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

in all seriousness this makes me wanna see the 101-120 results even more, then I can make an imaginary poll without any Eno, SoTL, or beats

More like 101-200 amirite?

lol sure I was gonna say "why not take out Gas and Arthur Russell as well"

the only ambient record is david hykes' hearing solar winds

4'33 or gtfo.

There is really not a lot of distance between this "trance" psybient/psydub and supposedly more 'credible' techno-derived Orbital, FSOL, Orb and Global Communication records, in my ears it's a pretty straight evolutionary line (via The Irresistible Force, Solar Quest et al) that doesn't really have anything to do with Tiesto or anything like that.

4. Stars of the Lid: The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid (2001)
795 points, 12 votes, 1 first place vote.

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaSi7Gut7xM

Stars of the Lid's "Tired Sounds Of..." still ranks as one of my all-time favorite albums, even though I've never managed to stay awake for the duration.

― Sam Hunt (robosam), Thursday, February 5, 2004 2:58 AM

itunes tells me i listened to tired sounds...167 times this year. that's not counting playing it on my phone, or on spotify, or on cd, or anything else. some days i think i could only listen to the two parts of "requiem..." happily for the rest of my life.

― the oral history of (strongo hulkington's ghost dad), Sunday, December 9, 2012 8:43 PM

tired sounds is more singular in tone to atrotd; atrotd goes for full-on widescreen euphoria, where tired sounds culminates with a series of endless blissed out drones. kinda like the difference between inner and outer space. both are some of the best music ever recorded imo so you need both really. even if you only start with one you'll get the other eventually.

― r1o natsume, Sunday, November 25, 2007 3:02 AM

"The Tired Sounds..." is one of the most self-descriptive album titles ever. It's one of those things I put on and actually forget there's music on at all -- like, I'll go to put in a CD and realize the Stars of the Lid is still playing. Which isn't bad, on its own merits. I mean, I guess it does what it set out to do.

― spittle (spittle), Wednesday, March 3, 2004 2:39 AM

The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid would make for a kind of epic ending to a life, and a peaceful one, too.

― Zach S, Thursday, March 16, 2006 11:08 AM

There it is. So it's going to be Music for Airports, On Land and Selected Ambient Works, Vol. II.

The holy trinity: light, dark and synth.

I guess the popularity of the Stars of the Lid kinda exemplifies the difference of scenes/generations evident in this poll... Apparently they were around in the '90s already, but I don't remember ever hearing that name back then, and even afterwards I haven't come across their music before this poll (though I have seen the name mentioned on ILX). They're from the US and from what I've gathered they come more from the art (rock) music scene than from the electronic club music? Whereas my roots are firmly in the European dance music scene, which I guess would explain why they've been foreign to me. The music does sound nice, tho.

yeah they're out of a totally different idiom

I like both strands although neither is really my favourite.

just to recap my terrible evolution on Tired Sounds and this poll

- it is one of my favorite albums
- i didn't vote for it in this poll because i was thinking it wasn't ambient enough
- i did vote for the Ballasted Orchestra, which is also very good, but in a very different way. much more pure narcotic drone. just as beautiful but with less variation + more time spent in the drone zone.
- i now wish i would have voted for Tired Sounds (and Refinement). compared to much of what placed in this poll, those two albums are ambient as hell

To think that neither Somnium nor The Empty Hollow Unfolds made it (probably).

:(

Stars of the Lid sounds to me like "SAW II (Slowed Down 800%)". But it's consistently rated pretty highly, so I guess I'm just not getting it.

really depends on which SotL you're listening to. they changed quite a bit (although gradually and glacially, as you'd expect) from the mid-90s through Refinement. of course, after Refinement, they've decided to take at least TWELVE YEARS to release their follow-up, so who knows what's going on now

not too many specific song recommendations in this thread, which makes sense, but if you're new to SotL and you want somewhere to start, there's no better place to start than the first two tracks of Tired Sounds (Requiem for Dying Mothers, parts 1 and 2). Part 2 in particular is one of the most beautiful pieces of music in the history of time, and i still request that it played at my funeral, if any of you are there, so that everyone will cry harder than they ever cried

I must buy The Tired Sounds on CD. My vinyl copy crackles too much and I rarely listen to it.

