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

I don't wanna start a fight here, so if someone retracts their nomination, it can't be renominated by someone else, sorry.

have you run one of these polls before? the arguing over the nominations is one of the most excruciating and tedious things imaginable. the correct answer to however the pollrunner wants to handle nominations is "ok, thanks. and thanks for spending an insane amount of your free time on this internet poll for my enjoyment"

That’s dumb as shit and ALSO thanks for spending an insane amount of your free time on this internet poll for my enjoyment

Whiney, as you well know, ambient is notoriusly hard to define. IMO it's much better that the "what is ambient?" discussion is happening here, and that it's reflected on the nominations, than if some controversial album makes it to the top 50 and people start arguing then. If multiple people have expressed doubt whether Fennesz belongs to the poll, and the person who nominated the album retracts it, I think you should respect that and not renominate it immediately afterwards. To me that feels like petty contrarianism.

Anyway, today is the last day to nominate!

i'd like to retract all everyone's nominations except my own please

Les Joyaux de la Princesse & Regard Extrême - Die Weiße Rose

40/40

recently i was whining on a satie thread about how no one follows the instructions on the Trois Gymnopédies to play it as slowly as possible. the slower the better imo

― i will never make a typo ever again (Karl Malone)

My nominations:

Strategy - The Infinity File ‎
Elodie - Vieux Silence
Toumani Diabaté - The Mandé Variations
Machinefabriek - Marijn
The Necks - Aether
Hisato Higuchi - Dialogue

good call on "Aether."

The Fun Years - God Was Like, No
John Luther Adams - Become Ocean

I think I'm done. Thanks to Tuomas for making sense of all this!

No prob. I'm going to sleep now, and I'm not gonna sort the final nominations until I get up, so you can still nom stuff until around 8am GMT tomorrow.

good call on the fun years.. i wanted to cite 'baby, it's cold inside', but it sort of crescendos / plateaus in a celebratory way. there's a stretch midway through the album where it becomes this all-encompassing, shuddering tremolo--it sounds fantastic on the stereo. their music feels like a rough blend of philip jeck-styled sound art and something like CODY-era Mogwai

*not a "rough" blend, but rather a very successful one

why is fennesz not ambient?

Sorry for the last minute noms, I'm on China time and it crept up on me.

Various - Pop Ambient 2006
Various - Excursions In Ambience - The Third Dimension
Kazumasa Hashimoto - Yupi
Biosphere & The Higher Intelligence Agency - Birmingham Frequencies
Dan HabarNam - From The Known

I really think Talk Talk's chill LP's should be allowed.

I had no idea there were so many ambient fans still on ILM. I had no idea there were so many folks still on ILM at all, I thought it was all pretty much just five-ten recalcitrant stragglers. Is ILM actually more active than ever, and if so does that explain why dad rock dominates the site now?

Veering sharply into another realm of me being a nuisance, I really don't get some of the ambient hipsterism on display here. If you're truly averse to calming music, why focus on ambient at all?

I'll show myself out...

...And another thing:

Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement - Ambient Black Magic

I really hope folks have given this a listen. Best ambient I've heard from the past ~decade.

i don't know about best i've heard in the past decade, but it is pretty good.

xpost

I don't listen to that much new ambient to be fair. Checking out your list, I definitely like the Loscil but it is slightly treacly. RSE have a distinctive sound which as a hot take I'd rate higher.

The only other artist I recognize from yours is Sunn O)) but I'm not much of a drone fan if it's harder than SoTL (I do quite like their more droney cuts). Which other one would you rate as the greatest of the decade?

Speaking of last minute, how about this Anthony Rother?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EOAqGAuWZk&t=3337s

I'm familiar with the last song which just popped up on my random but I haven't had a chance to check out the full release yet. Hi ho hi ho it's off to work I go...

Link is borked?

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

why is fennesz not ambient?

I kind of feel that the intersection of drone and ambient is a pretty large overlap, and the sustained washes of Venice become texturally unobtrusive through its saturation, like minimalism through maximalism.

But as to why I denominated it, it's looking like I misread Lowell's post (I must have elided the "less"), haha oops.

Tuomas: please reinstate Fennesz - Venice.

thanks for the extension!

