uncommon ambience

Billerica, Massachusetts Hotel PTAC ambience. Enjoy hours of gushing hot air on a cold winter night in your Boston-area hotel room. The TV is off, so no local TV news to slog through. I used to watch local news in this area. Mostly the NBC station, back in the aughts. Their promotions featured station characters referring to themselves as “the neeeews station.”I also worked nearly two decades in local news. Take it from me: you could give up commercial local TV entirely and not miss a beat.Aside from what you think of Ralph Nader from a political perspective, he had the commercial news industry dead to rights in the summer of 2000: “Look at your late-evening news… It's 30 minutes. Nine minutes of ads; three minutes of street crime right at the beginning, never corporate crime, very superficially covered; one minute of impromptu chit-chat between the anchors; four minutes of weather; four minutes of sports — and that's what happens in your town tonight.”Nader didn’t mention that our weather studios were named after local florists, and sports were “powered” by local Toyota dealerships.At one job, a befuddled new anchor approached me in the hall.“Do you know where the ‘Terrorism Desk is?”“Oh, for sure,” I said. “You want the lobby.”The lobby had an open window to the station’s master control setup, flashing with over thirty monitors showing color bars, live cams, satellite feeds, and other inputs (looks impressive). And that camera station had other monikers: the “Breaking News Desk,” “Hurricane Whomever Desk,” and “We Have a New Baseball Team in Town Desk.”Still just the lobby.Nader also didn’t mention sweeps week, the designated ratings period when stations try to attract the largest possible audience. Viewership is collected from a small sample of homes with Nielsen boxes — sometimes just hundreds — that determine a region’s TV habits. Sweeps weeks set advertising rates, deciding how much a law firm or Buffalo Wild Wings has to pay to appear in a commercial break.Sweeps week is also a time of intrigue, danger, and sensationalized threats — online predators, out-of-control crime, spikes of spammers. I’m not being facetious: in Albany, I saw a promo claiming drinking water could be dangerous (the water is piped in from the Helderbergs, some of the cleanest water a small city could hope to access — you could eat off the floor in the Helderbergs).Sweeps week is also when favorite network TV characters die. J.R. was shot during sweeps. Brad Pitt showed up on Friends during sweeps.At one station, a producer said, “If Oprah has a Dancing with the Palins…” we’d beat our rival in the 5pm slot. It was the last day of sweeps, Oprah had Bristol and Sarah Palin gab it up on her program. We did hit #1 for the 11 that sweeps period due to the Bristol Palin-led Dancing with the Stars. Sweeps also judge station performance. If you watch local television and see a “We’re #1 in something” ad, that’s what that is all about. Those ads are specifically for station management, no one else gives a ****.Speaking of — once, walking into a station bathroom, I heard a toilet flush, and a colleague walks out of the stall holding his bag of Chipotle. These are folks you could stand to listen to less, is all I’m saying.Postscript-ish story: when I worked for a station that shared a newsroom with Politico.One morning, I’m walking into my department through the Politico sales area, gabbing with an awesome lady I worked with. Because I’m a stupid klutz, my hand bangs the side of a desk and dislodges my lunch. Which was soup in a Tupperware bowl. And it didn't just spill — it exploded. Clam fragments and sad potatoes amongst a red ooze splashed and soaked into the carpet (which, I’m not embellishing here, was new and cream-colored).I don’t know what smells pleasing to you at 8:57 AM — I’m positive it isn’t canned Manhattan Clam Chowder hit with 27 spluts of Tabasco.Awesome lady grabs my elbow and is like, “Go, go, go, go.”

A tambouras is running through the river… ambience. I don’t have much this week. The magic of the holiday passed pretty quickly as the news kicked back on with the new thing to worry about. Only they don’t seem too worried about it, which really worries me.Honestly, just turn off the TV. **** them. Listen to this week’s episode, which is an earlier recording of Vermont’s Mad River and a buzzing tambouras (and a distant drum). Ignore the world.Or turn on a semi-autobiographical film about two brothers in Montana who like to fly-fish the crap out of a river with their dad while speaking earnestly, often. The movie A River Runs Through It is the inspiration for this week’s title (and more, if I fished around for a deep, dangling metaphor or something).I saw the film when I was 16 and would have preferred to be next door for the screening of Under Siege. I could just make out the muffled screams of slaughtered bad guys booming from the speakers in the auditorium to my right. I agreed to A River Runs Through It because my sister was bringing a friend I thought was cute.

