ZoneOut is the home of music without boundaries – ambient, progressive, contemporary. We are curators of musical counter-culture – sharing stories, providing context and connection. We invite you to experience a world of atmospheric, immersive, mind-expanding sound.

Subscribe to the ZoneOut Newsletter

Follow us on Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

Find us on Spotify | Apple Music

AMBIENT

“Ambient” describes the mysterious ability of music to occupy, or even become, the air around us. it describes a sense of timelessness, or no-time. Music can surround us and create an atmosphere of sound – an environment into which we can enter, and have our consciousness altered by doing so.

PROGRESSIVE

“Progressive” – something that is moving forward, happening now, innovating. It also applies to the political – to take a progressive stance is to have hope that the future is promising, exciting, and hopeful. To desire progress is to have a mind that is open to new experiences.

However, progress is not limited to the new – sometimes one makes progress through retrieval: of tradition, the archaic, the ancient, the indigenous.

CONTEMPORARY

In John Cage’s 1952 composition 4’33” (a work in which performers are instructed not to play their instruments for 4 minutes and 33 seconds) the audience is challenged to consider the environmental sounds occurring around them as art. It is a work of complete disorder, and utter simplicity.

4’33” provides a signpost in identifying a transition point in music – the beginning of an era in which the extremities of complexity (order) and silence (lack of order) can be fully explored by artists.

However, to think of music as an artform that moves through defined historical periods is to take an inherently Western-centric perspective. The music of indigenous peoples from across the globe is often both ambient and progressive. And by virtue of not belonging to the Western historical narrative – eternally contemporary.

Image by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash.