The mind revealing itself to itself: the TOP 100 AMBIENT ALBUMS as voted by ILX

I decided against submitting a ballot on the basis I didn't know enough True and Pure ambient but looks like that was silly of me

Haha. I'm feeling more like this with every passing selection.

Just wanted to chime in and share that I recently visited Cologne, Germany and hiked through Konigsforst while listening to GAS. I was not on LSD, however, so the experience was not 100% authentic.

The results so far lead me to think there are some very large but non-overlapping ambient fandoms.

have been interested in GAS for a long time, to me the most recent albums, narkopop and rausch are the best

Oh, that's interesting, I don't think I've ever heard anyone prefer the new albums to the old ones... What makes you feel that way?

Sorry I didn't end up voting. Last few weeks were really hectic and it felt like I would have to think and listen a lot to do it right. Good to see albums I love on here. I should really listen to Hykes again.

I also prefer the newer albums, I think there's a level of refinement to them that feels more like a culmination of a style and expression than the earlier records.

loving this radigue btw. la mort la merrier if you ask me :)

― budo jeru, Friday, June 28, 2019 11:28 PM (two days ago)

otm

27. The Future Sound Of London: Lifeforms (1994)
406 points, 8 votes.

https://i.imgur.com/wf6kw4N.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCUN46Rb3Q4

God, this brings it back. Too many earnest late night conversations on this new-fangled thing called ~the internet~ with boys who made me Loop Guru mixtapes and talked about Freemasonry and the secret meaning of Babylon5. Oh god, the mid 90s, did they really happen.

― I want to smother him in electronic butter. (White Chocolate Cheesecake), Thursday, July 26, 2012 1:41 PM

future sound of london's "lifeforms". disc 1 is the most indescribably beautiful piece of musical lushness evah. disc 2 is OK.

― weasel diesel (K1l14n), 28. elokuuta 2003 0:58

FSOL do sound a bit dated, but it's dated to a time and place musically that I happen to be really very fond of so I'm not going to complain.

― 3-D Whinge-ometer (Masonic Boom), Tuesday, May 11, 2010 12:28 PM

But I will rep for Lifeforms some more. In addition to being playful, it also very much has the feeling of happening in a city, or some place full of people, and that makes it delightful to me... I get this same thrill from the KLF's Chill Out. Although like WCC, I usually want my ambient albums to knock me out of time and space, or take me to some natural landscape bereft of people... but Lifeforms doesn't do that and still works.

― the girl from spirea x (f. hazel), 26. heinäkuuta 2012 19:27

26. Hiroshi Yoshimura: Music for Nine Post Cards (1982)
410 points, 6 votes.

https://i.imgur.com/rAXfH2M.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyY7NU4cbtY

Yoshimura started work on Music For Nine Post Cards in an unassuming manner. He stared out the window and played the piano, attempting to mirror what he saw in short, one-measure phrases. While at work on this project, he visited the Hara Museum Of Contemporary Art, in the Shinagawa ward of Tokyo. Inspired by the clean, white minimalism of the museum's architecture as well as the trees that rustled in the courtyard, he envisaged the nine pieces as environmental music for Hara, an offer its administrators accepted. It was only after visitors frequently asked how to acquire the music playing throughout the grounds that Ashikawa and Yoshimura launched a record label, Sound Process, to release it.

In so doing, Yoshimura removed this music from its intended environment, but the nine pieces would bring an atmosphere of quiet grace to any setting. The static beauty of Yoshimura's nine pieces, which revolve around simple Fender Rhodes figures, have the ability to bring a sense of comfort into the hustle-and-bustle of a morning commute or a long flight (as Huerco S noted in interviews surrounding his 2016 Yoshimura-indebted ambient LP, For Those Of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have)). But a sense of place remains central to Music For Nine Post Cards. On "Urban Snow," Yoshimura quietly intones: "Snow... this is Tokyo."

Matt McDermott, Resident Advisor

25. Brian Eno: Thursday Afternoon (1985)
421 points, 7 votes.

https://i.imgur.com/xG8Fd8M.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyY7NU4cbtY

An aside -- Didn't Brian Eno once try to make a film that was meant to be seen many times (I think you actually had to turn your TV on its side to watch it), with "Thursday Afternoon" as the soundtrack?

