Our field of vision can fit quite a lot of different elements into its projected space, but our focus actually limits what we see clearly to only a few of them. Even then, all those blurred images caught by the edge of our eyes contribute to the experience of looking at something - they add up to create a spatial whole. Things could be very similar when it comes to music: we can seemingly concentrate fully on a few lines of sound, their alternative being the whole of notes and harmonics as it fills our ears. Either way, it’s all too common to find out we need to revisit a lot of music in order to more fully enjoy it; there’s too many things we miss, too many things we want to relive, and too many things someone else says he or she hears that we will never get to hear ourselves in our own experience.

In terms of vision, this inevitable segregation of elements may be overcome, in concept, by means of the optical flow. In essence, it’s “the apparent visual motion that we experience as we move through the world”. The example given in this definition is that of looking out the window in a speeding train: things appear to move backwards, in a curved manner due to the very form and nature of our eyes. Also, the closer they are, the blurrier they get because of velocity, and the farther they are, the “slower” they move. In other words, optical flow grants us the illusion of the world moving as we move. All those distinct things out there are synthesized into a single word that represents them (world), a word that gives us the power to experience the whole even when we’re focused on one of its parts. It could be said that ambient has a very similar objective, something Motionfield has dedicated himself to explore along various releases that are directly related to visual concepts. So, does Optical Flow give us that angle at music? Yes, and no.

We’re welcomed by an “Embrace”, a sweet composition of dream-like highs and lows, a seven minute game of appearances and disappearances by multiple, very distinguishable sounds. If both light and sound move in wave form, then it could be possible to translate this piece’s sonic effects to optical terms: we perceive each sound individually, but as we try to follow that sound we find out it’s already moving away (maybe backwards, maybe to the side, maybe everywhere) and other sounds are taking its place in a perpetual motion cycle of both concrete presences and presences suggested. It is then that we perceive a whole, something out there that exceeds us and which, when it has “finished”, we can only experience in the form of the piece’s name: it evokes that whole, for an instant we invent the limits of that music and recall everything we lived in it, that music that has already moved far away from our field of hearing and has been replaced by a million other sounds.

If optical flow is relative to the position of the spectator, then we could find its parallel in the listener. Many things can affect our experience of music – headphone quality, relatives yelling around home, where we’re sitting down, what we’re looking at, what we’re feeling, what we’re remembering, and so on. As immersed as we are in that reality, regardless of how concentrated we could be on the piece we’re hearing, we find out that, in truth, all music is ambient music. All music is an eternal optical flow in which things seem to pass us by and disappear. The loudest sound appears to be closer than those in the back, and we grant them more importance, we give them the spotlight over lesser, farther sounds, but thankfully ambient music, just like the optical phenomenon, indicates there is no hierarchy in reality – it’s all in our mind, and the far things are just as important as the close things even if it is just for contrasting effects.

The experiment has been great and interesting up to this point, but Optical Flow soon becomes too repetitive, too much of a generic ambient record that stops asking us questions and starts to reiterate the same answers time and again. Soon after googling “optical flow” and making a bunch of crazy assumptions, we can see that this album lacks the power to transcend its own tranquil limits of exploration; just like experiencing the optical flow, this music speeds by and afterwards we’re unable to recollect it in a clear, static way. It becomes an image decomposed by its own movement, something we remember losing but which we can’t exactly recall what it is. After a strong initial impact, all that is left is… sound, in the same manner optical flow is, in the end, light bouncing off different surfaces. The artist intervenes too few times, leaving the listener to his or her luck with the album, practically adrift and floating freely. In this regard, this is a perfect ambience record, but at the same time it might be just better to get an ambience experience directly from founders like Eno and other really interesting artists out there like Sawako and Daisuke Miyatani. After all, optical flow, to be relevant, needs to have some sort of meaning in our lives, be it our reasoning, our sensibility, or our curiosity, and sadly, in this respect, there is something lacking in Optical Flow.

-David Murrieta