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

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?

I didn't have the heart to vote for it here, not unlike Karl Malone's hesitance to vote for SotL's 'Tired Sounds' :-/

Not ambient, for me, one of my all time fave albums, for sure.

I couldn't vote for E2-E4 either but I fail to see how The Tired Sounds... isn't ambient. I'm sure we'll have plenty of time to discuss this anon.

I did vote for 'Tired Sounds', no mistake! Just referred to the ethical bind ZS found himself and that I can relate to that w/r/t what is ambient or what isn't.

17. Brian Eno: Discreet Music (1975)
577 points, 10 votes.

https://i.imgur.com/N7VnEzP.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jl_z5JvrKlc

I like it because depending upon how loud you have it, you can hear ambient, "musique concrete" from your own surroundings. Your mind fills in the parts that are too quiet to hear - so you hear something different every time. Come to think of it, it's completely different from schlock.

― Dave225, Thursday, January 24, 2002 3:00 AM

Except, “Discreet Music“ is anything but unimaginative.

True, there are some happy accidents there (he mistakenly played the finished tape at half speed to Fripp) and it is very much generative (so much so he apparently left the tape running while answering the phone and the like). But the way the lines unfold and overlap to create new melodies and variations is sublime and the tones themselves are evocative and deceptively complex (for evidence, read Tamm’s take on this, starting on page 30: https://monoskop.org/images/f/f1/Tamm_Eric_Brian_Eno_His_Music_and_the_Vertical_Color_of_Sound.pdf ).

It’s fine if you don’t care for long generative stuff—much of Eno’s is hit or miss—and he can sometimes talk about it as if he’s the first person any of this ever occurred to. But don’t think for a second that a lot of work doesn’t go into these pieces – and nothing about this one says “I don’t give a shit about my audience.”

― Naive Teen Idol, Saturday, August 25, 2018 4:47 AM

Discreet Music is fantastic. It's interesting to think about how it sounds at different volumes. I've tried to play it at a low volume level a few times, but I inevitably turn it up after about 2 minutes in.

― Z S, Tuesday, June 12, 2007 3:20 AM

don't know if it'd be possible but i'd LOVE an app version of discreet music, even if the generative nature of it would be less pronounced than scape, bloom, or trope. even minimal variation (and without the fades) would be preferable to just putting the 1975 recording on repeat. i'd rather spend 30 bucks on that than this newer thing.

― sciatica, Wednesday, February 8, 2017 3:08 AM

16. Tangerine Dream: Phaedra (1974)
580 points, 10 votes.

https://i.imgur.com/4HBEmBg.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIQ0dd7B_FU

its like new age music, but totally cold and rad sounding

― latebloomer (latebloomer), Thursday, December 23, 2004 8:40 PM

Funny, I was just reading about this album. I guess part of its sound - or part of one song - had to do with the tendency of the temperature sensitive oscillators to go out of tune. Which is funny, because in that prog book I was just reading about Keith Emerson complaining about the exact same thing. He'd have to factor tuning his synths into all the other shit he had to do on stage.

― Josh in Chicago, Wednesday, September 27, 2017 11:45 PM

I put on Phaedra earlier this month and was pleasantly surprised - I've got a buddy that's a hardcore ACDC/hardrock/powermetal fan, but loves his TD - never saw the connection myself - but you know what? - In their own way these guys have the rock ...

― BlackIronPrison, Thursday, August 9, 2007 5:48 PM

God I love that bit like 4:40 into "Phaedra" where it has that rolling bass line that sounds like a guitar

― frogbs, Wednesday, August 10, 2011 12:33 AM

put this on the turntable the night I lost my virginity. She made me change the record.

― Dan Peterson, Thursday, August 9, 2007 5:29 PM

ah, the soundtrack of computer graphics demos

drove to Portland and back twice this past week (2 hours each way, so around 8+ hours total) taking my wife & father-in-law to the airport to go to her brother's funeral and we had Discreet Music on rotation the whole time I was driving with them, it knocked my wife right out when we were driving back down at like midnight last Saturday and she spoke very highly of it when she woke up :)

15. Steve Roach: Structures from Silence (1984)
584 points, 9 votes.

https://i.imgur.com/r22jFrG.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsIjyJvhR9A

80's high point = Structures From Silence which is sort of everything that was good about new age -- if the digital synth textures sometimes seem a little simple, they really can be calming. I hated this stuff as a teenager in the 80's compared to trickier darker industrial or classic ambient or the more detailed textures of the Eno records, but this record's aged well. after his earlier sequencer-based albums that did a good job mining the post-Tangerine Dream lots, this was the transitional one where he turned off all the rhythms and went for duration, the last track is 30 minutes and I often just leave that one looping

― Milton Parker, Wednesday, May 23, 2007 11:09 AM

I bought Structures From Silence today on iTunes -- I'm a huge sucker for endlessly shifting analog pads. Sounds to me based on the articles I've read the last few weeks that the guy is an Oberheim Xpander ninja of sorts -- this record would seem to be evidence of that.