― Mark Richardson, Sunday, September 10, 2000 3:00 AM

With songs like "Thursday Afternoon," he was experimenting with what he called a "holographic" style, composed according to mathematical principles, in a series of repeated loops in which each component represents the whole. >> http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/magazine/04funny_humor.html?_r=1

I enjoyed Wendy McClure's True-Life Tale (June 4) that chronicled the less-than-enthusiastic reception Brian Eno's ''Thursday Afternoon'' received in Rossi's, ''an amiable dive bar.'' I am concerned, however, that readers unfamiliar with Eno's work might accept the reaction of the bar's patrons as informed and legitimate criticism. In that setting, Bach's ''Goldberg'' Variations would have evoked a similar response.

'' Thursday Afternoon'' is an organically complex work best experienced through a quality sound-reproduction system, in an environment without intrusive noise that would obscure the myriad intricate details suspended through the recording's dynamic range. McClure's ''Ting . . . ting. . .ting . . .'' characterization of the piece, while not inappropriate in context, is analogous to reducing Beethoven's Fifth Symphony to ''da-da-da-DUM''; there's really quite a lot lost in the process. >> http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=980CE6DC1331F93BA25755C0A9609C8B63

― Andrew O'H, Monday, May 3, 2010 7:14 AM

my favorite was always Thursday, mainly because it was the longest, but also because I think it's the most complex his harmonies & feel for textures ever got while remaining subtle and ignorable -- though I loved them all, many of the other ones either get so busy that they'd distract me from studying, or stayed so simple that they'd numb me out if I tried to listen, and Thursday allowed either mode of listening. I would go back and forth between the 60 minute CD version and a cassette dub of the 80 minute video soundtrack version which seems to pick up exactly where the CD version fades away.

― Milton Parker, Monday, January 7, 2008 2:27 AM

Mine is Eno's Thursday Afternoon. That's the go-to record for sleepless nights, and I never listen to it any other time.

― Mark, Wednesday, June 19, 2002 3:00 AM

Oops, I had the wrong Youtube link there, here's the correct one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyY7NU4cbtY

Argh, let's try one more time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTHF2Dfw1Dg

The rest of the top 25 will be wall-to-wall Eno?

hopefully not, though I've given up on the two I most hoped would make the list

finally made an mp3 that crossfades the CD & video mixes into a 142 minute version. seamless enough that it does make me wonder if they were both mixed in one go.

Great to see Yoshimura place so high, did not expect that. I've only known it for some years now (as opposed to a lot of others here) but it'd be in my top ten all time ambient records (if I'd ranked my ballot).

24. Harold Budd / Brian Eno: Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror (1980)
424 points, 6 votes.

https://i.imgur.com/L0b0EUy.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbFT7FXaggw

plateaux of mirror is it for me. the piano sounds as if it had exactly the dose of absinth you need to feel out of this world.

― alex in mainhattan (alex63), Saturday, January 21, 2006 10:53 PM

Harold Budd/Brian Eno – Ambient 2: The Plateaux Of Mirror (1980, synth, keyboards, treatments, instrumentation, producer) – With Budd falling into a Fripp-like role, this was pretty improvisatory, with Eno paring it down into spare, smooth results.

― Fastnbulbous, Tuesday, August 5, 2008 7:14 AM

But my fave has always been Plateaux of Mirror. The aural equivalent of jumping in a bed of cottonwool, the translation of the absinth experience into sound. Wooly, otherworldly bliss. How I love that piano sound.

― Ich bin kein Berliner (alex in mainhattan), Monday, January 21, 2019 9:09 PM

decided today The Plateaux Of Mirror is the best hangover listen ever. just the right balance of tragic, comfort and quiet.

― Jamie_ATP, Thursday, January 28, 2010 1:57 AM

Music for Airports confirmed #1.

