“As ignorable as it is interesting.” That’s the classic definition of ambient music, stated by Brian Eno in 1978 on the sleeve notes to his album Ambient 1: Music for Airports. And he should know, since he basically invented the genre three years earlier with his album Discreet Music. But while Eno’s definition of ambient has been cited continuously in the decades since, the sphere of music he first defined has broadened, especially if you judge by how that word is used by listeners. “Ambient” is now used to describe all kinds of music, from tracks you can dance to all the way to harsh noise. For our exploration of the greatest ambient albums, we polled critics for their favorites, with the suggestion that “ambient” meant, in part, music that creates an environment, something like a cloud of sound, be it soothing, sad, haunting, or ominous. We also suggested that our take on ambient music shies away from heavy rhythms and tends more toward “drifting” than “driving,” which meant de-emphasizing ambient house. And we considered the fact that not all albums in a given artist’s catalogue qualify as ambient. Taking into account our writers’ interpretation of those loose guidelines, here’s our list of the 50 best ambient albums.
But first, a word from someone whose work appears on this list.
The Nameless, Uncarved Block
I’m trying to focus on this record, Carter Thomas’ Sonoma—a mid-’80s UK pressing with a trilogy of early ’70s pieces, all done solely on Buchla and Serge equipment, all gorgeous. Deep, resonant oscillator warble, void of unnecessary motion: Exactly what I’m looking for whilst scouring the darkest recesses of this music. An unheard historical example, ahead of the curve, seldom discussed.
But I simply can’t; my phone has already buzzed twice during the opening 11-minute number; there’s another computer in the other room doing something quite taxing, adding a certain mid-range crackle of hard drive/fan noise to the air. The cover is being scanned at an archival quality; there’s a pleasing faint whirr for a few minutes, enough to wonder if it’s the record. A lamp casts a sliver of light on the wall, then slowly tapers off, fading away. My focus is elsewhere, everywhere else.
My first thought on presaging a list of canonic ambient records: “What music isn’t ambient in the 21st century?” Given the current life demands, multi-tasking has become a mono-activity, one that takes up our entire sensory field. Gone are the days where—eyes closed, headphones on—we can readily slip in and away for the side of a tape, lest an album. Listening to the average three-to-five-minute pop song with the distractions and thought processes of the world abated feels like a heroic act. That said, the appeal of ambient is ever apparent; much like a science project, when executed perfectly, the outcome yields the desired results: time becomes elastic, malleable.
One thing we can all agree on: No one agrees on the language surrounding this music. Not the musicians who make it, not the audience. “Drone”—as a nihilistic gesture, one with increasingly sinister connotations—constantly breaks away from the passivity implied, as anyone that has enjoyed/endured an in situ performance by Tony Conrad or Damion Romero can attest. I’ve always loved the term “Tafelmusik”—literally, “Table Music”—as best exemplified in G.F. Telemann’s 1733 titular suite; it’s music to accompany another activity. What a simple, unadorned term. “Minimalism” can be, and often is, maximal; witness Steve Reich’s “Music for Large Ensemble,” easily my favorite of his. Every time I hear it, certain lobes go into recess, and others experience a heightened serotonin boost that hints at the extra-sensory. There are many roads one can take into this particular sector; virtually every extant sub- and micro-genre has an ambient shadow.
My personal voyage into the world of ambient involves a series of record fairs in northern New Jersey—Montvale, then Wayne, to be precise—where I began querying the awful-smelling, suspended adolescents lurking both behind and in front of so many tables of priceless “import” compact discs and hastily labeled VHS tapes. Leaps from Satriani to Bill Frisell to Derek Bailey, Metallica to Napalm Death to Demilich, took years; the pace of things then was so glacial when compared to the immediacy of now, of broadband, of how fast your neurons can link to the next and trigger your fingers to act. Then, it was really possible to savor each step, make incremental decisions to dig deeper—to continue to fish, or to cut bait. Especially so with ambient; this is slow music, and slow change happens when confronted with it.
While I can’t pinpoint the first title that sparked my love affair with long-form music, I do remember holing up with a copy of Terry Riley’s Persian Surgery Dervishes after being repeatedly steered toward it by the well-meaning Meredith Monk disciple who effectively ran the Record Collector’s Depot in Ridgewood, NJ in the owner’s frequent absence. This was the guy who put the DNA 12” on American Clavé in my hands; I tended to trust him, even if his name escapes me now. It was only a handful of leaps from here to François Bayle’s Erosphére, and, if anything I’d discovered in my youth colored my current sensibilities, it is the “Toupie Dans Le Ciel” segment of this piece, still glorious in its asynchronous resolve—in retrospect, the atom that led to Generators and my interest in working with analogue synthesis as an escape from the rigor of computer music. When I need to turn to something to completely obliterate or amplify a feeling—a regret, an ambition—I have this recording; it gives my skin on my forehead the distinct, pleasant sensation of speed, of momentum.
I also have a semi-religious affinity for Eliane Radigue’s music; the alpha states I can reach by submitting fully to her recordings are significant, and as rewarding as can be expressed. I keep turning to her work, knowing that it’s borne of a deep commitment to Tibetan Buddhism and that so many of the young, photogenic, media-trained personalities dabbling in the more reverb-soaked corners of “modern classical”—so eager for that lucrative Apple placement—will likely bow out here in favor of greener pastures. JD Emmanuel & Joanna Brouk’s excellent cassette-era work sprang from the Minimalism & New Music scenes, respectively. Sunn O))) were powerful both as a physical experience and as a bridge from metal into its members’ vanguard tastes, much in the same way figures like John Zorn and Jim O’Rourke were so crucial to me in how they openly wore their influences on their sleeves, allowing for such transparent trace-back.
Ambient is a great meeting point: not so much at the center of everything, but floating just above, in a perfect geosynchronous orbit, within reach. At its best, it casts enough shade to dampen the extraneous while causing a shift in our perceptions, enough to take us out of time and place, to wherever we need to be.
Keith Fullerton Whitman is a composer and musician living in Melbourne, Australia.
Deathprod: Morals and Dogma (2004)
Dark ambient musicians renounce the genre's heavenly hum for the infernal simmer, the play of light for the shadows. They think, “What if this turned into a horror movie?” The style has crested in recent years with the likes of Demdike Stare and the Haxan Cloak, whose wide dynamic ranges of choked, blackened drones, windy death rattles, unnerving knocks, and postmortem shrieks nod back to 1980s post-industrial dirges.
Morals and Dogma, the Norwegian musician Helge Sten’s third solo album as Deathprod, floats like a menacing bridge between then and now. Sten calls his assortment of cobbled-together, often archaic electronic devices—tape echo machines, theremins, analog ring modulators, etc.—his “audio virus,” which had already infected his past bands Motorpsycho and Supersilent before taking center stage here. Here, Sten enlists Motorpsycho’s guitarist and violinist, and together they ride through heaving stone vistas with occult intensity. Sudden outcrops of gongs break up the toxified horizon dragged out by the violin, but an eerie songfulness also keeps creeping in, especially the sublime saw centerpiece in the otherwise lightless caverns of “Dead People’s Things.” Morals and Dogma is heavy without harshness, threatening without theatrics, and it shudders inside a silence so large, it could only follow the end of the world. –Brian Howe
Listen: Deathprod: “Dead People’s Things”
Bing & Ruth: Tomorrow Was the Golden Age (2014)
The pianist David Moore borrowed the name of his minimalist ensemble from “Daylight Come,” a two-page story by the writer Amy Hempel. In it, a newly married widow and widower, Bing and Ruth, go on a tropical vacation, frolicking with an exaggerated romantic energy that almost masks their deeper melancholy. It’s a densely textured, emotional story, sculpted from unvarnished words. Moore has said he took the name partially because he was inspired to write music with the same impressionistic qualities; in his group's second album, Tomorrow Was the Golden Age, they craft a suite of nine movements dense with equally mutable moments.