It's my go to soundtrack to flying. Calming, helps me sleep. But I don't pay much attention to it, then. I think I'd like to pay attention to it.

I used to live a few blocks from the Austin Texas Mental Hospital that album refers to

we should do an ambient bracket seeded based on the results of this poll vs. another 100 albums criminally absent from it

would vote

3. Brian Eno: Ambient 1 - Music for Airports (1978)
1119 points, 18 votes, 1 first place vote.

https://i.imgur.com/Vdj405p.jpg?1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNwYtllyt3Q

Of course, the man and the vast majority of his music, and his influence, is classic. Couldn't live without "Taking tiger mountain" or "Music for airports" amongst others. Those two boxed sets are two of the best investments I've ever made.

― Rob M (Rob M), Thursday, January 22, 2004 5:44 PM

I've been a huge Brian Eno fan since I was maybe 16 or so, high school, so closing in on 30 years now. I've listened to all of his stuff, tons of times. I love everything. I'm a completist. I have books, videos, apps, Oblique Strategies cards. And yet - confession - tonight was the first time I put on "Music for Airports" and, as best I can remember, truly enjoyed every last second. Utterly entrancing. Just sitting in the living room with my daughter, reading books, and it just ... clicked. I never disliked the album before, and once even watched Bang on a Can do it, but it always just sort of eluded me. Which is oddly apropos! But tonight - totally magical. Weird.

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, August 23, 2018 5:11

I think it's that starting (obviously) with 1/1 in the past has thrown off my listening. It's significantly longer than the other tracks, which makes it a together nut to crack, but for whatever reason this time, once I made it over the first, familiar plinking piano hump, the second half of the track revealed some new stuff to me, like the more traditional synth washes, which for whatever reason I never really glommed on to before. After that, the other three tracks were (for lack of a better phrase) easy listening, prettier and pretty simple, with their own beautiful synths and choral bits. I was able to get lost in the subtle melodies and textures as opposed to focusing on the austere almost chamber piece like nature of the whole thing (which of course is what Bang on a Can exploited so well).

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, August 23, 2018 11:28 PM

Actually I always thought the point of MfA was not to listen to it like you listen to more "normal" music like AGW for example. Instead it is just supposed to be an aural setting which originally was supposed to be played at the airport when you wait for your airplane to arrive or take off but which you actually do not hear consciously. So in a way your experience does not seem to be intended.

― Ich bin kein Berliner (alex in mainhattan), Thursday, August 23, 2018 11:45 PM

also music for airports is great, you just have to put it on in the background in another room while it's raining, like it's meant to be listened to

― messiahwannabe, Thursday, January 28, 2010 7:12 PM

i've got into this weird routine recently of having to blast out the last track from music for airports really loud first thing after i wake up

has to be the most beautiful music ever made. feels like i won the 200 metres and this is the music they're playing during the slow motion replay

― 不合作的方式 (r1o natsume), Sunday, August 1, 2010 6:17 PM

I had to put this at #1, I couldn't even begin to front. Been listening for 35 years and not tired of it yet.

also Robert Wyatt is the secret star on this

You deserve your badge.

2. Brian Eno: Ambient 4 - On Land (1982)
1193 points, 18 votes.

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

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

Ambient with Budd - ON LAND - its great mysteru

― | (Latham Green), Thursday, October 4, 2018 11:21 PM

DD: Is there something ironic about putting on a piece as still as 77 Million Paintings in somewhere so unstill?

Brian Eno: Well, when I lived in New York I made my quietest music. The record On Land (1982) I made here. And one of the things you do when you make a piece of art is you try to make the world you'd rather be in. Do you know what I mean? You try to make up for the deficiencies of the place that you're in, because New York is a hellish place to live. It's so noisy and always broken and always being mended and abrasive and disturbing. So one of the things you want is to find a little place where, 'Swooh', you can breathe out for a minute.

DD: Is it also a reaction to the increasing smallness of music?
Brian Eno: Yeah, I think it is. It's sort of a reaction against headphones, which I don't like. I don't like having the music pressed on to my head. I like feeling I'm walking around inside it.

This, alone, is intriguing and inspiring enough to fuel several different strains of creative activity, should one choose to embrace any of its ideas.

