"I worry that the person who thought up Muzak might be thinking up something else."

- Lily Tomlin

Are we, as David Byrne suggested, on a road to nowhere? Perhaps.

Vin Downes and I have been sending our new album into the electronic world of streaming culture and the results are fascinating. Playlist curators respond with such interesting comments, almost all positive about the music itself, but the general theme is that every playlist is a specific, unchanging mood that the curator doesn't wish to alter by introducing something new.

Streaming itself isn't to blame here, of course. It's been common for years for people to seek playlists to provide a continuous experience for functional use: yoga, studying, and sleep being very common in the ambient/new age world. Faceless, artist-less sound. And that's fine for what it is, if the sound provides a benefit I'm all for it.

And I also understand why a playlist curator would want to preserve the zone they've curated. That makes perfect sense when we look at the functional reasons people go to those playlists.

But what happens when curious music listeners want to hear something new? Something that sits outside those narrow lanes?

When terrestrial radio was the way we heard new music it came down to the music director and dj to curate the experience. Love them or hate them (Morrissey was occasionally not a fan), the dj was the funnel through which new music flowed, and their experience and taste (and maybe a little bit of something on the side) was what got new music on the airwaves and coming out of your dashboard.

There are still great curators in my little niche... programs like Echoes and Hearts of Space play new music alongside genre classics. If you tune in you're sure to hear something you haven't heard before that you'll probably like. I'd love to find playlist curators that share the same curiosity, deep knowledge, and generosity that the best radio djs have. I fear that's simply not what streaming was built to support.

Pandora internet radio started with its "music genome" project in which they analyzed multiple elements of the music you were listening to and then suggested music that was related by tempo, or key, or instruments. It seemed the intention was to introduce you to other artists and music you might like, rather than keep you blindly in the same small sonic spot. But when we combine the nearly infinite number of tracks on streaming with that sort of personalized (but inherently "dumb") design, is the eventual destination just variations on the same song played over and over again?

When we made "Until the Light Was Gone" Vin and I made something that defies easy categorization. It's definitely ambient, except where it isn't. It grooves, it floats, it's deliberately melodic. It's urban and spare, and it lingers in shadows. It's structured like a pop record from the 80s, with an album arc that ties each song together into a longer narrative. As the album took shape we kept saying to each other "I've never heard anything like this," which excited us both. It's NEW music. Human music. Music that neither of us could have made on our own.

And now we just have to get it to curious ears and I'm looking at that long, unchanging road and wondering...