The sounds of Tomorrow Was the Golden Age are unfixed, able to adapt to new emotions swiftly, from joy to anguish. The album was crafted from a relatively spartan setup—a pair of clarinets, two basses, one cello, a piano, and a tape delay—which makes it feel simple and human. Songs like “Reflector” and “Postcard From Brilliant Orange” are ambiguous, cavernously spaced, and emotional. Tomorrow Was the Golden Age surrounds the listener during moments of wandering and sticks to the walls of daily experience, coloring moments with its bittersweet spirit. –Kevin Lozano
Listen: Bing & Ruth: “Reflector”
Ernest Hood: Neighborhoods (1975)
Portland guitarist Ernest Hood was a fixture on the Pacific Northwest jazz scene in the ’50s and ’60s, both alongside his saxophonist brother Bill and in the ensemble the Way Out. When a bout of polio kept him from greater acclaim, he went into community broadcasting, helping to establish KBOO Radio.
In 1975, Hood recorded Neighborhoods, his lone album, and released it himself. The record drifts through Hood’s own childhood memories via tranquil piano, light synthesizer washes, and nimble zither runs. Hood gives the dreamy, melodic album further layers of sound by intermingling field recordings of crickets at night, passing thunderstorms, and children’s distant voices, creating the effect of the album being an open window to the world outside. Neighborhoods drifts past like cumulus clouds and evokes memories of a bygone era; by turns wistful and whimsical, it is a singular vision of one musician’s memories and remains a high point of the American private press. –Andy Beta
Listen: Ernest Hood: “Gloaming”
Jon Hassell: Vernal Equinox (1977)
Jon Hassell’s 1980 album Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics, produced alongside Brian Eno, is perhaps the most common entry point in the trumpeter’s catalog, arriving during the latter’s ascendance as a pop theorist and alchemist. But Hassell’s 1977 debut contains many of the same ideas in a more muted and subtle form. Inspired by raga music, particularly the work of the vocalist Pandit Pran Nath, Hassell processes his trumpet sound and focuses on notes that change in tiny increments, giving his melodies a slippery quality where you’re never quite sure where they are coming from or where they might go next. The background is filled with quiet twitches of rattles and bells, gurgling talking drum, and snippets of bird songs, creating a bed of sound that is hard to pin down but easy to absorb as a whole. Sources stretch in all directions, from the “Shhh/Peaceful” jazz of Miles Davis to Indian classical music to twinkling New Age, but the music’s refusal to be any one thing makes each listen feel like the first one. –Mark Richardson
Listen: Jon Hassell: “Vernal Equinox”
Edgar Froese: Epsilon in Malaysian Pale (1975)
As both the frontman of Tangerine Dream and as a solo artist, Edgar Froese favored warm, humid tones and pulses over the clicking rhythms and cold precision of his countrymen like Kraftwerk. As Tangerine Dream’s records grew increasingly smooth and mellow, his first solo album, Aqua, dove into gurgling water sounds and icy tones.
While on tour with his band in 1974, Froese became inspired by the new landscapes he glimpsed in the South Pacific, and he conceived the two epic tracks that comprise his second album, Epsilon in Malaysian Pale. One side is named for Maroubra Bay in Australia, the other for the dense jungles of Malaysia. Despite a palette of Mellotron and synthesized flutes, horns and strings, its genius lies in Froese’s ability to weave such technology into something wholly organic, subtle, and alive. –Andy Beta
Listen: Edgar Froese: “Epsilon in Malaysian Pale”
Huerco S.: For Those of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have) (2016)
There’s the easy way to make ambient techno: send some harmonic haze scudding across a 4/4 kick, and call it a day. And then there’s the hard way: forgo metronomic mile-markers and find ways to allude to dance music through pattern, texture, motion, and overriding shape. As Huerco S., Brian Leeds does it the hard way, and in a genre that trends opaque, his music is very clear—you can see straight to the bottom. On his superb release For Those of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have), the Kansas City producer treats techno like tissue paper and ambient music like a glass of clean water, dropping one into the other and watching raptly as it dissolves into drifting pulp.
We hear distantly percolating arpeggios and quietly bustling basses but nary a drum. Still, the invisible force of one seems to ripple out through the music, in which filtered bundles of harmonium and thumb piano tones limp toward steady repetition without ever quite falling into stride. It’s also representative of a contemporary era when club music leaks out of big cities through internet portals. It’s as if Leeds imagined he could almost hear the keenest edges of the signals booming from the coasts, echoing into the Midwest through all that empty space. For Those of You gives that feeling form. –Brian Howe
Listen: Huerco S.: “Lifeblood (Naïve Melody)”
Microstoria: snd (1996)
The second album from Oval’s Markus Popp and Mouse on Mars’ Jan St. Werner is a masterful study in small, subtle moves. It’s not a quiet record—many of the low-end tones that the duo generates can shake a room if the volume is turned up—but the power of snd lies the sum of its many tiny, precise parts. The pair’s dotted sounds border on the glitch-ambient style that Popp coined in Oval, but Microstoria’s version is less jarring, less tactile, more like rolling clouds than skipping CDs. Their songs are also more sneakily melodic; over repeated listens, what initially can sound like random tonal experimentation reveals itself to be hypnotically structured. Some of it is even hummable, if you give it enough time. But more importantly, snd is its own unique sonic world, an intoxicating journey made up of infinite single steps. –Marc Masters
Listen: Microstoria: “Endless Summer”
Eluvium: Talk Amongst the Trees (2005)
Eluvium’s Matthew Cooper would go on to create greater albums than Talk Amongst the Trees, but those were hardly ambient; rather than lurking among the wallpaper patterns, Eluvium’s later tracks leap to the center of the room, sucking up all the air. Talk filters the gloomy earnestness of the Pacific Northwest through the gaseous guitar atmosphere of Stars of the Lid, obliterating the familiar lunar fretwork of Brian Eno and Robert Fripp’s foundational ambient guitar albums. Cooper offers abstract hanging gardens of dark, lush drone, as yet unadorned by revolving strings or sighing woodwinds. Pure trails and tones hover in space, twisting around and through one another, mist on mist.
This was really only Eluvium’s second proper album (An Accidental Memory in Case of Death was just a quick piano improvisation), but his hopeful melancholy already shines through, a temperament that now draws the baseline of post-Romantic ambient music. Cooper is the archetype of a generation of indie kids who felt empowered to embark from the comfortable home base of guitar drones and into the foreign, self-challenging territory of classical styles. The balance of endless approachability and endless mystery in Talk Amongst the Trees is a testament to why they did. –Brian Howe
Listen: Eluvium: “New Animals From the Air”
Ekkehard Ehlers: Plays (2002)
Talent borrows, genius steals, and then there’s the sleight-of-hand involved in an album like Plays, which flips the anxiety of influence into a kind of shell game. In a few cases, moves are easy enough to follow: The opening “Plays Cornelius Cardew” suite salutes the free-music titan with two cuts of rumbling liquid ambience, and the closing “Plays Robert Johnson 2” (which, as a bumping minimalist house track, is the only tune here that breaks the ambient mold) contains obvious samples of the wailing bluesman.
