Uroš Kostić’s newest album of cassette loops and electronics as Overdriven Dreams, four trembles on an imagined occasion, was constructed from a live session captured in four distinct parts over the span of one day.

What is ambient music?

What is the line between ambient sound, muzak, and minimal music? Is it subjective or considered objective? Is it based on the person making it and our popular perception of them as an artist, or does it have to do with the artist’s tools?

I obviously do not have answers to these questions but these are fair questions to ask oneself when listening to ambient records. For example, how do we know we like something? Do we like it because everyone else seems to, or could we possibly be lucky enough to have a very personal experience with a sonic artwork to be able to find meaning in it that affects us?

With ambient music and sound, the absence of lyrics as well as often that of rhythm, harmony, and melody (or at least, the purposeful act of burying those elements) could make it quite hard on a listener to develop a personal connection with a work. However, the lack of those very elements could also remove all obstacles to one’s ability to impart personal meaning on a work of ambient sound.

I’m quite obsessed with the idea of music as an open-source memory bank. A tabula rasa with an invisible ink pen onto which one (anyone) could use to write the images of their life. Sound as soundtrack. Lyrics not included.

And with that perspective, ambient music is the perfect opportunity for personalized imagistic reflection. Let’s turn to overdriven dreams.

Kostić is a Serbian artist who uses sound and tones recorded to cassette and reel-to-reel tape loops, to create sonic environments that would fit the ambiance of any scene in any Andrei Tarkovsky film.

There are moments that are so bleak and empty, yet which are never without pensiveness and reflection. His pieces decay and dissolve, rotate and revolve, but never explode or disintegrate completely.

They almost exist solely to broadcast their own existence at times, to appear on behalf of a sound’s own anti-sound, negating any magnetic imbalance that might arise if one shows up and the other doesn’t. Dark and light, empty and full, how could so little signal communicate so much abstractness?

I hear some of these works as fogs.

Like passing grey clouds over empty highways, they exchange shades of grey for one another’s heat and hiss. Like the buzz of electricity but stretched out and slowed down, taffy for time, sand dunes shifting at a glacial pace on tectonic plates. A hum that spans millennia. A hush that quiets all storms.

Please check out Overdriven Dreams’ music at the link below.

Listen and purchase here, please.