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. My first thought on presaging a list of canonic ambient records: “What music isn’t ambient in the 21 st century?” Given the current life demands, multi-tasking has become a mono-activity, one that takes up our entire sensory field.
A lamp casts a sliver of light on the wall, then slowly tapers off, fading away. 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. An unheard historical example, ahead of the curve, seldom discussed.īut 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. Deep, resonant oscillator warble, void of unnecessary motion: Exactly what I’m looking for whilst scouring the darkest recesses of this music. 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. Taking into account our writers’ interpretation of those loose guidelines, here’s our list of the 50 best ambient albums.īut first, a word from someone whose work appears on this list. And we considered the fact that not all albums in a given artist’s catalogue qualify as ambient. 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. 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. “Ambient” is now used to describe all kinds of music, from tracks you can dance to all the way to harsh noise. 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. And he should know, since he basically invented the genre three years earlier with his album Discreet Music. “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.
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