Your nominations for the ILX AMBIENT ALBUMS POLL (nominations close on Friday, May 31st)

Hmm, I'm still not gonna disqualify anything, but just because some people have nominated dub techno shouldn't be an excuse to nom more dub techno. Most dub techno isn't ambient. If by the first Rhythm & Sound album you mean the one with Tikiman, it's a great record, but IMO it's not ambient by any measure. There are exceptions of course, for example I would say something like Liumin by DeepChord is both dub techno and ambient, but in general I would give a good consideration before nominating anything with a steady 4/4 kick beat.

And yeah, I know have Empire State Building on my list which also has a 4/4 beat throughout, so I'm not trying to say all techno or IDM or whatever doesn't fit here, I'm just hoping people understand that that not all "home listening electronic music" is ambient.

(xpost)

It's just a matter of time before someone noms Boards of Canada.

I think ambient-ness for me has something to do with difficulty of perceiving movement, lack of drama, also just a general diffusiveness and um.... driftiness... a sense of distance/absence/“not there”-ness, indirect, sonic blankets

Fennesz/Tim hecker include plenty of actual bursts of noise. and bald faced emotion. I like em both

Steve Reich/tony Conrad/Niblock stuff is so intense and lysergic it just doesn’t float or sit enough

I also hate sentimental gooey “ambient” that sounds like it could soundtrack a serious moment in a stupid movie/tv show. The ambient equiv of like Explosions In the Sky.

This mostly sounds right to me.

Last time I tried one of CBC Music's 'ambient' stations, it was p much all chill/loungey beats.

xp

just waiting for the moment that it'll cause maximum annoyance

Grouper isn't ambient either

Tim Hecker is very clearly a maker of ambient music as far as I'm concerned, despite the bursts of static and his more compositionally-oriented approach. Stars of the Lid also make use of climaxes and no one's disputing their inclusion in this poll. I'm on the fence when it comes to Fennesz, however, although his latest LP scans as ambient to these ears. And there's no question that Reich shouldn't even be considered. Or why not also nominate Morton Feldman, while we're at it? Or pieces from Ligeti's cloud period? Or Chopin's Nocturnes? etc.

I also hate sentimental gooey “ambient” that sounds like it could soundtrack a serious moment in a stupid movie/tv show. The ambient equiv of like Explosions In the Sky.

― brimstead, Saturday, May 18, 2019 12:57 AM (eleven hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Like Stars of the Lid?

The moment the ambient nominations thread turned violent

(Now is the time to nominate boards of Canada, btw)

Now, now. Their albums pre-Tired Sounds are less obviously guilty of such charges. (I like them all.)

2xp

Yeah, no, the minimalist composers seemed more 'wrong' to me than Tim Hecker/Fennesz; it was more that I liked brimstead's explanation of how ambient music works when it comes to drawing lines.

xps

Black Sea does sound like ambient music to me.

Definitely. I suppose Endless Summer is the one I'm most reluctant to call ambient.

H. Takahashi - Low Power
DeepChord - Immersions
Haruomi Hosono - Watering A Flower
M. Geddes Gengras - Hawaiki Tapes
Suso Saiz - Rainworks

Thing about Stars of the Lid soundtracking a movie... if it's an imax documentary about the mysteries of universe vs. if it's in a scene in a drama about a seemingly "happy" family- well you're going to get entirely different emotional results with the same exact piece of music.

Fennesz - Black Sea
6/30

(Agree that Endless Summer is more debatable. Feldman actually seems more 'ambient' to me than the minimalists, not that I'd nominate him.)

Oh sorry 5/30 for my list above

Agreed about Feldman, especially, say, The Viola in My Life.

xp

The moment the ambient nominations thread turned violent

Bill Laswell & Terre Thaemlitz — Web
(misattributed on spotify to Laswell & Tetsuo Inoue, but it's Thaemlitz)

1/30

The Rhythm and Sound first album call was based on a track from the Incense and Black Light record which sounded awfully like R&S - particularly the vast spaces of the first album (the compilation of the first EPs). I'm very much of the opinion it's not ambient either but if we're going down that route I'd hate to see it miss out!
Anyway, still happy to go with consensus.

Oh sorry 5/30 for my list above

"Low Power" had already been nominated, so you're at 4/30.

colleen - the golden morning breaks
virginia astley - from gardens where we feel secure
william basinski - melancholia
emeralds - what happened
emeralds - allegory of allergies
robert aa lowe / rose lazaar - eclipses
helios - eingya
grouper - the man who died in his boat

― meaulnes, Sunday, May 19, 2019 2:58

The Colleen album has already been nominated, so you've used 7/30 of your noms.

The Rhythm and Sound first album call was based on a track from the Incense and Black Light record which sounded awfully like R&S - particularly the vast spaces of the first album (the compilation of the first EPs).

Yeah, for better or worse DeepChord has made a career on imitating Ernestus and Oswald as well as Wolfgang Voigt... That's not necessarily a criticism though, some of the material he's released sounds incredible, no matter how deritative it is.

And sorry if I sounded needlessly critical above, I really do love that first Rhythm & Sound comp, it's what got me into dub techno to begin with back in 1998... But half of that album is dude singing reggae over dub beats, and like you said, that's not really ambient.

Gentlemen, you can't fight here, this is the chill-out room!

Tempted to write a screenplay just so I can get this line in.

Yeah I don’t like stars of the lid

Natural Snow Buildings, ambient or not?

is jeff mills ambient?

"Low Power" had already been nominated, so you're at 4/30.

― Tuomas, Sunday, May 19, 2019 12:20 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Funny, I probably forgot to check this one because among my picks I was convinced it was the least likely to have already been nominated!

Jonny Nash & Suzanne Kraft - Passive Aggressive

There! 5/30

Oh wait...