We’re ending the year in a wonderfully bleak Vermont valley, already covered in snow and taking on more. Spend the night listening as the small flakes pile up around you and the winds howl over the peaks.The holidays are gone, we flip the calendar back to the beginning with a new number to reign over it all. January, 2026. Ensconced in winter’s tomb until mid-April. But it sure looks pretty. The slight nighttime glow of Vermont’s small giants, the Green Mountains, covered in white, can make even the dullest early months feel magical. Just don’t forget to silence your phone — while we may be near South Royalton and far enough from everywhere else — the 5G will still bring in the incessant pocket buzzing of your phone (This is Vermont not the Oort cloud. You can get NYE messaging here).Look, I’m pretty sure many of the other New Year’s–adjacent uncommon ambience posts are painted with personal feelings about my least favorite holiday. I’m not here to rain on anyone’s ball droppings — I’ve done that enough already. This is the day we celebrate “new beginnings” while our health care costs reset, local governments enact unpopular new rules, and we stand in front of couches or bar stools toasting “my year!”And all night, messages and group chat alerts from all the people in our lives.The cinephile friends continuing their NYE phone-buzzing group chat that you somehow got added to. Tonight they started a movie together at an exact time so the Statue of Liberty smashes the roof of the Manhattan Museum of Art at exactly midnight.And you know damn well why you were added to that group — it was that movie take you absentmindedly assented that got you added to that group chat. Something about Rachel Dawes being swapped with Ellie Burr without changing either movie. It was a crowded party. A buddy was dangling on a trembling limb of being labeled “weird,” and so you swooped in with a reflexive “totally agree.”Now you’re in a movie-people chat. Tonight they’re watching Ghostbusters II, randomly dealing out their dark-horse New Year’s movies, when — guys — you won. We’ve ceded Die Hard to Christmas. We don’t need to do that with every holiday.There will be folks accounting for an earlier wave of pocket buzzing — the folks who don’t salute any dropping ball and want that known. Sending out all flavors of “in bed at 8 p.m., ttyl!”Also, the post-midnight flurry of photos: sleeping children. They almost made it! Oh, how wholesome. You knew Anderson Cooper and platform-specific lip-synching wasn’t going to keep your kids awake.The counter-culture folks still picking up Animal Crossing New Leaf for their long abandoned town’s celebration — And… I’m mocking NYE again — probably for the third year in a row.Maybe spend a quiet evening amongst the snow of Southern Vermont. It’ll work great at counteracting whatever fireworks your neighbor saved from the 4th of July and is definitely setting off tonight. Nighttime winter Southern Vermont snow. Wind over the Green Mountains, falling snow, and quiet rural winter sounds. An ambient sound podcast episode for sleep, focus, and relaxation (trying some SEO suggestions from a pal as I typically use this entire text block to rant — I wouldn’t need to do this if y’all felt like subscribing to uncommon ambience).Make it your New Year’s resolution to subscribe to the scrappy little sound podcast that only wants success for you in the new year — unless you’re evil.Episode art made in photoshop.

White Castle steam-griddle station... ambience. The perspective of this week’s episode is near the burger steaming station (if you’re curious how that operation goes, let Double Dare’s Marc Summers walk you through it). And not to worry — you can sleep at this steaming station; no one is worried about what you’re doing.And BTW, this isn’t sanctioned or intended to be an ad. I’m just a fan and would love to imagine myself within arm’s length of those steamy sliders. I have a bit of a White Castle problem: I have the White Castle Pumas, I’m usually a sack of ten and a Cherry Coke (no fries) — if I were hungry enough to add fries at any other fast-food spot, I’m spending that hunger on another sack of ten.And as a programming note: if the White Castle Corporation sends me a cease-and-desist, this description will instead be geared toward the oddly shaped meatloaf burgers my father would make, stuffed with Bac-Os, mushrooms, breadcrumbs, and onions. The patties were so oddly shaped, if they were in orbit they would be confused with Saturn's moon, Hyperion.One of the most notorious of these family “burger nights” ended with us watching a VHS of my mother at work in the cath lab. Had to wait until the end because she said something funny. Aside from the occasional flying streams of blood, it was hella boring. So watch this space!Until then — we are boosting the Castle for free. And I have to think that the oft-trod subject of “Where the hell are they?” adds to their nostalgic appeal — at least for those of us who know there are a bunch in New Jersey, but we’re not quite sure where. I swear the White Castles of New Jersey operate in the Doctor Who universe. White Castles only ever appear like, “Surprise *****! I’m in Ledgewood now!” And then maybe it’s not there next time because… TARDIS perception filter.And I haven’t seen the Dude, Where’s My White Castle? movie, so I could just be describing the plot of that. It’s a thread that runs through all of us. No matter where we as a species go — like, we could be going into space — we still somehow need to drive through New Jersey first (and hopefully near a food exit with a Castle logo).I was on a road trip with a buddy in ’09, and White Castle was the “food exit” around Perth Amboy. I nudged him: “White Castle, man — let’s go.”“Nah, man,” he said. “There’ll be one up there. Don’t worry.” My buddy never liked leaving the highways in NJ for local roads. I suspected the lack of legal left turns spited him somehow.But I countered with a pre-I-told-you-so — like, “If you see a White Castle, even if you’re not hungry, you go. It doesn’t matter how New Jersey you think your destination in New Jersey is — you can’t count on White Castle being there.”Parsippany burned us, and we ate Burger King or some ****.