23. Oneohtrix Point Never: Rifts (2009)
445 points, 8 votes.

https://i.imgur.com/BqAWcci.jpg

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

yeah rifts all the way through is good at evoking that woke up from cryo sleep too early and contemplating the void thing

― teflon dawn (uptown churl), Friday, September 24, 2010 11:38 PM

it's the boards of canada vibes (subtle pitch bends, spacious tonal wafts) that keep me returning to returnal and rifts

― Palpatean Mists (Lowell N. Behold'n), Sunday, August 15, 2010 7:24 PM

i like rifts more than returnal, and play it front to back sometimes, but i usually start or stop somewhere in the middle. i like how sprawling it is. it can blur together, but i'm a total sucker for cosmic synth drones and arpeggios. current favorite is zones without people

― a fucking knitted scarf (another al3x), Friday, September 24, 2010 8:17 PM

i'll join the chorus of ppl who prefer rifts. i get that he couldn't keep making synth drone forever for fear that he'd turn into jean-michel jarre and, like, play casinos or something... but the synth stuff was so much nicer aesthetically.

― oneohtrix point zero (fennel cartwright), Friday, November 4, 2011 5:42 AM

rifts is great in a single sitting if you're tired, sitting in the dark, drinking scotch and posting to ilx (inter alia)

― the decline of the altbro-hongarian empire (nakhchivan), Friday, September 24, 2010 10:15 PM

22. Laurie Spiegel: The Expanding Universe (1980, reissued in 2012 with 100 minutes of extra material)
456 points, 9 votes.

https://i.imgur.com/vJm5OVs.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KD8hkveKmYQ

I found The Expanding Universe on a blog, and I'm mesmerised. Lovely ambient Tangerine Dream-y sort of soundscape stuff, but also incredibly melodic and great sense of movement amidst all the drifting.

― Evren Kader (Masonic Boom), Tuesday, September 8, 2009 4:58 PM

her writings on computer software for music production are important and visionary -- her tone gets more frustrated in the 90's as consumer gear pushes the user further and further into narrow boxes, but I think the concepts & ideas she pioneered in the 80's are only going to come back around and be entirely validated. there were many people who wrote papers about the potential for the 'voice of the computer' being sounded as an improvising partner for real time performance, but I think she (along with the League of Automatic Music Composers) backed up their papers by making the most interesting sounding music -- that clip that Masonic posted, just look at where she was at while everyone else was just vamping over eighth-note sequencer loops

'The Expanding Universe' is wonderful, if you like that be sure to track down 'Appalachian Grove' from this amazing compilation. These are pieces where the computer is responding to her key inputs with algorhythms that constantly vary the arpeggios under her control, so she's improvising rhythmically in response to what the computer is doing with her inputs

― Milton Parker, Tuesday, September 8, 2009 9:14 PM

love the liner notes, especially the comparing of conscious interaction w/ programmed processes to conscious interaction w/ subconsciously generated processes (finger-picking patterns); there's some rich phenomenology in there. didn't realise the images that were posted upthread were actually programmed in a similar fashion to the music. that is so, so cool, i'd been thinking about this a bit after looking at databending & then, there they are. & she was a big john fahey fan!

― ogmor, Tuesday, September 18, 2012 12:49 AM

when all I had was an old scratchy vinyl copy of this, I preferred the range & sonic variety on her other records, especially Unseen Worlds, but now that this has been cleanly remastered, I've been listening to it constantly -- it is so simple and elegant -- and the bonus material helps with the immersion, now with two discs it lasts long enough that you don't ever quite burn out, it's always changing just enough to stay ahead of you, like a continuous stream

― Milton Parker, Monday, September 24, 2012 8:08 PM

I dunno if "The Expanding Universe" is ambient, well, the 28 minute title track certainly is, but probably not all of the extra material on the CD reissue. Anyway, I'm glad they reissued it, Spiegel is such a phenomenal and groundbreaking artist, and otherwise it would've been quite hard to come across all this wonderful and weird and inspiring material... So yeah, I had to rate it high in my ballot.

Love 'Thursday Afternoon', though not everyone does https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/magazine/04funny_humor.html

Bartender OTM.

lol

The bartender is clearly the person who put it on the jukebox.

I'd rather hear Thursday Afternoon than hear Under Pressure or Dirty Deeds for the twentieth time in a week.

(we used to put on Atom Heart Mother at the pool hall we hung out at but the bartenders could and did skip past it the second anyone started whining about it)

i've been a "regular" at a few bars in my life, and the only bar where they ever skipped past a song i put on was when i played the long version of Kraftwerk's Autobahn. i never returned to that bar ever again lol.

