If you can’t get enough cortisol-lowering ambient music these days (🙋‍♀️), boy, do I have a track for you. In this cover of Bon Iver by a guy who’s even chiller than Bon Iver, Leif Vollebekk takes a digital sea of autotune and plunges it into an oasis of Nordic snow, muting the vocals and letting the instruments echo across the frigid expanse. Jump in yourself.
At a time when pre-existing wealth seems to be the key to home ownership, it’s easy to wonder, what if you did just buy a $10,000 fall-downer in rural Maine, you know? That’s question that’s led the Cheap Old Houses instagram account to the top of our feeds— and now to an HGTV show.
The account’s owners, Ethan and Elizabeth Finkelstein, will host the show, touring two houses per episode in a runoff for a spot on their instagram. I’m not sure the show needed a plot to be appealing— just tour us around crumbling rural Victorians and we’ll all wet our pants. In any case, if this contract tells us anything, it’s that the Finkelsteins probably now have enough to buy an expensive new house if they choose. The irony.
So that glib thing I just said about touring ambiently through houses on TV? That’s now a genre. In the New Yorker, Kyle Chayka just coined the term “ambient TV,” a category you’ve already met in the likes of “Emily in Paris,” “Dream Home Makeover,” and “Taco Chronicles,” all from the data-optimized fortress at Netflix. These are shows light on plot and heavy on B-roll, asking the minimum of your brain.
The muzakification of shows is quite the development in the wake of the “golden age” of television, Chayka says. “The earlier era of prestige TV was predicated on shows with meta-narratives to be puzzled out, and which merited deep analyses read the day after watching… we’re moving into the ambient era, which succumbs to, rather than competes with, your phone.” This should probably make you sad. What will make you sadder is Netflix’s assumptions about what is pacifying: from interior design to casting, the predominant comfort element in these shows is the color white.
On that note, if you’re tired of white noise, take a look at Better To Speak, a digital media platform that promotes storytelling as a tool for social change in the Black community. They just released a zine on Black civic engagement in 2020 called Your Silence Will Not Protect You. They’re seeking donations to produce physical copies of the zine— chip in here.
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