About

Ampient is a collective of musicians based in Knoxville, Tennessee, with a singular goal of creating never-before-heard sounds with every performance.

Every Ampient performance is a conversation between two ore more musicians. Sometimes it’s the first conversation they’ve ever had together. 

Ampient’s participating artists come from diverse backgrounds, from punk rock to folk to techno and everywhere in between. While most of the improvisational performances are guitar-based, it isn’t uncommon to hear sounds emanating from laptops, homemade and circuit-bent electronics, or classical stringed instruments.

The artists that make up Ampient have all made their share of experimental sounds. Alongside the more traditional songcraft that most of these artists have spent years developing, many of their more ambitious experiments seem to have fallen through the cracks. Not because they were failures, but because of their unorthodoxy or lack of commerciality or maybe they just didn’t fit anywhere else. They never had a home. Until now.

Despite their apparent cast-off nature, these experimental sounds are oftentimes more indicative of the artists than the carefully crafted work one might hear on their other published works. Less manipulated. More direct. Less calculated. More spontaneous. Less contained. More expansive.

In having this conversation, we have discovered that there is a hidden wellspring of inspiration and creativity in this little southern college town. Not only is there an incredibly diverse core of musical talent here, but several of its leading lights are active in their search for uncharted sonic territory. Ampient will be a home and breeding ground for experimental sounds. Ampient will serve to sponsor more converstation about experimental music and its manufacture.