― Naive Teen Idol, Sunday, June 2, 2013 7:11 AM

absolutely the best music for driving around in southern california thinkin about your LIFE. for real. not bad for doing so in other states either but A+++ for doin this in california.

― Twink Will Ferrell (J0hn D.), Wednesday, March 31, 2010 4:08 AM

The opening “Reflections in Suspension” lives up to both its name and that of the album’s, slowly emerging from deep quiet only to again fade away, a pattern repeated on the other two original tracks. While this itself is a common enough pattern in the field, it’s the arrangement’s focus that calls attention here, pared down and extremely deliberate. It’s almost shocking to hear something so deceptively simple take shape, a soft, very slow lead melody of sorts in a steady loop while deeper layers of sound sometimes wash up like a just-on-the-horizon slow wave waiting to come in. Structure over silence indeed, but also suspension as tension, a surface beauty that suggests potentially dark as well as vast depths.

Ned Raggett, Wondering Sound

14. Harold Budd / Brian Eno with Daniel Lanois: The Pearl (1984)
597 points, 11 votes.

https://i.imgur.com/D3ifNdC.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om-iZHrE1S8

The Plateaux Of Mirror (1980) / The Pearl (1984) - Credited to Budd & Eno. The quintessential Budd albums. "The Pearl" takes the "Plateaux" sound and places them within deep, shimmering Eno landscapes.

― Hideous Lump, Thursday, May 20, 2010 5:21 AM

I've been listening to a ton of The Pearl of late and trying to suck up everything I can about how Eno and Lanois did it.

― Naive Teen Idol, Saturday, October 13, 2012 3:57 AM

The Pearl - Eno Budd came out in 1984. That's the album I've literally heard the most, as it was the "everybody go to sleep now" album when my kids were little. But I would often stay awake for the whole thing, hundreds of repetitions in - it's a unified composition, not just soothing sounds.

― Vic Perry, Saturday, July 14, 2012 8:12 PM

I'm vaguely anxious about something but I'm not sure exactly what. Also my back hurts -- the upper part, below the neck and between the shoulder blades.

Drinking tea; about to put on Harold Budd & Brian Eno's The Pearl.

― stockholm cindy (Jody Beth Rosen), Saturday, April 10, 2004 9:32 AM

The next entry might be disappointingly low for some of you.

I love that Steve Roach album

The next three entries, actually.

:o

13. Global Communication: 76 14 (1994)
606 points, 9 votes, 1 first place vote.

https://i.imgur.com/vgZDyr4.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7-PD2oBvyY

Not to get all Kraftwerkian here, but 76:14 and the Chapterhouse remixes have soundtracked my last three bike rides. And it's not because of any silly ambient-elecrtronic-to-pump-you-up nonsense, but it's that I fucking love these albums but I have to listen to them all the way through start to finish. I cannot bail-out midway through. Almost like a classical piece I suppose.

― Elvis Telecom, Friday, January 24, 2014 11:38 AM

i must have slept to this album 7614 times by now.

― cutty (mcutt), Thursday, December 8, 2005 6:32 PM

can someone tell me about more moments in music like the moment 10:02 into 14:31, that might be the most sonorous moment i've heard in all my ambient listenings

― dyao know what i mean (acoleuthic), Saturday, December 19, 2009 3:31 AM

that track has healing properties for real

― jabba hands, Saturday, December 19, 2009 3:45 AM

76:14 used to be my going-to-bed-on-a-comedown music. Perfect apart from the ticking clock, which used to freak out my wife.

― Get wolves (DL), Thursday, July 26, 2012 4:01 PM

that album ended up pretty low on my ballot because as a whole it has too many beats, but "4:14" is one of my all time favs

side a of discreet music is my religion

ah, the soundtrack of computer graphics demos

― the girl from spirea x (f. hazel), Monday, July 1, 2019 9:54 PM (thirty-three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

You say this like it's a bad thing!