21. Arthur Russell: World of Echo (1986)
459 points, 7 votes.

https://i.imgur.com/nhZIwlv.jpg?1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cQ2CDfTKaQ

these are incredibly intimate performances, almost as if Arthur is whispering the songs into your ear. so to have a video with such intense close-ups makes sense. to where you can watch the light reflected off his fingertips as he taps the cello, or even more incredibly, in near-darkness, seeing the light inside of his eyes is a powerful viewing experience.
minimal music with sympathetically minimal video made by one of America's most powerful minimalists...

― Beta (abeta), Tuesday, November 9, 2004 5:07 PM

this is one of the most unique sounding records ever made, and the music is brilliant and memorable to boot. my girlfriend just got me The World Of... on vinyl for Christmas! What a sweetie.

― sleeve, Tuesday, December 25, 2007 6:51 PM

this is the loneliest album in the whole wide world ;_;

― the 500 gats of bartholomew thuggins (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Friday, September 16, 2011 11:34 PM

i've just downloaded "world of echo" and am listening in full for the first time. oh, new obsession. where have you been all my life. beautiful.

― Emily Bjurnhjam, Thursday, March 20, 2008 5:21 AM

I think what stands out most about this album for me is it doesn't seem like it's really as old as it is. It seems very modern and it's hard for me to believe I can trace it as far back as my teenage years. Another thing that stands out is just that there is nothing in the entire world that sounds like this record. Nothing. Other than saying it probably should have appeared on the 4AD label, you can't really narrow it down any further than that.

― Bimble, Sunday, March 23, 2008 4:13 PM

first encountered World Of Echo as MP3s from Limewire, I forget how I first heard of him but I was totally transfixed when I listened

I have the same issue with this album as the Slowdive one, to me it sounds like artsy folk rock, not like ambient at all.

(Also, it's not half as good as Russell's disco output, but that's another discussion.)

yah World Of Echo is another one I love but did not vote for b/c NOT AMBIENT

agreed with Tuomas and Sleeve, World of Echo is not ambient by any stretch.

Aye, I scrubbed World of Echo from my ballot because NOTAMBIENT. But damn it's good.
Completely forgot to vote for Yoshimura and I Am the Center! Both glorious.
Laurie Spiegel is next level. I didn't rank but I'd have had her pretty high.

ambient is just stuff without drums

drums and vocals

I'd argue that Russell uses the cello as percussion on WOE

Interesting that Autechre is so present but Scanner wasn't even nominated.

That is an oversight for sure. 'Lauwarm Instrumentals' is a huge album.

Have to say though Tuomas, I am really digging the pace of the rollout. It allows for plenty of time to check out albums I don't know.

20. Gas: Königsforst (1998)
486 points, 7 votes.

https://i.imgur.com/eq0AgHc.jpg?1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7j360WlQPr4

Yesssss... I LOVE Gas--I played the second track off 'Konigsforst" with the signature low thrum moving from speaker to speaker at Night of the Living Drone, and I must say, Jess, you are WRONG about it verging on the ignorable! ;-) At "appropriate" volume, this music (to borrow an old-school Reynoldsism) evokes the womb, the feeling (not like any of us can remember it, but it's a cool comparison) of immersion in amniotic fluid.

― Clarke B., Thursday, December 13, 2001 3:00 AM

the last track on konigsforst always makes me think of a sunrise because it sounds like a warped/looped "william tell overture", that waking-up music they use in cartoons

― am0n, Wednesday, January 16, 2008 5:37 PM

Before today, I had only heard Pop. I liked it, but I mentally filed it away as music to do homework to. Today I listened to Konigsforst over and over again, and I realized I'm going to have to look into everything Voigt has done. Track 5 is AMAZING.

― 2 5 (Z S), Wednesday, December 31, 2008 5:03 AM

Königsforst is frikkin' great, though. Sounds of it have that sort of distant, slow-motion epic procession quality that characterises some of The Disintegration Loops audio by W. Basinski.. very regal or golden. I imagine it's an excellent album for Autumn, maybe it's the cover art/color that's coloring my impression of it.

― braunld (Lowell N. Behold'n), Monday, April 17, 2017 12:09 AM

Königsforst is pure magic, I completely forget myself when it is on at loud volume.

