background.

Jennings gained national attention after starring in her own TLC reality series, I Am Jazz—documenting her day-to-day experiences of being a trans teenager. Drumloop uses Hecker’s earthshaking track as a tragic backdrop to Jennings’s monologue of feeling isolated at school, struggling to fit in and make friends. Hecker and Jennings both articulate sadness and hope in equal measure, with Hecker’s washes of sound matched with Jennings saying: “If you just be yourself you can find someone who is just going to love you no matter what. A good, true friend . . . like an angel sent from above.”

In 2026, mash-ups are ubiquitous. TikTok’s dominant role in music distribution circulates sound in ways that reiterate endlessly. Everything is fair game: Monologues and choreographed dances find surprising cadence within one another, and memetic relationships arise between all kinds of unlikely sources. Look no further than the recent virality of Tinashe’s newest single, “Nobody Wanna Dance Anymore” (2026), overlaid with Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer” (1994). Or the resurgence of a very weird reggaeton/bubbling remix of a baby laughing. Strange emotions arise out of these unlikely pairings. They grab our attention but also exist in the background simultaneously.

To completely twist Eno’s words, anything and everything can be ignorable and interesting. Mash-ups are the ambient condition of our recombinant moment. If “ambient” means relating to our immediate environment—what happens when our immediate environment is itself one of total relationality?

—Nick James Scavo

FUNCTIONAL MUSIC

In the early aughts, one would occasionally see bumper stickers that said “Drum Machines Have No Soul,” appearing more often than not alongside a “Coexist” sticker. The message indicates that playing an acoustic drum is soulful, expressing a uniquely human agency and creativity unattainable by automation. The mechanization of a rhythm is positioned as an offense.

This automating technology is thus framed as a dehumanizing force. The “Drum Machine” bumper sticker’s core anxieties revolve around musical authorship and performance, responding to perceived threats to human creative faculties. Such worries seem quaint in relation to the current diffusion of AI-generated music.

A drum machine creates unease because it automates human drumming; AI music generation tools such as Suno introduce new concerns because they automate music production, full stop. Suno transforms the activity of music creation into typing on a keyboard or dictating prompts with voice-to-text software. Music becomes the by-product of written language: descriptions, invocations, instructions.

These new tools make new kinds of music, new kinds of musical encounters, and new kinds of musical controversies. Consider Fenix Flexin’s viral single from this past summer, “Rubberz,” which inspired months of speculation about whether it was AI-generated. Frequently, questions about the song’s provenance—the identity of its true creator—are framed with a value judgment: If the song was made with AI, then our estimation of its quality ought to diminish. Such lines of inquiry are legitimate but perhaps less interesting than the more mundane situations occasioned by AI music generation. A tweet from @UrbaneUrban on June 20 of this year:

took a lyft in philly yesterday and no joke the driver generated an AI pop song about me and him – both of us by name – hanging out on a drive together

The real potential of tools like Suno isn’t in cranking out radio-ready hits. It’s in creating music that doesn’t have commercial incentives to exist. Case in point: Functional Music. I started using it to generate songs that reinforce emotional regulation strategies . . . things like grounding, breathwork, staying present. Not instructional tracks, which would be unbearable, but actual songs with lyrics that reflect actual practice and skills.

OK, fair enough: functional music, catering to individualized demands, at a remove from a broader listening public. To make sense of this functionality, let’s take a look at a 2024 interview with Suno CEO Mikey Shulman elucidating some of the technical decisions underpinning the product. Interestingly, he says that Suno uses the transformer, a neural-network architecture underpinning modern LLMs originally developed to optimize the translation of text from one language to another:

And so we, we prefer transformers for a variety of reasons. . . . So it’s a language model . . . [which] is just something that assigns likelihoods to sequences of tokens. Sometimes those tokens correspond to text. In our case, they correspond to music or audio in general . . . But at its core, the way we like to do things with transformers is exactly like it works in text. Let me predict the next tiny little bit of audio, and I can just keep doing that and doing that and generating audio as long as I want.

It is obvious that this notion of functional, predictively generated “music or audio in general” is striking. Yet it is surely striking in a number of highly divergent ways, depending on who you ask. It comes down to what you think music is, or ought to be.

—Alexander Iadarola

The butcher the brewer the baker

The Philharmonic’s chorus sang these abstracted lines over the Glassian, hocketing arpeggios of Lang’s “movement no. 2: self-love” with appropriate precision and enthusiasm. This opening fanfare in the wealth of nations set a promising tone, evoking the relevant concerns of Smith’s text (the people, their labor, the social mechanisms of industry) while producing intuitive, gripping musical analogies in its restrained orchestration. In using the most historically and symbolically elite form to produce a large-scale commentary on capitalism, the work felt refreshingly goofy and self-aware. I began to imagine, optimistically, how Lang may have found a compelling modernization of this centuries-old format (he cites Handel’s Messiah as his primary model). He approached an ideologically charged text without ignoring the complexity of the subject or needlessly manipulating the audience’s emotions in a presumptive, collective judgment on its contents. This was exciting, given that Lang’s program notes gave me good reason to expect a more reductive, “capitalism=bad” approach. As a left-leaning attendee, in a presumably left-leaning audience, I sat in anticipation: Will the composer preach to the choir?

My optimism was dispelled in the following movement, “what is money?,” in which Lang apparently intervenes in the libretto (the only piece of text in the program notes, which Lang seemingly wrote himself) to riff on this question:

This movement (and the majority of those that followed) was characterized by a languorous melody, ruminating on fragments of speechlike prose that were deployed so slowly as to erase whatever sense of “plain” or populist context they might have held. Instead, questions like “what is money?” were repeated and layered with an emotional gravitas that felt almost condescending to the audience. The voices were accompanied by orchestration that felt remarkably noncommittal and harmonically shapeless compared with the stimulating counterpoint and lucid musical metaphors of the opening movements. Those first, exciting themes returned occasionally, but without much meaningful variation, with diminishing impact and too infrequently to salvage the deflating gesture of the chorale as some kind of vox populi. The words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edith Wharton, Frederick Douglass, and others were introduced, but with little discernible difference in texture, feeling, or historical position. I read ahead in the libretto, looking for some indication that the slumping trajectory of the work might receive some injection of energy. The piece ended, and I was eager to leave.

I exited the concert hall and went for a fish and chips down the street at a pub where I often see members of the Philharmonic dressed in concert black after performances. I wondered what their opinions of the work might be, but I didn’t ask. As a music student, I performed the piece for which David Lang was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2008, the little matchgirl passion (2007). That was an incredibly moving and memorable experience for me. Setting the tragic Hans Christian Andersen story “The Little Match Girl” to music, Lang imbued the text and its themes with the spiritual and literary gravity of the choral tradition; he wove textual and musical allusions from J. S. Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion, beautifully and inventively, into the texture of his own twenty-first-century Minimalist affect. Reflecting on these two works by Lang (and considering my polar-opposite reaction to them), I’m left wondering, more broadly, about the capabilities and limitations of music to express moral arguments. How do we musically reconcile the human capacity to connect and empathize with subjects, from Jesus of Nazareth to the Little Match Girl, or reckon with the economic abstraction of a Lumpenproletariat? My preference, at least, is to give the listener some space within which to walk toward their own humanity.

—Alec Sturgis