Can you feel it? It seems like we’re getting there. Not quite Spring but really not winter anymore. This is the time of the year where we’re in between seasons. This is the time of the year when Simon Stockhausen’s Floating Free makes the most sense to share. Hovering around the meditative, rhythmic minimalism of early Mark Isham records, Floating Free sounds like a fantastically airy soundtrack to slowly greening horizons — much like the gently, evoking soft pastels of its album cover.
Found on Uwe Buschkötter’s UBM Records, one would think it hovers around the same territory of bloodless muzak cum smooth jazz found in the rest of its German discography. However, Simon was no nameless hack. Together with half-brother Markus, they’d already put the iconic Stockhausen name (of Karlheinz fame) on a fascinating track, releasing mercurial records as a nascent Aparis (together with Jo Thönes) on ECM. Headier music would then arrive in forms of compositional pieces for orchestras and instrumental ensembles or in situational music design for collective spaces.
A wiz sax and sound designer/synthesizer player, Simon would normally be found composing or contributing to contemporary music works. When he ventured into jazz and ambient music it was from an angle of already knowing inside out how to generate sounds that were learned from various precocious years exploring sound itself (through synths and experimental work). Far from being utterly devoted to any school of music or to pristine, pretentious music, in all his work he injected a great deal of that very slippery essence: “emotion”.
So, when he was afforded a chance to debut a complete vision, solely himself, this one spoke of vast/other influences he could tie together. That’s what is surprising about Floating Free.
The first thing that greets you when you turn on the album is a plaintive acoustic guitar. Rather than bombard you with a synth fiesta, Simon eases you into a meditative album that shows its experimentation within its ornamentation. Perhaps some fretless bass here, a floating tonal percussion there. Then, when you’re lulled into a stasis the magic carpet eases you into really leftfield, dreamlike places. Balearic ideas inform granular, unplaceable samples, and it’s a fantastic layering of miniatures from disparate styles into a genre-free groove. Listen a few seconds and you instantly get into the mood. This is chill music that doesn’t wan’t you to complete turn off the left side of the brain.
There were traces of this fourth world-esque sound on his work with Markus on KölnMusik Fantasy but in an ensemble they’d get lost to the group’s higher, macro idea of improvisation. Using what sounds like wavetable based synths and sequencers, here, Simon creates funky things like “Snail Groove” that would sound like that gorgeous jazz music you imagined hearing on the Weather Channel when you had a dream that one time.
Songs like “Approaching Mars” with its unplaceable environmental tones find you in that weirdly unexplored early ‘90s world when ambient, new age, and other minimal musics felt they had no audience to play to and create music for (seemingly) itself. It’s what gives songs like “Feeling Home” or “One World” with all overtly experimental touches high amounts of emotional heft. As Simon was given the task of creating modern library music, he took off on a tangent and resolved to dig into his own experience. Steeped in a nostalgic mood, Floating Free hovers between light and dark moods quite effortlessly — sometimes in a whole song — earning its track lengths perfectly.
In this decidedly unsure times, it seems fifty or so minutes of this is a good respite from the delicate nature of whatever we’re going through.