"wide open desert music" S/D

I think of Scenic as more western tinged instrumental rock. There's an omnipresent drum kit, which keeps it out of ambient territory.

Harold Budd appears on the last Scenic album, which adds +50 to ambient

Bruce Licher's bandcamp also has this great 45min piece he and his wife put together for an installation of hers:
https://brucelicher.bandcamp.com/track/suspension-of-disbelief

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LGt2N5L4JA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6V9vEO76Z8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4S-aE879T0

Chris Isaak's old guitarist James Wilsey (that's him on "Wicked Game") has an instrumental album out that's well worth tracking down.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7XBBRvNkBk

Brian Grainger - Eight Thousander
https://attacknine.bandcamp.com/album/eight-thousander

Lost in the morass of mid-90s surf rock was this great album by Death Valley.
https://www.discogs.com/Death-Valley-Que-Pasta/release/2335153

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86l9awk-VLY

Nice Cocteau Twins cover too

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClZnB84DljY

Jon Porras' Black Mesa is the first thing that came to mind

And there has to be some Barn Owl as well, I think Lost in the Glare is the one that sounds the most like that

That Cocteau Twins cover is great.

Earth - Bees Made Honey

giant sand own this thread. an example from "chore of enchantment", his masterpiece.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJtbKgZkpc0

The whole "The Earth is not a Cold Dead Place" by Explosions in the Sky.

after moving to Texas, The American Analog Set's 'The Golden Band' suddenly made a lot more sense, striking me as the kind of music you would make after a brutal August day of 100+ degrees.

*wearily puts on high-vis jacket and gets to work* I can only side-eye the romanticised inhuman aesthetic at work here & wld question the appeal of it, even tho I like some of the music mentioned itt. also I wld humbly suggest that there is quite a bit of music from/indigenous to the desert (or the edge of it, I suppose) which is much better than this stuff *stretches back, sighs heavily, clocks off*

Quit humbly suggesting and actually suggest.

I've made a Spotify playlist of sorts, to which I'll add and mess about with the order as and when (Spotify web app is total bumcake).

The desert eased his vague anger

Christ, my tortured syntax: I'll change the order and add a few more tracks when I get the chance - ie when I'm not using the Spotify web app, which is shite.

all them sahel string instrumental players, hamza el din most especially

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2By_WxnL3AA

O the inhumanity of listening to non-indigenous, see-through romance music whlst driving through the american west, ffs

unless i'm missing something crucial, the "wide open desert music" under discussion here is, by and large, a genre of contemporary americana, sort of "post-country and western". in its essential form, you get clean, bright, reverb-heavy guitar lines drifting slowly through darkened ambient space. a combination of western twang, blues grit, and surf spaciness drained of vigor to point where it's practically undead, vampire music in cowboy drag (or vice-versa). dragging in hamza el din seems perverse.

I was with you until "drained of vigor", basically I started this thread to get more recommendations as to what else sounds like "Binah" from Live Low To The Earth In The Iron Age. the desert has color!

edited version, wtf this is supposed to be 27 minutes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cajQehDpbsc

i agree that the non-american stuff doesn't fit with this cinematic staring across a (most often imaginary) desert soaking up the atmosphere vibe, hence just alluding to it initially. deserts in this context are a blank inhuman wilderness for the listener to passively inhabit & think/feel/do graphic design

I was with you until "drained of vigor"

yeah, that was my prejudice showing. i'm not a big fan of the cinematic slowcore western thing.

It doesn't have to be cinematic slowcore western. Sometimes it's a particular style of cinematic instrumental guitar. Or krautrock infused country.

As far as the original post(s), the thing that makes this sound so special is that there really aren't too many things that hit these specific buttons. Hired Hand, Tuma, "Binah," etc are singular, which is why this thread jumped the shark as soon as people started suggesting every 90s post rock band that liked Morricone

I do really like that Bruce Licher piece mentioned upthread, and that Garlo thing sounds amazing. But even these have almost nothing to do with the Steve Roach album that inspired this thread

i did this a while back was pretty happy w/it but if anything too on the nose

http://soundcloud.com/matthew-lee-helgeson/desert-jive

Nice! Here's a rough little jam I'd done when I was obsessing over Paris, Texas. Improving a little with messy results.

https://soundcloud.com/factual-1/open

i like that!

i like this sound but i do get a little suspicious of it, like it's almost too easy to hit those stylistic cues that conjure up desert stuff

Thanks!

Yeah I feel like you can say that about solo instrumental music or electronica or ambient... It's helpful to have a unique take and not rely too much on gimmicky flare.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6YioCO0n8s

https://youtu.be/72csh1Zm38A
02 Oren Ambarchi - Knots (Touch)

ffs, it's silly to say this thread "jumped the shark" when it's got me listening to that Eyvind Kang record again (I downloaded it last time someone was raving about it on ILM, and liked it well enough, but it's been been a minute since I listened)

it's so good. his book of angels entry is fantastic too

Maybe the thread title could have been something more like 'music that sounds like the thing it's trying to imitate', or 'landscape music alchemy' or 'Richard Skelton plays quavery strings while ghostly children chant the names of lost Cumbrian villages.'

This video I had not seen before, and it is amazing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYJkH6mdbAY

The Harold Budd / Clive Wright albums (3 in all iirc) are all very worthwhile

Does Michael Brooks' HYBRID fit this genre?

I know this thread was CONDEMNED for stepping outside some relatively arbitrary parameters, but I'm still off exploring tangents.

My favourite discovery has been the Padang Food Tigers album from last year, Bumblin' Creed. I loved Ready Country Nimbus (from 2012, I think), but this is something else again. We don't really have a tradition of 'landscape music' as such in the UK*, cos we're too hemmed in and our imaginations are too stunted by post-colonial melancholia to allow us to mythologise the landscape or something, but what these guys do is perfect, evocative 'wide open space' stuff.

*OK, some/most local folk music is arguably landscape music, but not in the sense of trying to evoke or transmute landscape into music.

And thanks to Evan for the Calexico primer - lots of those I was unaware of.

yeah I still need to dig into those

sorry for condemning the thread! landscape music is a clear and interesting way to put it. I think if anything it's a colonial tradition, that is, relating to a place through the atmosphere/impression offered by its landscape is something of an outsider/touristic approach mb. it seems of a piece with national geographic etc. when you said british landscape music i thought of the excellent chris watson, who has made field recordings all over the place but including in the UK (listening to stepping into the dark now). he did a thing with robert macfarlane which is another parallel seam of landscape-art. the relationship or contrast between this stuff and field recordings is interesting. I'm def more into the latter for whatever reason. they feel lighter.

can't think of much that might fit the "british (or old world in general) landscape music" description though, that is curious

this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yPnLIwIA1E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-px60iPueEk

can't think of much that might fit the "british (or old world in general) landscape music" description though, that is curious

maybe Diamond Mine by King Creosote and Jon Hopkins?

Last year's album Elite Feline by Lotto is a minimalist/mantric guitar trio take. bandcamp

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErG7vJ-L5-M

Must be something in the water: Latest Mojo with cover story on The Joshua Tree has an accompanying CD of "desert songs" that seems very, uh, compiled by British rockists who've never been to the desert