Ambient is no longer the province of purely theoretical sound experiments by the likes of Edgard Varèse or John Cage. In recent years pop musicians have been more willing to crossover into the wide open spaces of sound without strictures. Not only that, but they package the music for mass consumption – and, wonder of wonders, they expect to move units. Who could’ve imagined that Claire Rousay would be a Bandcamp darling? Let’s namecheck Brian Eno for bringing this type of music to the pop mainstream, though the true center of the music movement is everywhere and nowhere all at once. Part of the beauty of the genre, such as it is, is that the rules are unwritten.

Iceblink enters the fray with their superlative LP Carpet Cocoon at a time when the listening audience is more ready than ever to entertain the marriage of ambient and pop.

In ten songs, Lynn Avery explores the emotional and psychological interior of this fateful union. What is most exciting about her exploration is neither the pop stylings, nor the ambient meanderings, but rather the plucky little offspring that is produced by the pair.

With an ear for textures in jazz, rock, electro, and pop, Avery creates what she calls her “comfort album,” the aural counterpart to a snug sweater and hot cup of tea on a brisk afternoon.

While most ambient albums are built like a house without walls, Iceblink lends Carpet Cocoon structure throughout with a singular, recherché brand of picked guitar. “Healer” comes on like a medieval lay. A delicate progression presents a motif that Art Garfunkel would appreciate. You feel transported to a distant past, though the song is no period piece. When the saxophone kicks in with its slow, mournful notes, you realize you’re in the present day. The slow tempo of the composition gives you plenty of time to readjust your bearings. Nothing on this album is pushy, or hurried, or harried. The mood is meditative and unrushed.

You’ll enjoy taking your time on this track and others like it, including “August Von Koenig” and “Dialoghi”. On the latter, the saxophone takes front seat while an odd, intriguing guitar picks patterns in back. The space between the instruments is occasionally pierced by notes from a synth that sounds like their being fed through the lower intestine of a Martian.

“Cellphone In The Bath” mines a more electro-ambient vein. The song interweaves slow and serene synth motifs in a gauzy, gurgling stew of sounds. A light echo filter on some or all of the tracks tricks the ear into thinking it’s inside the hard-tiled interior of a real bathroom. Iceblink records the song as if it’s soaking in the tub. Only the singing saxophone at the tail end of the track lifts the gauzy veil to show a little leg.

“Mother 4” showcases as an electronic jam that cradles the ear and rocks you to sleep. Shades of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works, Vol. II – but shorter, sweeter, and softer on your pineal gland. Other forays into electronica, like “Microsong”, feel more programmatic. “Microsong” is not so micro, with a running length that’s longer than average for the album. But if it deserves its name, you can credit it to the use of a small synth trope that builds up into Reichian, or Glassian, spheres with the inspired chaos of fractal design. A few sonorous moonbeams injected into upper registers of the song give it a bit more body. But the atomic structure of the piece is solely determined by the little trope that started it all.

Iceblink ventures into the borderlands between jazz minimalism, noise, and ambient on “Vocoder Upright”. The song subtly flirts with form, giving not much more than a wink from across the bar. The sound is wide-open and motored at the margins. A stray whistle, a reedy squawk, an occasional pick of a string.  Shades of ZRL. Iceblink navigates the negative space deftly, uses the throwaway sounds of the genre, creating an air of anticipation (like an orchestra warming up before the conductor raises the baton). Except what we expect to arrive is already here – this is the song.  

The same could be said about the entire album: Carpet Cocoon is here, this is the album. A pleasant voyage that exercises a subtle brilliance incorporating forward thinking music concepts into an agreeable cocktail of sound. A time will come when the icecube of “ambient” will melt into the rest of the drink for pop music at large. We’ll all be less self-conscious of deploying “ambient” as a music-making strategy because, in truth, it’s not a formula on its own but rather a more general philosophy of sound. But for now we have Iceblink, and other fine progenitors of the hybrid style, who remind us how far we’ve come and compel us to push forward.