Tonight we have a Christmas-themed triple feature of public-domain movies as heard from the projection booth: The Star of Bethlehem (1950), Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1948), and Scrooge (1935).We’ll also be running trailers from three really bad Christmas movies: Die Hard 2, Santa Conquers the Martians, and Santa Claus (1985). Plus one trailer for a really good Christmas movie, Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas. Rounding things out will be favorite 1980s-ish Christmas commercials and other vintage theater messaging (and a random appliance warehouse ad bc I want it stuck in everyone else's head too).So — The Star of Bethlehem was the only work I was familiar with before beginning this week’s episode. It’s inclusion is a shout-out to my late father, for his insistence that we make it to the midnight service to hear this story told again and again and again. Miss you, Dad.Religiosity aside, it’s an astonishingly beautiful work. I have a computer, and I couldn’t dream of producing something this wonderful. If you gave me a time machine to the 1950s, my MacBook, and pitted me against the creative team of Lotte Reiniger and Carl Koch, I would lose every time.Reiniger created articulated paper figures from spare cardboard and other materials, and the team animated them on glass over painted backgrounds. (Preservationists studying her paper figures believe they can tell what she was eating during production, based on what material ended up in the dolls.) One of their rigs also looked like the best bunk bed ever — photo on wiki. Honestly, give me a time machine just so I can hang out with this crew, they seem cool.Rudolph (1948) feels lower-budget by comparison. This is not Rankin/Bass Rudolph, man. It’s based on Robert L. May’s 1939 story, not the song. And to steal an internet meme: this is Zack Snyder Rudolph. Hard times — you can feel them oozing out of that steely, cold color palette. Which makes sense: World War II had just ended when production began.Going further back in time brings us to our feature film Scrooge (1935). The acting is solid and includes an Ebenezer expert (Seymour Hicks) as the lead. Variety, literally said Hicks could play Ebenezer upside down in its December 11, 1935 issue. And that Hicks played Scrooge for more than a quarter century both onstage and in two films including a silent Scrooge in 1913.As for trailers:Die Hard 2 — which is just Die Hard with the melodrama turned all the way up and relocated to an airport. Also, I’m positive the airplane-eject scene for John McClane was later pilfered by the GoldenEye folks… and it’s nowhere near as cool.Santa Conquers the Martians, which I briefly toyed with making the feature; is awful.And Santa Claus (1985)... Last year my family stumbled onto a smart tv Christmas-movie list, and I saw Santa ’85 and said, “Hon, I have a movie that will blow your ****** mind. It’s like Superman meets Kris Kringle and is still earnest. Everyone is acting out of their brains. It’s like Shakespeare. Like if Frank Miller did Shakespeare doing Superman.”And then I hit play like I was firing a heat-seeking photon torpedo at General Chang.Three minutes later, we’re watching Santa drown in snow. A few minutes after that: bizarre McDonald’s product placement. A scene of people merrily eating Quarter Pounders while, through the window, an unhoused and hungry child stares lustfully at the food consumption. His face framed by the Golden Arches.The movie is bad. But awesome bad. See it for John Lithgow, as an evil toymaker who excels at selling extremely dangerous **** to children. And Dudley Moore is a charming mutinous elf that tries to outdo Santa by creating candy canes that make children float. Definitely see it.And happy holidays, y'all.PS: If you’re looking for an uncommon ambience episode with a more modern Scrooge, check out last year's ⁠The Night the Reindeer Died⁠: Christmas Workshop Ambience. "Yule love it."