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

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.

Alio Die & Mathias Grassow - Expanding Horizon
ASC - Nothing Is Certain
Atrium Carceri - Ptahil
bvdub - Return To Tonglu
Carbon Based Lifeforms - World Of Sleepers
Circular - Divergent
Deutsch Nepal - Tolerance (How the Servant Utilized His Masters)
Entheogenic - Spontaneous Illumination
Herbst9 - Buried Under Time And Sand
Ildjarn-Nidhogg - Hardangervidda
Ishq - Orchid
Klaus Wiese, Ted de Jong & Mathias Grassow - el-Hadra: The Mystik Dance
Kreng - Grimoire
Natural Snow Buildings - The Dance Of The Moon And The Sun
Northaunt - Barren Land
Oöphoi & Tau Ceti - Celestial Geometries
Organum - Birds' Wings Were Glued To Their Bodies And Their Feet Froze To The Ground
Oval - 94 Diskont
Rapoon - The Fires Of The Borderlands
Schiller - Atemlos
Shinjuku Thief - The Witch Haven
Suspended Memories - Forgotten Gods
Svartsinn - Elegies For The End
Troum & All Sides - Shutûn
When - Svartedauen (The Black Death)
V/A - ...And Even Wolves Hid Their Teeth And Tongue Wherever Shelter Was Given
V/A - Ambient 4: Isolationism
30/30

Much as I like the 'big tent' definition and I appreciate that 'open music' can be created in many many forms, indeed music that drifts and feels organic & all that but I can't really bring myself to vote for Lee Scratch Perry or Kruder & Dorfmeister or Autechre or Penderecki or endlessly droning black metal records, in a poll like this even though you can credibly argue they're all ambient in one way or another.

Arthur Russell - World of Echo

(2/30)

Fabio Orsi - Winterreise
Ezekiel Honig - Surfaces of a Broken Marching Band
Pan American - White Bird Release
Former Selves - Selige Sehnsucht
Jack Jutson - Mother Official
Sarah Davachi - August Harp
Sarah Davachi - Baron Court
ASC - Fervent Dream
Secret Pyramid - Movements of Night
Wil Bolton - Quarry Park

10/30

ASC is going to suffer massively from vote splitting is he?

I thought abt nominating that Organum record Siegbran, thanks. I think it qualifies here, some of their stuff is just too noisy but that one's massive and droney.

Yes that’s a corker.

I’m now revisiting the When record, that might be a bit too noisy to warrant inclusion, these collage-type records certainly set a mood but ‘ambient’ doesn’t really fit the bill.

oooh, I forgot about Shinjuku Thief, nice

Natural Snow Buildings - The Dance Of The Moon And The Sun

Is this included in Daughters of Darkness?

Daughter Of Darkness is a completely different album no?

I was thinking the box set, which on review of the rules would not qualify.

The Dance of the Moon and the Sun is glorious.

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

Can't believe I forgot to mention Rothko Chapel. I would actually be ok with that nom.

Area C: Touch Pieces
Barry Cleveland: Mythos
Christian Høy Knudsen: Hav
Forest Management: Delicate
Klaus Weise: Qumra II
Kowalski Room: Modern Urban Starlight
Lightwave: Musique Provisoire
Michel Redolfi: Desert Tracks
Murmer: What Are The Roots That Clutch
Robert Henke: Layering Buddha
Stijn Hüwels: Tomodachi
Subterrene: Bathetic Resonance
Tatsuya Nakatani: Gong
The Young Gods: Music for Artificial Clouds
Thumpmonks: Noir Selections
Tor Lundvall: Empty City
Warmth: Essay
Zimoun: Drums

Area C: Touch Pieces

Ledriver, this appears to be a 20 minute extra disc that came with the album "Charmed Birds Against Sorcery", not an album in its own right. Do you wish to nominate the whole 2 disc album?

Kara-Lis Coverdale - Grafts

Evan, this is an EP and it lasts only 22 minutes, so it doesn't meet the poll criteria. So you still have 23 nominations left.

I didn't even know it was an extra disc. I don't have the original. I withdraw that and will submit more if I think of some.

Oh darn! 30 min or more, right. Got it.

The nomination list should be up to date now, lemme know if anything is missing.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1X14B7JHAooNtfPbNilJ1xPshNaKBbL6q-8E1xUdM7xU

Now I have my work cut out for me to find and listen to every one of these 500 albums and come to a fair and unbiased judgement of its relative rank.

Boards of Canada - Music Has The Right To Children
Boards of Canada - Geogaddi
Boards of Canada - The Campfire Headphase
Boards of Canada - Tomorrow's Harvest
Brian Eno - Another Green World
Arthur Russell - Instrumentals
Jon Keliehor - The Beginning Of Time
Pendant - Make Me Know You Sweet
Various Artists - Mono No Aware
Various Artists - bbliss
Happy Meals - Full Ashram Devotional Ceremony (Volumes IV - VI)
Cucina Povera - Hilja
Cucina Povera - Zoom
Iona Fortune - Tao Of I
Penelope Trappes - Penelope One
Colleen - Captain Of None
Colleen - A Flame My Love, A Frequency
XYR - El Dorado
Huerco S - Untitled
Pontiac Streator and Ulla Strauss - Chat

23/30

Boards Of Canada ambient or IDM/Downtempo? I was also listening to that Hammock Kenotic record and while it's great, that's mostly a straight up shoegaze/postrock record with lots of uptempo beats.

BoC have too many boring beats to be ambient.

"Boring" and "ambient" in the same sentence?! I never! *clutches pearls*

However I do agree that BOC don't really strike me as ambient.

However however I am tickled that we've basically got Colleen's whole discography now (only missing her Mort Aux Vaches).

Love Colleen but there’s not a single record of her that I’d consider ambient. Perhaps only Colleen et les Boîtes à Musique?

List of nominations looks great. Extremely stoked.

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Do we have a campaigning thread?

I'm sad that David Sylvian's Gone to Earth sides 3/4 can't go in because of sides 1/2.

I hate to my nominations so Brian Eno-centric because, duh, but we have to make sure this one is on there:

Brian Eno - Lux

very underrated album in his catalog imo

^^ was just listening to that the other day, quite nice

sadly i'm sure Another Green World will absolutely destroy it in voting, since AGW was nominated. i (of course) adore AGW but it would be difficult to classify as "ambient" under even the most generous interpretation, yadayadayada

Yeah, great album thought it is, can't see how that one fits. Almost half the tracks have vocals on them.

Yeah, It's all songs!

Détrée - Architectura Celestis

8/30

I will be voting for a fair amount of Eno, but not AGW

‘discreet music’ the only truly ambient piece for me

I kinda feel that beatless should be part of the criteria of ambient.

ambient music isn’t the same as chillout music or whatever

If AGW is ambient I'm out.