Music From Memory: Gaussian Curve's Clouds

A personal look back at an ambient classic released 10 years ago

I’m sitting on the rooftop of an Amsterdam townhouse. My friend, a lawyer whom I’d met back in my Hamburg days, is lighting one up. We haven’t seen each other in a while, now we’re overlooking the canal on a late summer morning, listening to music on a small Bluetooth speaker.

There are gentle Rhodes chords and airy synth pads, woozy electric guitar and smooth acoustic instrumentation, with some earthy programmed drums underneath.

Is this ambient? New age? Downtempo? It sounds vaguely Balearic, no? A slight Fourth World influence, maybe?

Clouds is the debut album of the trio Gaussian Curve, consisting of Scottish dreampop guitarist Jonny Nash, Italian ambient musician Gigi Masin, and Dutch outsider house producer “Young” Marco Sterk.

Gaussian Curve, from their Bandcamp page

The trio first convened in November 2013 for a short session at Sterk’s studio in Amsterdam’s red light district. The connecting tissue between the artists from different generations, who didn’t really know each other, were Tako Reyenga and Jamie Tiller, co-founders of the Music From Memory label.

The chemistry in the studio felt vibrant. Encouraged by positive feedback from the label managers, they met again for a weekend of two days in spring 2014, with the plan to record an album.

It was unexpectedly warm for that time of the year. City life bled into the music through open studio windows, while the trio jammed all through the night, churning out eight improvised chill-out jams, each recorded live in one take. They would turn into a modern ambient classic.

While the whole album feels coherent front to back, the clear standouts are “Impossible Island”, “Ride” and “Broken Clouds”, the latter a rework of Masin’s 1980s tune “Clouds”, which had already been remixed by Berlin post-rockers To Rococo Rot for their song “Die Dinge des Lebens” (1999), and sampled by Björk and Nujabes.

A few months after Clouds was released, I traveled to Amsterdam with my friend. We’d rented this gorgeous townhouse to visit a music festival with another friend, who had to pull out at the last minute due to job obligations.

We’d spend the mornings on the rooftop terrace before cycling to the festival site, listening to nothing but Clouds and German cloud rap.

This might sound chill, but these weren’t happy-go-lucky times. Just some months before, my first marriage had imploded. Neither of us had been happy in that relationship for a while, but neither had mustered up the courage to end it. When she moved out in December, we gave each other three months to contemplate whether “we” still had a future. In March we met again, talked and cried, and then parted ways for good.

In the months after, I often felt this strange combination of sadness and relief. I just wanted to laugh and cry at the same time, and I had no words for these emotions, but Clouds captured them perfectly. The music seemed to reflect that ambiguity – a melancholic longing for past times and, at the same time, a vague but exciting hope for a better future.

In Amsterdam I kept texting with a woman I’d met shortly before. I was impressed by her light approach to life. She was a nightfly, always on the go. I first went out with her while she was working in Berlin, and we kept meeting in random cities: Cologne, Frankfurt, Paris. I’d hoped she’d come to Amsterdam too, but for some reason she couldn’t make it.

At the festival, we ran into some friends from Berlin. One of them posted a photo on Instagram that I recently stumbled across on my computer, showing a bunch of us lounging on the huge seafront stairs leading up to Nemo Science Museum, all wearing sunglasses. It has a black-and-white filter on it, and it truly feels like it’s from a long bygone era.

Clouds will forever be connected to that time, but it also kickstarted my journey into experimental ambient. The album made me look into Gigi Masin’s 1980s records, which were re-released by Music From Memory. I found that their catalogue includes reissues of amazing records by Vito Ricci, Suso Saiz, Joan Biblioni, Roberto Musci, G.B. Beckers and Kuniyuki Takahashi. This wormhole kept me busy for months.

Gaussian Curve released a follow-up in 2017. The Distance is an enjoyable record, and I listened to it a few times when it came out. But the tunes are not quite as memorable, and they just didn’t connect with me as deeply on an emotional level. My life had also moved on by that time.

After Amsterdam, I’d had a few intense weeks with that woman mentioned earlier. Towards the end of summer, we were sitting on a bench in the afternoon sun, when I asked her where she saw this relationship heading. My seriousness caught her by surprise, and it only then dawned on me that ours was just one of several loose affairs she held with men and women in various cities. We’d eventually fade out of each other’s view, and very soon I’d meet my second wife, the woman of my life.

Clouds still conjures that lingering promise of those summer months a decade ago. For me, this music will forever be connected to that in-limbo state, that time between uncertainty and freedom, sadness and joy, treasuring good memories but also letting go, throwing off baggage and moving on.