Kara-Lis Coverdale - A480
Kara-Lis Coverdale - Grafts
Kate NV - для FOR

8/30

The more I’m trawling my library for nominations, the harder it gets to draw a clear line between ambient and minimalist/classical (Arvo Part? Terry Riley? La Monte Young?), IDM (BoC, Autechre, FSOL), metal (Filosofem, Sunn((O)), Lustre, Boris, Darkspace), minimal/dub techno (Deepchord, Jeff Mills), 90s ambient house/trance (The Orb, Sequencial, Solar Quest), downtempo/psybient (Shpongle, Entheogenic)...even though I’m more of the ‘big tent’ school I end up chucking out all the borderline cases since there’s so much worthy stuff to nominate that is unambiguously ambient.

I'm more inclined to follow this poll than participate because I've got quite a catholic approach to what ambient is and I want to see what the headz are into but:

Pete Namlook - Air-You

(1/30)

I suppose it’s a comp so delete if necessary but:
David Bowie - All Saints

i'm still early on in david toop's Ocean of Sound, but i'm really enjoying it. some words from him and also from biosphere and the orb:

“much of the music i discuss could be characterized as drifting or simply existing in stasis rather than developing in any dramatic fashion. structure emerges slowly, minimally or apparently not at all, encouraging states of reverie and receptivity in the listener that suggest (on the good side of boredom) a very positive rootlessness.”

“ambient music os more a way of listening, an umbrella term for attitude, rather than a single-identifiable style.”

“before Geir [Jennsen, Biosphere] goes on stage to press the first button, he wants to lay one more ambient cliché to rest: ‘i hate it if people use my music as a background. when i was listening to jon hassell and brian eno, i was inspired to know more about the himalayas or astronomy, egypt and archaeology. i want people to get inspired to read astronomy or get another view of the universe. to be curious.”

Alex Patterson of the Orb: “…i spent four or five hours playing really early dub reggae. you don’t have to dance to it, you just nod your head to it. it’s still ambient to me. some of the effects on those records - a four track, in a huge in Orange Street, Kingston, and they’d make sounds like that. it puts us to shame when you think of how much we’ve got to play with.”

also, on a completely unrelated note, this amazing passage:

“in the early 1930s, a man named geoffrey christian witnessed a demonstration of an instrument used on the upper purari river, papua new guinea, during full-moon dances. for the ten to sixteen days of this ceremony, the men ate very little but drank huge amounts of water through long bamboo pipes. five or six of them would then sit in a circle and balance large, polished hardwood disks on their toes or knees. ‘each man lifts his diaphragm’, wrote christian, ‘and the edge of the disk is thrust deeply into the pit of the stomach; all then depress their diaphragms on to the upper surface of the circumference of the disk and open their mouths. an old man then takes a stone-headed hammer and gently hits the centre of the disk. the sound appears to reverberate from the distended lungs, and issues forth from the mouths of the seated men; the effect is a deep booming sound, similar to the sound of the big skin-headed drums of other parts.’

ambient music is more a way of listening, an umbrella term for attitude, rather than a single-identifiable style.

this is essentially how i think about and use the A-word too

I feel bad for starting the dub techno debate - especially when I nominated the Rod Modell album by mistake! I meant to nominate Rod Modell and Michael Mantra’s Sonic Continuum. I got the album titles switched. I’m glad if my error turned some onto that great album, though. I’m fine with striking that one and replacing it with Sonic Continuum.

another passage that would argue for the expansive definition:

'various forms of this music have been called, with varying levels of appropriateness, ambient, environmental, deep listening, ambient techno, ambient dub, electronica, electronic listening music, isolationist, post-industrial ambient, space music, beautiful music, sound art, sound design, electronic music without beats, brainwave music, picture music, ambient jungle, steady state music, holy minimalism, Fourth World, New Age, chill out, or the useless one to cap them all, new music. but no genre category adds up to much more than media shorthand or a marketing ploy. open music might be a more useful catch-all name for what i am talking about, except for the fact that a proportion of this music, sometimes a high proportion, is vacuum sealed, zipped up in a droning Om-zone of discarnate reverie resistant to intervention and crackling quietly at the back of the freezer.'

isn’t that book great?

I end up chucking out all the borderline cases since there’s so much worthy stuff to nominate that is unambiguously ambient.

Here’s a recent goodreads review I wrote for ocean of sound:

I first read Ocean Of Sound in high school, and found it to be a dizzying and overwhelmingly intoxicating read. As the years went by and my sense of aesthetics developed, I would revisit passages and find myself becoming more and more in tune with its vision of music. Nowadays it's practically my bible. On my fourth or fifth front-to-back read now, I find myself emphatically thinking "Yes! Hell yes!" to the ideas of the musicians that Toop interviews/describes (as well as the ideas of Toop himself).

This is a magical and inspiring work about various strands of non-programmatic 20th century music; music that drifts, music that explores, music that allows things to happen. It's sad that most "ambient" music these days is cheap programmed melodramatic soundtrack fodder.

Yeah this book was written 20 years ago but the vast ocean (heh) of ideas and thoughtfood here will inspire any artist who is truly interested in transcendence.

sorry

Spotify playlist is mostly up to date, and hilariously long. I'll paste things I can't find on Spotify here, in case anyone knows better/has the benefit of local licencing/wants to do something else with them:

https://pastebin.com/kinHYBWn

anybody know how to open that spotify link in app instead of in the browser?

if you search for Nag! Nag! Nag!'s username (empeecee), you should be able to find it in his public playlists

and yeah, huge props to NNN for putting all that together

Does the app like this better?
spotify:user:empeecee:playlist:4fPPFJHHNihMjlO9GVEs6F

nice! that did work, thanks! I did try searching by username before but didn't have any luck.