However, in “Plays Robert Johnson 1,” it’s hard to say whether the reverberant plucks and quivering slide guitar are sampled or played, and Ehlers’ foggy homage only gets murkier from there. A pair of “Plays Albert Ayler” tracks are constructed of slowly scraped cello and warbling digital glitches presumably meant to pay tribute to the saxophonist’s bellowing style; the burbling “Plays Hubert Fichte” tracks make oblique reference to a German novelist while delving deep into freeform electro-acoustic tones. The album’s twin centerpieces are no less inscrutable in their relationship to their inspiration, the filmmaker John Cassavetes; musically, however, they’re so direct that you could hardly care. “Plays John Cassavetes 1” paints on a watery wash of sampled strings with no discernible outline; “Plays John Cassavetes 2” is a single, two-bar loop of strings taken from the Beatles’ “Goodnight," slow and hopeful as a wide river at sunset, that collapses 10 minutes into the blink of an eye. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Ekkehard Ehlers: “Plays John Cassavetes 2”
Harold Budd / Brian Eno: The Pearl (1984)
Harold Budd, an American composer and pianist who draws on drone, minimalism, conceptual notation, and other rarified practices, has made it clear that he does not consider himself an ambient musician. But, perhaps to his chagrin, most of the world disagrees, largely because of his collaborations with Brian Eno in the 1980s. Produced by Daniel Lanois, The Pearl was the duo’s follow-up to the seminal Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror, and its title perfectly describes the inimitable timbre produced at the juncture of Budd’s “soft pedal” piano style, achingly slow and drenched in sustain, and Eno’s discreet processing, which transforms the instrument’s natural resonance into gentle swirls of snow and sheets of melting, cracking ice.
Budd’s delicately creeping, expressive intervals sway and grasp like longing incarnate, in impressionistic pieces that are mimetically precise—the aqueous, darting “A Stream With Bright Fish” and the smooth, round “The Silver Ball” vividly evoke their titles. The Pearl’s icy elegance, sumptuous beauty, and mesmeric pace form the Platonic ideal which all post-classical piano-ambient has since imitated. Hearing it feels like retreating into a snow globe where there is nothing to think about, but everything to feel. –Brian Howe
Listen: Brian Eno & Harold Budd: “A Stream With Bright Fish”
Max Richter: Sleep (2015)
Most ambient music gestures at unconscious eternity, but on his 2015 album, Sleep, Max Richter almost gets there. On it, Richter—an influential modern, post-minimal composer whose works border electronic and ambient—collaborated with the neuroscientist David Eagleman to help listeners go gentle into that good night. The result is a nightlong electronic chamber music monolith with crests and lulls that are designed to interplay with sleep cycles. It’s not without precedent; maybe Richter recorded eight hours to top sleep-concert veteran Robert Rich’s seven-hour Somnium. But whereas Rich filled the dream world with evanescent drones and nature sounds, Richter populates his with a dazzling variety of timbres and forms to create liminal chamber music that’s also lively enough for wakeful listening.
But in the grand scheme of time that ambient music evokes, what’s the difference between eight minutes and eight hours? A lot, it turns out. Since you’ll probably never hear enough of it at once to arrange its whole ecosystem in your mind, Sleep isn’t simply long, it’s functionally infinite. Its sense of unheard regions is like the invisible continuation of the music’s finite line. It’s not just an album that summarizes all of Richter’s many modes, but a definitive ambient album: an eternal medium that can accommodate whatever charged emotions or neglectful neutrality you project on it. –Brian Howe
Listen: Max Richter: “Dream 13”
Suzanne Ciani: Buchla Concerts 1975 (1975)
Suzanne Ciani has said, of meeting the inventor Don Buchla in the 1960s, “[He] gave me my electronic wings.” They came in the form of the Buchla synthesizer, an early modular instrument of his invention. With it, Ciani went on to compose Grammy-nominated electronic New Age records, including 1982’s stunning Seven Waves, as well as hugely successful television commercial soundtracks for the likes of Energizer and Coca-Cola. (The sound of a can popping? That’s her.)
But Ciani's recently reissued Buchla concerts from 1975 are magic, a crucial document of what it sounded like to engage with one of the earliest formulations of the Buchla. These two concerts—one held at the minimalist composer Phill Niblock’s loft, the other at the WBAI Free Music Store—are intense experiences of transitions and pace, highlighting the possibilities of this strange new instrument while not conforming to any pop expectations. Ciani offers an early education in synthetic forms and adaptability; the Buchla Concerts are a document of the beginning of technological reverence, when people began fostering their obsessive relationships with machines. –Jenn Pelly
Listen: Suzanne Ciani: “Concert at Phil Niblock’s Loft”
Biosphere: Substrata (1997)
Geir Jenssen’s early-’90s releases flitted between opposing impulses: deep, enveloping ambient tones; flickering breakbeat techno fueled by gnarly squarewave bass thonk; and, on occasion, the wide-eyed sci-fi kitsch of the era’s rave flyers. But by 1997’s Substrata, the Norwegian electronic musician zeroed in on his most atmospheric impulses, letting everything else fall by the wayside. The model for Substrata vacillates between the planetarium, where luminous abstractions dance against the illusion of infinite space, and the isolation tank, where the weightless dark sends listeners on journeys deep into the mind. Field recordings—planes high overhead, children laughing, the gentle lapping of waves—trade off with more overtly musical cues: slow bass pulses, underwater strings, and even, occasionally, a reverberant hint of Cocteau Twins’ burbling guitar tone. The careful balance of background and foreground invites the listener to go exploring inside the sound, and the free-associative sensory flow distills the music’s lysergic potential to a purity rarely encountered in any genre. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Biosphere: “Poa Alpina”
Tim Hecker: Virgins (2013)
Ambient music has a tricky relationship with form: Make the structure too obvious, and too obviously musical, and you move into a different realm. The result might be a song, or a dance track, or a composition, but it’s no longer ambient—that formless form whose outline is blurry by definition and its center squishy. Virgins goes right to the heart of that conundrum. Up until this album, Tim Hecker’s music had typically focused on fat, formless drones—by running software synthesis through gargantuan overdrive, or pumping church organs through a virtual black metal backline—but Virgins finds the Canadian electronic musician writing for chamber ensemble and then remixing the results.
The results sound a lot like composed music—at least, compared to the decomposed music of his previous releases, which gave the impression of having been sourced from tapes that had laid moldering in the ground through several rainy seasons. But it ultimately pulls apart at the seams; the music remains unstable, its energies dissipating like boiling water. The influence of classical minimalism is tempered by opaque echoes and dark streaks of tapes run backward, and no melody is strong enough to escape the terminal gravity of Hecker’s black-hole pedal tones. It’s ambient music as the event horizon. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Tim Hecker, “Live Room”
Windy & Carl: Depths (1998)
Along with Stars of the Lid, Windy & Carl were prime movers in the ’90s drone sphere who started out releasing music on handmade tapes that were sold and discussed in zines like Ptolemaic Terrascope (or at Stormy Records, the shop Windy Weber and Carl Hultgren opened in Dearborn, Michigan). They were loosely affiliated with other bands in what has been called the Michigan space rock scene, but Windy & Carl were more about drift and sustained moods compared to more song-oriented approach of Füxa or Alison’s Halo. Windy & Carl’s music is like a corona of light surrounding an eclipsed pop song, as if they took the sound of their favorite artists on 4AD (Cocteau Twins, Slowdive) and blotted out everything but the frayed edges, where distortion and feedback reside. Like SOTL, Windy & Carl started out with 4-track recordings that they made themselves and they eventually signed with Kranky, where they released a run of classic drone records. Their 1998 album Depths was a peak, finding just the right mix of calming hum with an unsettling rumble of tension beneath. –Mark Richardson
Listen: Windy & Carl: “Set Adrift”
Laraaji: Ambient 3: Day of Radiance (1980)
Serendipity was in full effect the day Brian Eno strolled through New York’s Washington Square Park and came across Laraaji playing his plangently chiming autoharp, and dropped a note in his busker’s hat inviting him to make a record. Born Edward Larry Gordon, the actor-musician Laraaji had already released one album, 1978’s Celestial Vibration, and explored the concept of cosmic music for some years using electrified and adapted versions of the zither and hammered dulcimer. He believed that these and similar metallophonic instruments like gongs induce a trance state that breaks down the self’s boundaries and loosens the bonds of time.