― Josh in Chicago, Saturday, July 12, 2014 4:23 PM

"The Lost Day"* has always been my jam from On Land, but I listened in greater detail than usual to the album rather than as background or falling asleep music and the (subtle!) tunes of a few other tracks became more apparent, so I'll be listening for them. partly because of the addition of Hassell (4/1) or Material (4/2), I feel like the side closers work a little against the mood of the first 3 on each side which are more of a piece, but it's pretty perfect as is.

*also like Eno's lost day concept: the things that didn't come to be. which could be read as the road not taken, in contrast to Another Green World aka the ultimately fertile other road (or art process) taken. but in "the lost day" I think Eno was nostalgic for better(?) futures that failed to materialize: other green potentials (or even things we didn't get to do).

― Paul, Monday, July 14, 2014 7:52 PM

I think "On Land" is a good thing to bring up, because I find that album, pretty as it is, much darker and more menacing (same with "Apollo," despite its blatant beauty), which in a way makes it more accessible. Or at least more overtly "interesting." His much later generative stuff, or even his asleep-at-the-DX7 stuff like Neroli and Thursday Afternoon, is more boring and invisible, sort of by design, I imagine, but both are firmly from his installation phase, with them devised explicitly as background support for visuals or other related concepts.

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, August 23, 2018 11:28 PM

I'm not really fond of "ambient" as a catch-all term to encompass anything with low-to-no-BPMs which uses drifty soundscapey bits. So little of it paints a compelling portrait of 'place' or sonic geography in the way that, say, On Land did.

― Myke. (Myke Weiskopf), Saturday, September 30, 2006 8:04 PM

An ambient poll without Eno at #1 is embarrassing

SAW II is also RYM's highest rated ambient album of all time.

#2 is… the Silent Hill 2 soundtrack (Music for Airports is also at #3).

Exactly

It's worth comparing the two:

https://rateyourmusic.com/customchart?page=1&chart_type=top&type=album&year=alltime&genre_include=1&genres=Ambient&include_child_genres=t&include=both&limit=none&countries=

I feel like such an amateur ambient cop after LBI’s rejection of SAWII

i will gently push back on that rejection - SAWII is _extremely_ ambient to my ears, the very aural equivalent of spatial environments, some of which are vivid enough to be physically disorienting

Sui generis music that exists in a world by itself, too creepy to be ambient, too placid to be techno, too haunting and pretty to be industrial.

Plenty of (dark) ambient is deliberately creepy.

1/1: minimalism/modern classical: NOT AMBIENT
2/1: choral/new age: NOT AMBIENT
1/2: choral/new age: NOT AMBIENT
2/2: progressive electronic/Berlin school: NOT AMBIENT

Yeah I really don’t get it, myself, but whatever

the saw2 thing

1. Jean-Michel Jarre: Waiting for Cousteau (1990)
1195 points, 17 votes, 1 first place vote.

https://i.imgur.com/KloW1K9.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8z9iZOiMEw

I have a soft spot for Jean-Michel Jarre. frogbs up the page mentions Sylvester Stallone, which is the kind of genius observation that brings me back to Ilxor every decade or so. Jean Michael Jarre is the Sylvester Stallone of electronic music. You know how some people like to synchronise Pink Floyd's "Echoes" with the last twenty minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey? You can do that with the careers of Sylvester Stallone and Jean Michel Jarre, and they line up almost perfectly. Slightly atypical initial hit; competent sequels; return to triumph in the mid-80s followed by rapid commercial decline; occasional attempts at artistic credibility; all ending with surprisingly competent rehashes of earlier ideas.

Think about it. Rendezvous is basically Rocky IV but as a piece of music - it's so bombastic and upbeat! It makes me wish I could go back in time and vote for Ronald Reagan. Revolutions is Rambo: First Blood Part II, slightly grimmer and not very well made although popular. They even begin with the letter R. R. It's not a coincidence.

I've always loved the way Jarre had this obvious burning desire to be taken seriously - along the same lines as Peter Gabriel or David Byrne - so his early albums have these little ambient vignettes and are like gateway drugs to hardcore ambient and systems music. At the same time he was never willing to abandon the mass market and go all the way. In my opinion the title track from Waiting for Cousteau is way up there with Global Communication's 76:14 as the best ambient music from the early 1990s but the album as a whole is dragged down by the television game show themes on side one.