― calzino, Thursday, November 3, 2016 5:11 PM

TOO LOW

Agreed. My fave GAS album by far.

This is my favourite of all the Gas albums, it's magical in ways that are hard to put into words... Like, at this point things like "forest techno" or "sea ambient" have become sort of cliches, it's easy to create a sense of place in electronic music through established, recognisable signifiers. But the Gas project, and this album especially, seem to be more about ideals of places than the actual environments, so despite being named after a real forest, to me it invokes more the idealised concept of "mother forest", so well known to Germans (and Finns!) because it has been shaped and reshaped in the national culture since the romantic era. I don't actually enjoy real, physical forests as much as I do Königsforst.

Yagya are really good at this sort of thing as well, particularly with Rigning and Stars and Dust

19. Pauline Oliveros / Stuart Dempster / Panaiotis: Deep Listening (1989)
515 points, 8 votes.

https://i.imgur.com/ElZbeHj.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U__lpPDTUS4

Deep Listening – recorded 14 feet underground in an unused cistern with a 45-second reverb time.

― aaaaaaaauuuuuuuuu (melting robot) (WilliamC), Monday, November 28, 2016 3:56 PM

I got to participate in what I guess was a deep listening piece at UC San Diego once. It was fun. Everyone laid on the floor with eyes closed and we were supposed to make vocal sounds imitating other sounds that we heard.

― Tim Ellison, Saturday, June 26, 2004 1:20 AM

Alien Bog / Beautiful Soop is pretty great. That Deep Listening stuff creeps me out a bit tho

― roger adultery (roger adultery), Saturday, June 26, 2004 8:19 AM

I concur with the love. Just today I found the "Accordion And Voice" album on Lovely Music from like 1981, so psyched to hear it. My favorite is Deep Listening I think. The one in the cistern.

― sleeve, Monday, March 26, 2007 1:08 AM

my #17 pick, definitely "deep"

Another controversial entry coming up...

Yagya are really good at this sort of thing as well, particularly with Rigning and Stars and Dust

― the girl from spirea x (f. hazel), Monday, July 1, 2019 9:10 PM (seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Hear, hear!

Tuomas, your Köningsforst aubade resonates with me. It's very forest-y. What makes GAS stand out from the crowd, for me, is how he employs the beat. The beat is right there, but - to me - it never feels like it's front and center. It is just there to help you along, forward, on whatever path you're on. In what I consider ambient music, this is a rarity.

I find Gas too palpable (har har), although I admire the disquiet of his latest album.

18. Manuel Göttsching: E2–E4 (1984)
532 points, 8 votes.

https://i.imgur.com/phgRXDa.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vq-kovIr2BE

I'm listeing to E2-E4 for the first time and thinking to myself "why the heck haven't I heard this years ago????!?!?!?!?!?! what's wrong with you octobeard?!!!"

I'm not even 20 minutes in and I'm floored. 1984? This sounds better than many seminal 1994 albums. WTF.

― octobeard, Monday, February 22, 2016 6:40 AM

E2-E4 sending me into inner space atm. That is all.

― WARS OF ARMAGEDDON (Karaoke Version) (Sparkle Motion), Saturday, March 20, 2010 7:31 AM

i saw harvey play a beach party here in hawaii just three days ago. a half hour before sunset he put on E2-E4. about 25 minutes in i went up to him and asked, "are you going to play this one all the way through?" he smiled huge and replied "of course, man!" it was dark by the time the song's 58th minute rolled around. the mixture of an epic sunset with an epic track orchestrated by such a master selector created something hard to describe. it will probably remain one of my top 5 musical moments for the rest of my life.

― grady (grady), Wednesday, June 28, 2006 11:18 PM

i love the psychogeographic feel of e2-e4, that feeling of leaving the centre, an acidpsyche trip from bethnal green to chingford

― 696, Sunday, May 27, 2007 9:18 PM

e2-e4 is so unbelievable. it never ever gets old and every time i put it on i have to listen to it all.

also e2-e4 is the greatest running music ever.

― ooooiiiioooooooooooooooaaaaaaaaoooooh un - bi - leevable! (LocalGarda), Friday, May 4, 2012 12:43 AM

An important, influential album, but ambient?