Not that the first side of Day of Radiance is relaxing, exactly: “The Dance” seems to flood your mind with almost-painful brightness. But the flipside’s two-parter “Meditation” gently unspools folds of glimmering texture in a slow-motion cascade. Although Radiance was a career highpoint and reached his broadest audience, Laraaji would record many more wonderful albums (including Flow Goes the Universe, for Eno’s latterday label All Saints). The fact that Laraaji’s other main occupation is working as a laughter therapist reminds us of the higher purpose—at once practical and mystical—behind Radiance. This is music for healing and making whole. –Simon Reynolds
Listen: Laraaji: “Meditation #2”
Charlemagne Palestine: Four Manifestations on Six Elements (1974)
The keyboardist-composer Charlemagne Palestine’s double LP was conceived to mimic a modern-art gallery space, its four walls represented by the four sides of the original vinyl release. In front of each wall, the listener is invited to observe and explore an arrangement of tones, and the titles indicate which musical intervals (or “elements”) you’re hearing. The first side-length track is a drone work, performed on an organ, titled “Two Perfect Fifths, a Major Third Apart, Reinforced Twice.” It seems utterly fixed, at first listen—but as the dynamics of the performance shift from overdrive into a softer expression, a journeying feel unspools.
On Side B, Palestine moves to an acoustic instrument, and creates more of a melodic ride during a three-movement piece, “One + Two + Three Perfect Fifths in the Rhythm Three Against Two, For Bösendorfer Piano.” (His contrasting use of pedals makes this performance especially memorable.) Side C embraces some of the techniques that Palestine used in his other “strumming music” pieces. Then the gallery trip to the composer’s varied worlds wraps with another work that investigates the sustained textures of an organ drone. –Seth Colter Walls
Listen: Charlemagne Palestine, "Two Fifths"
Steve Roach: Structures from Silence (1984)
In the early 1970s, inspired by the likes of Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream, California desert motocross racer Steve Roach wandered away from a career of high-revving engines and taught himself how to play the synthesizer. He’s since become one of the defining American artists of new age music, perpetually on a quest for silence and the suspension of time in his music. “For me, the essence of this music is what is felt when it ends, a returning to the silence,” he wrote on the sleeve of his 1984 masterpiece, Structures From Silence.
The three extended compositions that comprise Structures arise out of such quiescence; the loops and gentle melodic refrains spire upwards and suggest vistas. With just a few cycling elements and floating chords, "Reflections in Suspension" and "Quiet Friend" exude a peaceful calm, while the title track is a half hour of contemplative bliss, full of purring drones and high notes that shimmer and fade. Like a desert mirage, these structures hover forever at the horizon, an oasis from the din surrounding it. –Andy Beta
Listen: Steve Roach: “Reflections in Suspension”
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Marian Zazeela / La Monte Young: The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath (An Homage) (1999)
La Monte Young, an originator of Western-classical minimalism, is typically heard pursuing his concept of “the drone state of mind,” whether with his blues band or his version of a chamber ensemble. The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath (An Homage)—performed by Young and his partner, Zazeela—is primarily a drone album and one of the best ever, fit for dreamy contemplation. (Happily, it’s also currently in print, unlike his other complex works The Well-Tuned Piano 81 X 25 6:17:50 - 11:1859 PM NYC and The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer From the Four Dreams of China) Performed on a pair of tamburas, inside a 1982 version of the couple’s ongoing, mixed-media “Dream House” installation, this recording features the three pitches that Young and Zazeela bowed when accompanying Pandit Pran Nath, their guru and teacher, in the slow, Kirana style of Hindustani vocal music.
Thanks to the resonant quality of the tamburas—designed by Nath—and the perfectly matched tuning between the instruments played by Young and Zazeela, the overtones of the two instruments create a startling variety of effects within the unceasing drone. Wisps of melodic patterns and beats seem to emerge like apparitions from the restricted harmonic field, with the occasional, distant rumble of New York City motorcycles serving the only trace of the “real world” outside their Dream House. The album offers a purity of intent so refined, it has become the background track for Young and Zazeela’s continuing performances of raga-informed singing—and Tamburas is also a potent, powerful listen on its own. –Seth Colter Walls
Listen: La Monte Young: “Just Alap Raga Ensemble”
Ashra: New Age of Earth (1976)
In 1975, an album called Inventions for Electric Guitar appeared, featuring the name of both krautrock legends Ash Ra Tempel and their leader, guitarist Manuel Göttsching. It wasn’t quite the final Ash Ra Tempel album (as it featured Göttsching alone, that would be 1973’s Starring Rosi), and it wasn’t his proper solo debut (that would be 1984’s E2-E4); the music, too, straddled two worlds, with a mix of cosmic blues-inspired guitar soloing and precise Terry Riley-style minimalism.
With Inventions, Göttsching announced himself as a master architect of intricate instrumental arrangement. By 1976, when he issued the solo album New Age of Earth under the Ashra moniker, he proved himself equally adept at slowly shifting atmosphere. Backgrounding his guitar work and focusing on synthesizers, Göttsching crafts a new kind of space music, one that feels less about traveling through the cosmos and more about what it might feel like to contemplate existence while meditating on another planet. –Mark Richardson
Listen: Ashra: “Deep Distance”
Julianna Barwick: The Magic Place (2011)
With little more than her voice, a Boss DD-20 Giga Delay guitar pedal, and a smattering of piano and bells, the Brooklyn-based singer and sound artist Julianna Barwick conjures a rapturous space on her second album. Taking cues from the hymns she sang in the Church of Christ (where her father was a youth minister), as well as a fairytale-like bodark tree she climbed as a young girl in Oklahoma, Barwick sings at a volume one might use to soothe a colicky baby, barely louder than a whisper. Much like Elizabeth Fraser and Claire Hamill before her, Barwick knows how to carefully arrange each muslin-like layer of her voice and weave it into something gorgeous, luminous, weightless. The Magic Place conjures the reverie of childhood wonder, but rather than just merely recall it nostalgically, Barwick’s voice has the power to render such awe wholly in the present moment. –Andy Beta
Listen: Julianna Barwick: “White Flag”
David Behrman: On the Other Ocean (1977)
With microprocessors in our pockets and countless hours of life spent in front of computers, many people have fretted over humanity’s decreasing social interactions and increasing sense of alienation. New music composer David Behrman’s debut, On the Other Ocean, is a riposte on how humans and computers can interface and interact to make a warm, heavenly sound. It marks Behrman’s first interactive piece between man, woman, and machine; flautist Maggi Payne and bassoonist Arthur Stidfole flutter and slowly move between a series of six pitches, which in turn trigger Behrman’s KIM-1 (a precursor to the Apple II and one of the first personal computers available), which reacts and pitch shifts these pure tones so as to harmonize with its human counterparts. One song, “Figure in a Clearing,” pairs cello to computer-controlled synthesizer. The results couldn’t be more transportive and lovely; time melts away as soloists and microcomputer move at an unhurried pace, reveling in the resultant honeyed tones. –Andy Beta
Listen: David Behrman: “On the Other Ocean”
Pauline Oliveros: Accordion and Voice (1982)
On the cover of this album, sitting at Pauline Oliveros’ feet, is a blissed-out, shaggy little dog. Tongue out and eyes squinting, he’s presumably so excellently zoned because he’s listening to her play the enormous accordion balanced across her thigh. The backdrop, which appears to be a cut-and-paste job, is a mountainside scene. The whole world is reduced to the two of them, having a happy day making music. Please get me there ASAP; until then, I’ll listen to Accordion and Voice to surface the kind of serenity this pup is living.