I think Zoolook is his most successful go at crossing over into the high end of the mainstream. It's like liquid dayglo 1980s postmoderism. Memphis furniture design in audio form. But from what I remember it didn't chart very well, and by that time he was competing with e.g. Art of Noise. In my opinion his use of samples was more inventive than Art of Noise but he didn't have Paul Morley phoning up the NME every few minutes so Zoolook tends to be forgotten nowadays. I wonder if the critics disliked the fact he was the good-looking son of a successful composer who had access to masses of equipment; they never felt the need to give him any help.

I'm still impressed with the way that the bassline from Equinoxe V becomes the rhythm of Equinox VI, which turns into an awesome wobbly bass solo at the end, and then becomes the basic track for Equinoxe VII. That must have been very difficult in 1977 with eight-track tape and no MIDI sync. Almost as if he was a classically-trained musician who knew how to plan things out on paper. I think the composed aspect of his music appealed to me as a kid because I grew up with computer game soundtracks. His music was obviously written, not improvised; if you fiddle with the stereo balance control on his early records you can unpick the tracks and see how he built up the music because he used hard left-right panning.

He updated his sound effectively with Magnetic Fields, which sounds a bit like Depeche Mode albeit lusher. He then bought a Fairlight, which means that his 1980s albums sound very dated nowadays. Rendezvous mostly works. Revolutions has its moments, but that was the point when old-wave synth stars of his generation were left behind by acid house and drum'n'bass - the likes of Squarepusher and Autechre and Aphex Twin took up the torch, but they owed nothing to Jan Hammer and Vangelis and Jean Michel Jarre etc, they came from a completely different tradition.

I saw him live at Wembley for the Chronologie tour but I barely remember that album; Oxygene 7-13 was okay; Metamorphses felt like a misguided attempt to copy Air; I haven't heard a single note of his music after that. I remember reading that Cousteau was largely generated with software running on an Atari ST; the original recording was hours long, it would be great if it was released at some point.

― Ashley Pomeroy, Tuesday, November 27, 2018 12:55 AM

Let me decribe the tracks, then get an idea of the album:

Calypso Part 1: A steel drum piece that will make your day happy.
Calypso Part 2: My favorite of the album, it brings the image to your mind of a submarine submerging into the waters. It somewhat reminds me of the music on Donkey Kong Country 2, although it doesn't sound like it at all.
Calypso Part 3: A slow, melancolic piece, the guitar part is cool too.

― (Jon L), Monday, January 10, 2005 6:18 AM

I've always loved the way Jarre had this obvious burning desire to be taken seriously - along the same lines as Peter Gabriel or David Byrne - so his early albums have these little ambient vignettes and are like gateway drugs to hardcore ambient and systems music. At the same time he was never willing to abandon the mass market and go all the way. In my opinion the title track from Waiting for Cousteau is way up there with Global Communication's 76:14 as the best ambient music from the early 1990s

― Ashley Pomeroy, Tuesday, November 27, 2018 12:55 AM

I like Calypso pt. 1 a lot tho, because of its hilarious appearance in Olympic figure skating from time to time

― nevertheless, he stopped (flamboyant goon tie included), Tuesday, March 13, 2018 10:40 PM

Nice.

:D

LOL

I feel like such an amateur ambient cop after LBI’s rejection of SAWII

― brimstead, Tuesday, July 2, 2019 7:05 PM (thirteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

We're all amateur cops in the greater realm that is ambient.

I'm the blade runner of ambient

Tbf Oxygène and Équinoxe deserve to be on this list as much if not more than [redacted].

hahaha, and by 2 points it takes the #1 spot

That Silent Hill 2 soundtrack is excellent btw, but the pieces are all these short vignettes that manage to instantly set a certain mood. Not at all the kind of long-form meditative ambient that people tend to look for in album-length music.

We're all amateur cops in the greater realm that is ambient.

in this realm, the police show up and their sirens just make really deep
"wooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom" noises that gradually become embedded in the surrounding environment

Armed with Buddha Machines instead of tasers.