Thom Brennan – Mountains
Seconds in Formaldehyde – Suchness 3
Star Turbine – The Sleeping Land
Andrew Pekler – Tristes Tropiques

26/40

sustained washes? are you thinking of another album?

https://www.discogs.com/style/harsh+noise+wall

https://harshnoisewally.tumblr.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UerLIFo4d6k

One more nom

Broken Hearted Dragonflies: Insect Electronica From Southeast Asia

Also don’t forget

FM3 - The Buddha Machine

The Buddha Machine is not a record, so it's not eligible, sorry. If you want, you can nominate some of FM3's actual albums. Also, someone has already nominated Robert Henke's Layering Buddha, which is an album made by sampling the Buddha Machine, so you can always vote for that.

It doesn't look like I have the time to go through the nominations today, so I'm gonna give you 24 hours more time. The nomination process ends this time tomorrow.

Boris - Flood
Julia Kent - Temporal
Julia Kent - Character

Speaking of last minute, how about this Anthony Rother?

I have that album (62 Minutes on Mars), and while it's not among my favourite FAX releases, it's indubitably ambient. So feel free to nominate it, if you wanna.

many xposts to Viborg, I really think that Richard Skelton's work (Landings in particular, as well as his work as A Broken Consort) is probably my highest-rated of the past decade after SotL. it's definitely more influence by Arvo Part and a sort of academic minimalism, but it has an emotional depth in its slight variations that make it really worth for me.

Here's one from Landings:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NTvcfkPq4Y

and here is how his latest is described:

Music for the retreating ice-sheets of Iceland, produced whilst on a 'Frontiers in Retreat' residency in Seyðisfjörður in 2016.

www.frontiersinretreat.org/artists/richard_skelton

Front Variations is composed from sine waves subjected to increasing amounts of feedback in order to simulate the so-called 'ice-albedo' feedback mechanism.

This is the process whereby the action of melting glaciers reduces the global surface area of ice, thereby reducing the amount of solar radiation that glaciers reflect, which in turn increases global temperatures and causes further glacial melting.

Ring modulation and distortion were also used to further deteriorate the sound signal.

Front Variations is also available as part of Quoin 4 - the annual publication for friends and patrons of Corbel Stone Press. Quoin 4 features data collected by the World Glacier Monitoring Service and aerial photography of arctic glaciers from the US Naval Oceanographic Office.

https://aeolian.bandcamp.com/album/front-variations-one-two

Kyle Bobby Dunn - From Here To Eternity

just came out, and it's really good

The Buddha Machine is not a record, so it's not eligible, sorry.

― Tuomas, Saturday, June 1, 2019 2:59 AM (nine hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is an absolute horseshit decision, you can listen to it on spotify*

https://open.spotify.com/album/7COTnWvHjhkq10ph3q4xH4?si=koVhRwTiQLmeodVPb4NbMg

*also thanks for spending an insane amount of your free time on this internet poll for my enjoyment

Can I sneak in:

M. Geddes Gengras - Ishi
Omicron - Acrocosm
V/A - Plug In + Turn On Vol. 2
Skyramps - Days of Thunder (is this ambient?)

lol whiney

It has an entry on Discogs too, idk what else you need

https://www.discogs.com/FM3-Buddha-Machine/master/517873

According to that Discogs tracklist it’s too short!

Bonus time! I'll submit my final three:

Löwenritter - Prelude: Ten Seconds Before Sunrise
Vangelis - Fais Que Ton Rêve Soit Plus Long Que La Nuit
Cernunnos Woods - Awaken the Empire of Dark Wood

Cernunnos Woods, now there’s a name I haven’t heard in over twenty years.

Great call on Kasumasa Hashimoto, I must revisit his stuff, I love that little boutique label he was on, Noble Records, they have some lovely music, much better than Childisc.

dark forest ambient! it has some spoken word bits, but then so does the Harold Budd/Clive Wright stuff

Dang it *Kazumasa

was considering Midori Takada's "Through the Looking Glass" but it seemed a bit too dynamic.

Kazumasa Hashimoto can be a bit twee but I find it delicate and poignant at its best. I don't want to discriminate but it seems like the urge to sweeten the mood is a common strain in much of the Japanese electronic music I've heard. There's a Japanese artist called Pass Into Silence who's made releases on Kompakt, the songs are some of the most exquisite ambient creations ever (I'm not so familiar with LPs). But it definitely has a lullaby quality about it.

MaresNest, what else do you especially like on Noble Records?

Saw1