Offering just what the title suggests, this is the quintessential Oliveros recording, two 20-minute pieces of gentle tones. “Horse Sings From Cloud” feels like a stripped and slowed raga. “Rattlesnake Mountain” is slightly more mournful, with less vocals; if you want to hear the same accordion sound used in polka, it’s there, the basic fact of air being pushed around but with very little interruption. Oliveros occasionally drops in a quick riff but, mostly, she seems to push her instrument’s folds in and out at a slow pace, the big accordion taking one deep breath after another. Oliveros’ playing feels like an extension of the natural world, not something built to interpret it. –Matthew Schnipper
Listen: Pauline Oliveros: “Rattlesnake Mountain”
Oneohtrix Point Never: Rifts (2009)
It can be easy to forget now how radical Daniel Lopatin’s early albums sounded when they were first released in 2007 and 2008. When Rifts appeared in 2009, compiling a handful of Oneohtrix Point Never’s early LPs and compilation tracks, the DIY electronics scene was largely fixated on hellish frequencies and high decibels. But OPN offered an escape route in the form of plaintive tones inspired by German electronic music of the ’70s, along with new age and corporate readymades. His radical approach was to turn down the volume and sweeten the tone, zeroing in on the hollow buzz of classic Roland synths like the Juno 106 and highlighting skeletal arpeggios and stately open fifths—all bathed in a queasy, fluorescent glow.
Cold, distant, and unmistakably melancholy, Rifts is a three-hour dose of the purest sci-fi romanticism with all the kitsch burned off, balanced between drugged-out drone states and full-on tearjerkers. (There’s no better accompaniment for licking your wounds at the end of a long, rough night than “Hyperdawn.”) Lopatin has gone on to make more ambitious music, but nothing else quite nails that particular mood—4 a.m., eyes glazed, nerves jangled, the vibe as dystopian as a William Gibson novel—as well as this exhilaratingly weary compilation. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Oneohtrix Point Never: “Hyperdawn”
Iasos: Inter-Dimensional Music (1975)
Iasos’ universe is populated with images of glowing light, mandalas, chakras, rainbows, paradise, and angels. (The ur-New Age artist, he even sells couch-sized crystals on his website.) But the Greek-born, Sausalito-based composer’s musical vision defies easy categorization; he gets daps from the Buddhist philosopher Alan Watts and the architect R. Buckminster Fuller alike.
One can trace the rise of New Age music back to Iasos’ debut album, Inter-Dimensional Music, which emerged the same year as Brian Eno’s Discreet Music and Steven Halpern’s first album. Positing himself less as “the artist” and more as a vessel through which spirits enact vibrations on this earthly plane, meditations like “Rainbow Canyon” and “Cloud Prayer” are as blissful and calming to both the near-dead and the fully awake. Small wonder that when the psychology department at Plymouth State College studied patients who had near-death experiences, they discovered that Iasos’ music was the closest approximation to what they’d heard in their temporary afterlives. –Andy Beta
Listen: Iasos: “Cloud Prayer”
Folke Rabe: What?? (1967)
Folke Rabe’s “What??” begins with a single pair of tones—two sine waves, hovering in sustained near-unison—and a cursory listen might suggest that it never really goes anywhere from there. Composed in 1967, the 26-minute piece bears virtually none of the features of Western classical music or popular song; there are no melodies, no rhythms, not even any notes, basically. Instead, the Swedish composer's ultra-minimalist landmark represents an attempt to get inside the mechanics of sound—“to ‘hear into’ the different sounds in order to grasp the components that made them up,” as Rabe once explained. Microtonal variations between tones create new overtones; what begins as a single held note soon splits into a chord and becomes a throbbing, teeming field of riotous wibble.
The listening experience is a little like staring at a screen illuminated by what appears to be a plain white light, steady and unchanging, only to realize that all the colors of the rainbow are not only present but at war with one another. What seems at first to be neutral and serene becomes wild and untamed, a total spectral headfuck, and the more deeply you listen, the more intense it becomes. Evolving too slowly for the listener to perceive its changes, much less its overall structure, it is almost hallucinatory in the way it seems to impose a radically different sense of the passage of time. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Folke Rabe: “What??”
Brian Eno: Ambient 4: On Land (1982)
The climax of Eno’s supremely fertile New York period, On Land is, ironically, an attempt to psychologically flee the very city in which he’d produced so much astonishingly innovative work. The working title, Empty Landscapes, reveals just how oppressive Eno had come to find Manhattan’s hyperactive bustle. Drawing on inspirations from film (Fellini’s Amarcord) and art (Pierre Tal-Coat’s pastoral paintings), Eno was, above all, working from personal memory: his faded impressions of the unpopulous East Coast of England, where he’d grown up. Some tracks are named after places he frequented as a child (Leek Hills, Dunwich), while another (“Lantern Marsh”) gets it title from an evocative name he’d seen on a map.
Aiming for “a nice kind of spooky” and a “feeling of aloneness,” On Land pushes much deeper into abstraction than Music for Airports. Eno drastically processes the instrumental sounds until unrecognizable and weaves in natural-world timbres such as stones and frog noises. The glinting, amorphous result has barely any ancestors in music. On Land was a deeply conceptual project: Eno wrote 25,000 words of notes to articulate what he was trying to do and invented a three-speaker system that listeners could set up to intensify the feeling of sonic engulfment. But On Land ultimately works on a purely emotional level, as a heartsick 34-year-old expatriate mentally prepares himself for the homecoming that will follow in a few years. After all, “On Land” is only a missing consonant and a shifted vowel from “England.” –Simon Reynolds
Listen: Brian Eno: “The Lost Day”
Keith Fullerton Whitman: Playthroughs (2002)
Keith Fullerton Whitman took a radical turn on 2002’s Playthroughs, his first official solo album under his own name. Compared to the frantic drum-and-bass sprints he made as Hrvatski, Playthroughs is a sonic still frame, filled with long tones and blended layers that Whitman made by filtering his guitar through a self-devised computer process. Yet there’s still a ton of action in the album’s five tracks: shifting drones, swelling atmospheres, rippling sonic waves. It’s all timed and arranged with uncanny precision; every sonic event feels perfectly clear and balanced, as if Whitman’s computer is thinking many moves ahead, like a chess program beating Garry Kasparov. Some music at the time sounded similar, and Whitman has since made many records that build deftly upon what he achieved here. But nothing has ever quite matched the impeccable purity of Playthroughs, a record that seems to hook itself into some fundamental cosmic brainwave and never let go. –Marc Masters
Listen: Keith Fullerton Whitman: “Feedback Zwei”
Fennesz: Endless Summer (2001)
The two words that form the title of Christian Fennesz’ 2001 landmark album are equally important. The summer side of Endless Summer is perhaps more prominent, as Fennesz evokes sun, beaches, and breezes through sublime weaving of sampled guitar, glitchy noises, and sliced-up tones. But the endless quality is what endures: This is an album about the infinite nature of memory, about how every summer, every season, every experience becomes immortalized by the mind, playing on a loop in the background of life. It’s not that those memories never change; in fact, the way Fennesz makes his sounds recur and retreat, stutter and fuse, perfectly matches the malleability and impermanence of recollections. But no matter how much they bubble and morph, memories always remain—and so do Fennesz’s notes, strums, and waves, all ebbing and flowing perpetually like a sea that never stops lapping the shore. –Marc Masters
Listen: Fennesz: “Made in Hong Kong”
Grouper: A I A : Alien Observer (2011)
Liz Harris’ voice has the ability to leave you dumbstruck, speechless, just plain wrecked. It’s so beautiful, it’s almost mythic. Her hums, the barely audible whispers of words, the repetitions of phrases—they are often phantom presences, conjuring spooky action at a distance. On the first side of A I A: Alien Observer, she casts aside her previous inscrutability and replaces it with focused intensity. There is perfect symmetry between her spectral voice and the wash of equally striking, shrouded noises she employs. In “She Loves Me That Way,” her voice is like some astral lodestar, corralling the clouds of guitar echo and distant noise into a lush swirl of sound. Other instances, like the album’s title track, are almost liturgical: Harris stretches her voice into a ghostly chorus. Alien Observer feels material and visceral, but it retains her sense of mystery and emotional resonance. –Kevin Lozano
Listen: Grouper: “She Loves Me That Way”
Oneohtrix Point Never: Replica (2011)
As good as advertisements are at getting our attention, we are often even better at ignoring them. Like the banner ad on your favorite website that you’ve seen a hundred times but never really registered, never mind clicked. Or the billboards you walk by every day that don’t make it past your peripheral, and the TV ads that soundtrack nothing but your Twitter scrolling. Though these blasts of capitalism aim to stun, they often recede into the ether. But they’re still there, making a soft impression. In this way, advertising might be the most pervasive ambient art form of our time.
