A few nights ago I biked the Springwater Corridor at dusk as kids were scrambling into an abandoned industrial site on the waterfront. I slowed, hearing an unmistakable hiss. Someone’s hand lit up, holding a brown orb at the end of the fuse. Out of sight, a femme laughed a little, before urging the ignitor to throw it. But they held on a second longer. Two more seconds, and the laughs turned to pleading—"Throw it!" They held on longer. Silence, except for the hissing fuse. Then, hardly twenty feet above, an explosion—purple and red and yellow all on fire. The sparks flew up in chaotic twinkle as a news helicopter zipped by, narrowly missing the oncoming attack. The helicopter didn’t stop. The last I heard were the kids laughing, “That was close!”
A bad decision that could have turned to terror in so many ways. A near miss, but a miss nonetheless. How close they were to actual disaster is unknowable, just that it was close. Like when a car door opens into the bike lane and you manage to swerve just in time—multiple feelings rushing in at once as you just continue on, a pure mood.
In one ear I listened to “Little Fluffy Clouds” by the Orb, perhaps the perfect song to bike to, and the inspiration for Bike Summer's August 14 Pure Moods ride. The track, with its layered house melody, and whimsical sample of Rickie Lee Jones remembering summer sunsets in Arizona, there is undoubtedly a particular mood in that moment.
The 1994 mail-order compilation album Pure Moods, is an eclectic collection of new-age, ambient, and trip hop music often referred to as “World Music.” The compilation came as a provocative late night commercial that defined a 1990s slacker moment. Sitting alone, stoned in TV hypnosis leving many in awe of the esoteric, “straight from Europe" sound, while a disembodied voice asks the onlooker to, “Imagine a world where time drifts slowly.” And slowly drift it does, between the windswept synth riff in “Oxygene” by Jean-Michel Jarre, the dreamy one woman choir of Enya’s “Orinoco Flow,” to the iconic keyboard melody of "Tubular Bells” by Mike Oldfield, featured in The Exorcist (1973). Hell, I first came to this genre of music, stoned out of my mind in my freshman dorm when my drug dealer roommate wanted to “show me his speakers,” playing “Sweet Lullaby” by French new-age duo Deep Forest. I thought it was pretty cool.
Brian Eno, whose song “Another Green World” is featured on Pure Moods, coined the term “ambient” for the new genre of background music in the liner notes of his 1978 album Ambient 1: Music for Airports. Ambient music is in contrast to muzak (or elevator music)—a genre Eno believes to flatten environments by removing feelings of uncertainty and doubt. Whereas, “Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and a space to think,” Eno writes. “It must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”
Like Ambient music broadly, Pure Moods creates an atmosphere for life’s cinematic moments. There are obvious nods to the world of soundtracks on the compilation: Angelo Badalamenti’s Pacific Northwest instrumental classic “Twin Peaks Theme,” two tracks by the legendary film score composer Ennio Morricone, and “Chariots of Fire,” which became a stand in for the overwrought slow-motion montage (and apparently the first Apple Macintosh computer).
The artists featured on Pure Moods had largely set the tone for cinema and television in the second half of the 20th century. Which makes sense, it’s music that’s immediately upfront as a commercial product. Whether it’s songs were commissioned by film studios, duty-free malls, or advertisers for the 1996 Summer Olympics, this music immediately entered the commercial realm.
At the time of release, the compilation’s most famous song—between its use in a slew of film and television, as the centerpiece of the Olympics ad campaign, and the first song featured in the Pure Moods commercial—was perhaps “Return to Innocence” by German electro-pop group Enigma. The track typifies the complicated ethical questions of sampling and commercialization in so-called “World Music,” possibly bordering on a new cultural avenue for European colonization. The chorus features beautiful throat singing by Difang & Igay (Kuo Ying-Nan and Kuo Hsin-Chu) in the Ames folk tradition of Taiwan.
Was it bringing indigenous folk music to new audiences, or were Europeans taking their voices and selling it to new markets? Difang & Igay originally went uncredited until a 1998 out of court settlement with Virgin Records. This certainly seems different from British DJ duo the Orb’s unauthorized sample of a multi-Grammy winning American singer being interviewed, however Jones also settled out of court with the Orb’s label.
This isn’t to say Pure Moods cannot be enjoyed, in fact these moods sort of just happen. They erupt upon us in moments that feel realer than real life. When the world seems to only be happening around us. We’re not able to truly act, only think and observe. Maybe it’s something truly dangerous—a car door that will send us over the handlebars and through the driver side window, a firework exploding in a teen’s hand as all their friends watch the horror of flesh and bone.
Yet we remain calm, comforted. Somehow knowing that nothing bad is actually going to happen, because there’s someone out there designing the atmosphere we inhabit. Life isn’t actually a movie, but sometimes you remember it feeling like one. Or at least like a television advertisement.
The Pure Moods ride presented by BiciBuds and Ride Safe PDX is on August 14. The ride meets 7 pm at Irving Park, rolling out at 7:30 pm with a slow, “no-drop” pace for 7-8 miles.