This idea churns through Replica, an exercise in science-fiction nostalgia by Oneohtrix Point Never’s Daniel Lopatin, a man who's never shied away from conceptual electronic experimentation. The album is sourced from samples of old commercials, cut, looped, and doused with effects. So a Folgers TV spot turns into something playful and strange on “Sleep Dealer,” a song that answers the question, “What if a jingle’s ghost became sentient and started listening to a lot of Thelonius Monk?” By spinning the white noise of commerce into abstraction, Replica pulls off something of a meta-ambient coup. It’s music that only sells itself. –Ryan Dombal
Listen: Oneohtrix Point Never: “Sleep Dealer”
The Orb: Orbus Terrarum (1995)
The Orb have always been mad hatters, tinkering with genre boundaries and aural expectations; they’re heretics who explore the borders of house music, progressive, and ambient. Whether pushing the physical limits on what constitutes a single (see all 39:58 of their woozy “Blue Room,” the longest song to ever chart in the UK) or dropping a fuzzy cover of the Stooges’ “No Fun” during an otherwise chill Peel Session, Dr. Alex Paterson and his cohorts can soothe and startle in equal measure.
The group’s third album, Orbus Terrarum, remains their psychedelic pinnacle, embracing opposite urges throughout: It’s concise and sprawling, catchy and abstract, placid and turbulent, spacey and aquatic. It marks the beginning of Paterson’s decades-long collaboration with Thomas Fehlmann, and it makes sense that tracks like “Montagne D’Or,” “Plateau,” and the elegant piano of “Oxbow Lakes” suggest geographical phenomena. Each expansive track doubles as an enveloping environmental space, places to roam and explore or just sit still and zone out. –Andy Beta
Listen: The Orb: “Montagne D’Or”
Stars of the Lid: And Their Refinement of the Decline (2007)
“Dungtitled (In A Major),” “Dopamine Clouds Over Craven Cottage,” “December Hunting for Vegetarian Fuckface”—pretty sophomoric names for song titles. But the 18 tracks on Stars of the Lid’s final record, And Their Refinement of the Decline, are a brilliant act of bathos in reverse. These stupid combinations of words are gateways to impeccably beautiful sounds: Language (of any maturity level) feels useless next to the gentle rushes of horns, cellos, and clarinets.
Brian McBride and Adam Wiltzie’s work on And Their Refinement of the Decline seems to reflect old-fashioned grandeur, powerful romance. Yet somehow, McBride and Wiltzie have a sense of humor that makes the album constantly feel generous, easygoing, and surprisingly gregarious. Rarely is art so casual and staggering simultaneously. –Kevin Lozano
Listen: Stars of the Lid: “The Evil That Never Arrived”
Alice Coltrane: Turiya Sings (1982)
During the 1960s, many artists and musicians embraced Eastern religion and explored its disciplines, from the Beatles and the Beach Boys studying Transcendental Meditation to Pete Townshend and Carlos Santana becoming students of Indian gurus. For most of these musicians, it was just a phase, but for Alice Coltrane, her study with Swami Satchidananda began a lifelong path of spiritual study.
It’s staggering to visit the Vedantic Center in California and see Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda represented not as a jazz figure or musical icon, but rather a spiritual teacher and Swamini. Turning her back on public life and her recording career in the late ’70s, Coltrane founded her own ashram and recorded a series of haunting cassettes of devotional Hindu bhajans that were only available for purchase at the center. These legendary tapes—still not in wide release—are some of her most moving work. Utilizing only organ and her voice, the nine hymns that comprise 1982’s Turiya Sings have a distilled, deeply personal quality to them. Hearing them is like listening to Coltrane in dialogue with the Divine. –Andy Beta
Listen: Alice Coltrane: “Jagadishwar”
Terry Riley: Persian Surgery Dervishes (1972)
Where American minimalism, Indian classical raga, barrelhouse piano, modal jazz, and rugged western individualism all intersect, there stands the sage composer Terry Riley. The California-born musician drew from his gig as a barroom pianist, Coltrane fan, and student with La Monte Young and Pandit Pran Nath to bring his vision of music to life. His work exploded listeners’ notions of classical composition with his ever-shifting structures and epic improvisations.
Unless you experienced it in-person, though, Riley’s live “all night flights” were scarcely documented and never fully captured on record. The closest we get to such nirvana is via the two live performances from the early ’70s that comprise his 1972 double album, Persian Surgery Dervishes. With only an electric organ and Riley’s “time-lag” accumulator (a reel-to-reel that played back loops of his improvisations), Dervishes is four sides of oozing drones, percolating virtuosic soloing, and undulating waves of bliss. It’s layered so as to suggest spellbinding Islamic tile patterns, lava lamp globes, and infinity itself. –Andy Beta
Listen: Terry Riley: “Performance One, Part Two”
Robert Ashley: Automatic Writing (1979)
On “Automatic Writing,” Robert Ashley composes under the influence of his “involuntary speech.” (In his liner notes, Ashley revealed that he suffered from “a mild form of Tourette’s.”) The piece starts quietly, with scraps of Ashley’s mild, tremulous voice arranged next to more fluid French translations and barely-there touches of Moog. After Ashley’s phrases lengthen enough to encompass sense-making phrases, a bass-register groove briefly appears, vanishes, then returns. Few pieces so quiet have proven as captivating; many that intend to be equally startling can’t capture Ashley’s range of surprises. –Seth Colter Walls
Listen: Robert Ashley: “Automatic Writing”
The Caretaker: An Empty Bliss Beyond This World (2011)
There’s a certain passivity ascribed to ambient music, both in listening to it and also making it; there’s less activity involved in making this type of music than, say, “Gimme Shelter,” if not less thought or process. An Empty Bliss Beyond This World is one of the most passive efforts of the genre; on it, Leyland Kirby, working under his Caretaker alias, plays a collection of early 20th century parlor music and moves the microphone somewhere between a half-parlor and a half-acre away. Perhaps there’s a quarter-turn of a filter dial somewhere; it’s difficult to tell.
But there’s a certain performative aspect to Empty Bliss, a “Voila!” in the way Kirby transforms a trifling, social music style into an otherworldly remembrance. The crackles and pops remind us that physical media decays; the notes remind us that styles, modes, and ways of living do, too. Lots of ambient music fades into the background, emphasizing the importance of the background; An Empty Bliss Beyond This World is all about the fade. –Andrew Gaerig
Listen: The Caretaker: “Moments of Sufficient Lucidity”
Brian Eno: Apollo (1983)
Where Music for Airports was meant to slip almost undetected into the atmosphere around us, this 1983 soundtrack to NASA footage of the Apollo moon missions tackled a more impressionistic goal, translating the emotional experience of space exploration for earthbound consumption. It succeeded: Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks helped set the tone for essential strains of ambient music to come. “Drift” conveys a weightless sense of awe, a profoundly calming glimpse of the sublime that continues to resonate in new age; the held tones and whale song of “Matta” lead directly to the dark ambience of Biosphere, Robert Rich, and the Fax label.
Where Music for Airports reduced musical form to an abstract, Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks moves in the opposite direction, marking a reconciliation between atmospheric sound and more conventional musical forms. The elegant and slow-moving “An Ending (Ascent)” is not so far off from the late-Romantic composer Gabriel Fauré's Requiem, simply boiled down for DX7 and tape effects. And producer Daniel Lanois’ pedal steel comes to the fore throughout the B-side. The country-music flourishes were inspired in part by the American qualities of the space program, as well as the Texan background of some of its astronauts, but they also make a broader point: Cut the drums and add enough reverb, and virtually any genre can be made into ambient music. Lanois would go on to pick up that line of inquiry on his masterful 2016 solo LP Goodbye to Language, administering the pedal steel in liquid form, as if by IV drip. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Brian Eno: “An Ending (Ascent)”
Laurie Spiegel: The Expanding Universe (1980)
It would be helpful if there were another term—a better term, a more rigorous term—for ambient music, one that hadn’t been sullied by years’ worth of spa soundtracks and dodgy chillout compilations. You could conceivably file Laurie Spiegel’s The Expanding Universe under “academic computer music”—it is, after all, the product of a pioneering computer scientist who studied composition at Juilliard before going to work at Bell Laboratories, where she contributed code to a number of early computer-music technologies. But that tag, in turn, is so cold, so formal, so starched-shirt. And unlike much academic computer music of its time, Spiegel’s 1980 album is approachable, expressive, and deeply enjoyable; it betrays no suspicion of pleasure, makes no knee-jerk obeisance to the angry gods of dissonance.
With a programmer’s eye for detail, Spiegel renders both extended drones and folk-inspired counterpoints in the simplest of terms. On slow-moving pieces like “Old Wave” and “The Expanding Universe,” much of the action lies in the subtle modulation of analog waveforms, while “Patchwork” and “Appalachian Grove” offer deep dives into vivid and mercurial harmonic structures. (The latter track is part of the 100 minutes of previously unreleased material added to the album’s 2012 reissue.) On “Kepler’s Harmony of the Worlds,” she shifts her focus toward see-sawing glissandi and dense thickets of overtones. It’s only fitting that the piece, inspired by the German astronomer Johannes Kepler’s theory of harmony and geometrical form, was included on NASA’s “Golden Record,” a gold disc engraved with some of humanity’s most notable musical achievements that travels on board the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft—the first of which has already reached interstellar space. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Laurie Spiegel: “Patchwork”
GAS: Pop (2000)
Though he specializes in beautiful understatement, Wolfgang Voigt’s influence on atmospheric music is hard to overstate. First, he helped turn techno ambient as a leader of Germany’s minimal scene, where he cofounded the definitive Kompakt label. Then he transmuted it back, producing a new substance that bridged the two genres. With Gas, the most famous of his many recording aliases, Voigt plunged house beats deep into richly textured loam, creating a dark, dense counterpoint to the relatively bright and airy ambient house of the Orb.
According to popular lore, the sound grew out of Voigt’s youthful experiences tripping on mushrooms in the Black Forest, and his record Königsforst most directly evokes that particular mystery and awe, with a lone kick drum as a spirit guide through vast, shadowy woods. But it’s Pop, Gas’ final album, that distills this into their visionary statement—brighter, less muffled, and more songful. Voigt deconstructs his glowering 4/4 lope and retools it with bright melodies, beveled cymbal washes, free-range basses, and other writhing elements into a shaggy stasis. The odd texture of the first two tracks, somewhere between a rainforest and a dot matrix printer, should become tiresome soon, but Voigt extracts every shade of effervescence from it. The result is Gas’ most enduringly habitable sound world. –Brian Howe
Listen: Gas, “Untitled 1”
Fripp & Eno: Evening Star (1975)
Though it contains Brian Eno’s signature lolling synthesizers, Evening Star, more than much of his ambient work, has a feeling of induction. That welcomeness owes much to King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp’s warm noodling and plucking; he’s like a wedding musician if the whole world was getting married.
Evening Star, which opens with the National Geographic-esque titled “Wind on Water,” maintains its ebullient tone throughout its first half. But the second side, the almost 30-minute track, “An Index of Metals,” shows the sinister side of the duo, with less synthesizer bounce and more iciness. It’s less playful than the first half, and more shocking. It stands in stark contrast to the rest of the 1970s, when others made ambient music that felt allegorically about life and death, the two locked in some eternal competition. Rather than co-mingle the two, Fripp and Eno split them like some kind of fork in the road. –Matthew Schnipper
Listen: Robert Fripp & Brian Eno: “Wind on Water”
Tim Hecker: Harmony in Ultraviolet (2006)
Tim Hecker’s style of ambiance has always shaded dark, but Harmony in Ultraviolet is his purest exploration of what lies beneath. Where his earlier work favored the crackle of garbled transmissions and clanging metallic wires, Harmony in Ultraviolet leans toward heavy, layered drone, drifting by like a massive airship that appears far too heavy to remain aloft, a Star Wars-scale object that blots out the sky and shoots off sparks. His palette includes pipe organs, gnarly guitar feedback, static, and woozy strings, all of which come together for music of awe, the feeling of contemplating an erupting volcano or a massive tornado from a safe distance. It makes you feel small, one speck on a pale blue dot. Harmony is the rare ambient album that begs to be played loud. –Mark Richardson
Listen: Tim Hecker: “Dungeoneering”
Panaiotis / Stuart Dempster / Pauline Oliveros: Deep Listening (1989)
Pauline Oliveros has called improvisation the natural state of human existence—because, amidst even all the surface chaos of everyday experience, “the universe is improvising...and we have evolution, so [improvisation] is always happening.” It’s why, to Oliveros, the most considerate way to live is to listen. So, in 1988, she descended 14 feet beneath the earth, into a cistern located in Washington where sounds reverberated up to 45 seconds in the dampness. She brought the trombonist Stuart Dempster and the sound artist/vocalist Panaiotis to record music that doesn’t sound of this world. The trio carried with them an accordion, trombone, didgeridoo, garden hose, conch shell and a pipe, which all became mangled by the bigness of the room.
Deep Listening, the recording born of these sessions, feels cosmic, like listening to the echoes of the Big Bang. It begat a new philosophy of the same name which focused on the possibilities of truly paying attention, retuning and calibrating your ears to allow for meditation and the preservation of well being. Deep Listening introduced into ambient music the radical possibilities of the body to overcome itself, just by listening hard enough. –Kevin Lozano
Listen: Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster, Panaiotis: “Suiren”
Oval: 94diskont (1995)
In the run-up to the new millennium, as digital technology inserted itself ever more deeply into our lives, ideas about progress and creative misuse were in the air, as unmistakable as the gravelly pings of the dial-up modem sitting in the corner of your office. Enter Oval, the German trio of Markus Popp, Frank Metzger, and Sebastian Oschatz, who made their name early on by sampling the sound of skipping CDs. If Systemisch is where Oval first distilled their idea down to its essence, then 94diskont is where they discovered their homemade medium’s expressive potential.
Bit-crushed chirps and desiccated hiccups establish the basic vocabulary that will come to define “glitch music” for the next decade; some of the album’s more abstracted tracks, like “Commerce Server,” sound like a peripheral device coughing up pixels. On centerpiece “Do While,” glassy pings skitter like snowflakes across the frozen surface of a pond; bell tones rise and fall in pitch, glowing with an eerie luminescence. There’s nothing more to it than a handful of short, overlapping loops, yet something about the way they wrap around each other only draws you deeper into the mix with every elliptical pass. It goes on like that for 24 minutes, but it’s not hard to imagine letting it run for one’s entire waking day. Like Satie’s furniture music or Eno’s airport ambience, it’s a sound that both fades into the background and charges the very air around you. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Oval: “Do While”
Stars of the Lid: The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid (2001)
One great use of a synthesizer is to hold down a note, turn some knobs, and listen to it sparkle— to examine the big swells of harmonics created when a bundle of circuits try to sound like violins or trumpets. Lots of great music, ambient and otherwise, has been made by folks holding down keys on synthesizers.
The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid seems to reverse-engineer this practice; Adam Wiltzie and Brian McBride employ actual strings and brass, piling them on top of each other and sustaining them into gaseous clouds of overtones. Chemtrails of reverb and delay amplify this feeling as the music veers wildly between a low hum and a medium-ish hum. The arrangements find the middle ground between careful composition and pure drone, and the result is so beautiful and sad, it becomes funny, something the song titles seem to acknowledge (see: “The Lonely People (Are Getting Lonelier)”). Turns out, misfits and wise-asses are capable of grand gestures, too. –Andrew Gaerig
Listen: Stars of the Lid: “Piano Aquieu”
The KLF: Chill Out (1990)
The title Chill Out—a reference to the chill-out rooms common at raves in the late ’80s—harkens back to a time when ambient music was uniquely functional. It was comedown sauce for dancers and users who required womb-like enclosures, sonic or otherwise. Chill Out, which dropped as this functionality was crystallizing into a style of its own, is not useful in this way. Far from feeling encompassing, its diffused clatter of samples and references seems to let anything and everything pass through. It is an obtuse piss-take, because the entirety of the KLF's existence was an obtuse piss-take.
Still, Chill Out has earned a place in the ambient ranks because of the serenity in the group's sample-adelic quiltwork, plus a commitment to scene-setting (it purportedly describes a train journey from Texas to Louisiana). There’s a tranquility that would be completely unnecessary if the duo of Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond were just cracking wise. In emphasizing the specifics—Elvis launching into “In the Ghetto,” or a preacher repeatedly imploring you, the listener, to get ready—they achieved a kind of wayward, everyday clamor: music and voices and car horns, all sinking in deep. –Andrew Gaerig
Listen: The KLF: “Madrugada Eterna”
Terry Riley: A Rainbow in Curved Air (1969)
The original jacket art for A Rainbow in Curved Air includes a short utopian poem that begins, “And then all wars ended.” It explores a world in which the Pentagon has been tipped over and painted psychedelic colors, all of lower Manhattan is transformed into a pastoral wonderland, vegetarianism reigns worldwide, the boundaries of society become porous, and, ultimately, “the concept of work was forgotten.” When it was released in 1969, the poem was probably not much of a surprise, as hippie culture was already ubiquitous, but it gives distinct hopefulness to Terry Riley’s monumentally influential piece of minimalist composition.
Its visions speak to the friendliness of A Rainbow in Curved Air. The piece is a warm sensorium of repeated notes and early electronic weirdness, and it still sounds fitting in an incense-filled ashram or a hazy dorm room. The piece was Riley’s most commercially oriented; it leaked into the mainstream, inspiring the keyboard repetitions of The Who’s “Baba O’Riley,” and it also foreshadowed the hypnotic overdubbing techniques of Steve Reich and William Basinski, bridging generations of experimental music makers.
What really makes A Rainbow in Curved Air so special is its overwhelming sense of optimism; of all its qualities, this is the one that has never been reproduced exactly the same. It feels good to be listening to this music: It permeates the air, makes the world feel sweeter, lets the drudgery of work disappear. It’s truly the ideal world Riley imagined in his poem—and it feels like music that soundtracks discovery. –Kevin Lozano
Listen: Terry Riley: “A Rainbow in Curved Air”
William Basinski: The Disintegration Loops I-IV (2002)
In a healthy state, analog tape is pale brown, the color of the magnetic audio recording contained therein. In 2001, William Basinski, looking to digitize a collection of older tape loops he’d made out of easy listening music, found that the tape began to flake a bit as it played, like paint peeling. Playing the loops repeatedly, they began to lose their composition as the tape disintegrated. What starts as a snippet of a forlorn brass instrument eventually degraded into a pale imitation, as though he’d produced a composition and then, immediately after, performed its faded memory.
The Disintegration Loops is immensely long (the first of its four parts is over an hour), but it is made up of repeated snippets sometimes as short as five or 10 seconds. Over the course of that mammoth running time, you hear the piece fall apart, literally. “I’m recording the life and death of a melody,” Basinski said in a 2011 Radiolab interview. “It just made me think of human beings, you know, and how we die.” The mysteries of life and death are perhaps too big a question to be answered by tape drone, and Basinski doesn’t attempt to. His piece is beautiful and sad, temporal and infinite; its changes are imperceptible, yet ever-present. It sounds like wind, like a ship’s horn heard in the distance when lost at sea, on track to either rescuing you or passing you by.
Basinski made the accidental discovery of the tapes’ disintegration in 2001, shortly before the attacks on the World Trade Center. From his home in Brooklyn on September 11th, he made a short film of the light just before the evening’s end. When Disintegration Loops was released, a still from that film made up its cover. The music has since been entwined with the loss of that day, and rightfully so, but it represents forward momentum, too. Hearing the sound slowly degrade, it's clear it will eventually disappear entirely. But until then, it keeps going, trying its best to play before reaching the end. –Matthew Schnipper
Listen: William Basinski: “D|p 1.2”
Aphex Twin: Selected Ambient Works Volume II (1994)
With Selected Ambient Works 85-92, Richard D. James established “ambient techno” as a viable concept rather than a contradiction in terms. But soon this serene offshoot of banging rave floor music became its own New Age-y cul-de-sac. Bloody-minded as ever, for its follow-up, James switched from chill-out to chilling: ominously featureless soundscapes woven from abstract textures and eerily fixated pulses. Gone, for the most part, were those lovely Aphex melodies shimmering like dewdrops on a spider web. The project’s foreboding aura was intensified by the absence of track titles: All 24 tracks were identified only by images of texture swatches such as lichen or weathered stone, as if to deliberately exacerbate the listener’s sensation of being lost.
There was beauty here, still, but a peculiar and unsettling kind: The opener, for instance, modulates a voice into a baby-talk squiggle, then ripples it through a hall-of-mirrors echo. James trailed the project—which proved as influential as its predecessor, with similarly mixed results—by talking about the inspiration he’d drawn from experiments with lucid dreaming, techniques that allow the sleeper to steer the storyline of a nocturnal adventure. True or not, the effect of this music feels exactly like being inside a dream: not necessarily idyllic, with a strangeness that haunts you long into your waking day. –Simon Reynolds
Listen: Aphex Twin: “#3”
Brian Eno: Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978)
Eno may not have invented the idea of atmospheric sound, but he gave it a name: ambient music. (No offense to Erik Satie, but Brian Eno is the whole reason you're reading this feature.) Eno, the 1970s’ wiliest and most reflective pop-star/philosopher, sought a functional music that could color the air to suit certain moods—the sonic equivalent of perfume, or air freshener. He set his quest in opposition to what was then the dominant form of environmental music: easy listening and “elevator music,” orchestral arrangements of pop hits, which he deemed “lightweight and derivative.” Snobbery was built into ambient music from the beginning: Eno aspired to create not just any atmospheres, but above all, tasteful ones.
But he wanted to coax, not impose. Rather than “blanketing” a given environment, Eno imagined sounds that could enhance a space’s emotional resonance; he favored sounds conducive to doubt and uncertainty, as well as those favoring calm and thoughtfulness. In other words, he wanted to create background music for loners, aesthetes, and introverts, and that’s precisely what he achieved with Ambient 1: Music for Airports. Its piano and synthesizer melodies move as gently, and seemingly without purpose, as a mobile in still air. Simultaneously wistful and beatific, it is emotionally open-ended, and it makes for an ideal mood-enhancer, at least for the listener in a reflective headspace. If only any airport on earth were like this; the image it evokes—of patient, optimistic travelers gliding soundlessly along moving walkways while sun falls across gleaming surfaces of aluminum and glass—seems unlikely to be made real in our lifetimes. That train to the future has long since left the station (and derailed in a fiery heap). For the listener curious about ambient music who has no idea where to begin, there really is no better introduction than this. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Brian Eno: “1/1”
Contributors: Andy Beta, Ryan Dombal, Andrew Gaerig, Brian Howe, Kevin Lozano, Marc Masters, Jenn Pelly, Simon Reynolds, Mark Richardson, Matthew Schnipper, Ryan Schreiber, Philip Sherburne, Seth Colter Walls
