Ambient Recommendations

Cheerz

i've put lightning in a twilight hour's cassette-only release from a couple years ago on youtube. it was ripped straight from the cassette, so the fidelity isn't amazing. music's wonderful though.

New Loscil. Loads of stuff like this about but he just seems to do it better/ deeper

https://open.spotify.com/track/0piAVJZfRRqqdC9W6jMKae?si=mk9uWBenQ8qJ13fPesfHRw

Yeah, enjoying this one. It is more "ambient" than a lot of his other records, which often have some underlying beats/oscilations/pulses.

btw there is a loscil thread, which I only point out because I think it's literally the only thread I've ever started in my 10 (?) years on this message board.

thanks for that recommendation, beautiful stuff

2814 - Lost in a Dream

https://soundcloud.com/dreamcatalogue/2814-lost-in-a-dream-1

this worked well last night- https://marchasselbalch.bandcamp.com/album/long-time

good call pickles, this might well achieve what zolpidem can't

New Loscil! Have to get on it. Love his work.

ive been binging on non "distintegration loops" basinski. so much material, so much of it great. he really has a touch for selecting the most elegiac fragments of sound and presenting them beautifully

dang. joanna brouk. i regret not having explored her music more after hearing her highlight track "lifting off" on the I Am the Center comp. but Lifting Off is just the first part of a 5-song "Maggi's Flute" sequence which is just the best. it's flute. with delay and reverb. it sounds really good and i wish i had a house in the country just so i could quietly play it through speakers outside. but the rest of the brouk comp it's on (NUMERO 069, Hearing Music) is also very good. it runs around $40-50 on discogs these days, but i need it

what's amazing about her music is that it has a sense of continuity and cohesion that sticks even with different instrumentations and themes. for example, check out "majesty suites - entrance of the queen of winter dawn", which seems to use french horn or something similar - it's a cousin to the Maggi's Flute sequence i mentioned earlier, not only with the reverb and delay setup, but also with the hard tape edits and the occasional glimpses of her throat (gasping for quick breaths when playing flute, snippets of some sort of guttural breath or half-syllable, delayed, on the majesty suites song)

btw, she's no one comp wonder - listen to "the space between". it's 21 minutes long, and even better than dave's version

i really like the album ‘peel’ by kmru on editions mego.

thanks for the Brouk tip Karl, listening now

1 Mile North released a new record this year that's quite lovely.

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

I was looking at that Brouk comp on Discogs and there’s quite a few people complaining that it’s a bad pressing

yeah I would definitely check Discogs before buying any ambient music on recently pressed vinyl

see also the fiasco re: Nurse With Wound's "Trippin' Music" 3LP, bad packing ruined a bunch.

I loved 1 Mile North back in the day - will check the new one for sure.

It's pretty good upon listening to a few tracks, Chinaski. The sort of sound is exactly what I want sometimes.

the table is the table just made an excellent ambient recommendation in a secret, forbidden, non-indexed thread, so i wanted to put it out here:

https://privateelevators.bandcamp.com/album/la-looks

also, after purchasing that on bandcamp, it automatically went on to the next track in my "collection", which is a preview track from the william basinksi album coming out in November, Lamentations. the alert went out on the basinski thread a while back, and one listen to the preview track, "O, My Daughter, O, My Sorrow", was enough to make me click the pre-order button.
holy shit, it is beautiful. the slow introduction of the voice - for some reason i strongly believe that the entire album will be a standout release for him, based off of these 6 minutes.

Joanna Brouk is great.

I've been feeling the new album from Romeo Poirier. This could go in the Balearic thread as well because it sort of overlaps both (and he's a lifeguard, which is a very Balearic job). RIYL Jon Hassell, Jan Jelinek's ambient stuff.

https://sferic.bandcamp.com/album/hotel-nota

An artist I've been liking a lot recently is Motion Sickness Of Time Travel. The 12-album collection 'Ballades' and her self-titled album are two of my favourites.

Thanks for the Romeo Poirier nod, paolo. Lovely stuff.

yeah it is wonderful

seeing as the thread has been revived, here's a pretty good in depth article about the original ambient house scene that's just been republished :

https://jointhefuture.net/2020/09/10/long-read-the-story-of-chill-out/

Thanks for the Tetsu Inoue recommendation upthread! Listened this morning and can tell I'm going to revisit for awhile.

Things I've been enjoying lately:
Sofie Birch - Themes For A Better Tomorrow Vol. II 'Hidden Terraces' (chill modular synth + field recordings)
https://vaagner.bandcamp.com/album/themes-for-a-better-tomorrow-vol-ii-hidden-terraces

H. Takahashi - Sonne und Wasser (warm take on Japanese minimalism)
https://wheretonow.bandcamp.com/album/sonne-und-wasser

Phil Struck - Schleswig-Holstein Aufnahmen (meandering/dark/warm soundscapes & miniatures, employs a drum machine or loops to a Cluster-esque affect at times)
https://philstruck.bandcamp.com/album/schleswig-holstein-aufnahmen

also the Steve Roach 'Quiet Music' reissues...don't know about anyone else, but ambient is about 90% of my listening this year.

That mix from the RBMA article on chillout is ace, thanks for pointing it out mark e

Another beautiful Poirier

https://kitrecs.bandcamp.com/album/plage-arri-re

The Motion Sickness Of Time Travel was new to me and I'm liking it a lot! So thanks!

this Kagami Smile album is huge sounding, seriously enveloping:

https://vill4in.bandcamp.com/album/dream-residue

feel like on ilx we once started to feel out the boundaries of a kind of “urban” vs “rural” vs “cosmic” vs “drug trip” ambient map.. or maybe it was just me trying to justify my indifference towards Stars of the Lid... but anyway this is definitely “urban” ambient

Dark ambient def feels underrepresented in these threads.

there was some of that in the ambient poll, too. seems impossible to pin down!

yeah I’m not a fan of dark ambient really, or “creepy” music in general.. love zoviet france tho, guess their stuff can get pretty dark

Deliberately creepy low-key horror dark ambient doesn't do much for me either but the cavernous, nocturnal and melancholy side of it definitely does.

Enjoying this Kagami Smile recommendation brimstead

I did that thing with Kagami Smile where I look (usually on RYM) at a band's discography, tut audibly at the sheer, daft size of it, and decide not to listen because overwhelmed.

Dark ambient is hard to make without being too cheesy. I do love some of it! I think my absolute "you have to hear this" from the past few years has been this David Terry record called Sorrow on Opal Tapes. He's in cult stoner weirdo group Bong, but this doesn't sound much like anything Bong has done.

I love this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_vSPsWJnEg&t=1188s

Apologies!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_vSPsWJnEg

But I also love New Risen Throne, Kammarheit, Gravetemple, and some other dark ambient stuff...The first two are particularly amazing when they're on.

ambient is about 90% of my listening this year

Same, since lockdown started anyway

Dark ambient def feels underrepresented in these threads.

― pomenitul, Monday, September 14, 2020 2:55 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I would suspect that the brighter, calming, new age adjacent vibe is the kind of escape most people are attracted to these days.

I've loved revisiting old ambient favourites and exploring the intersection between ambient/new age/Gigi Masin-adjacent/minimalism (holy and otherwise)/ECM & electroacoustic. Incredibly fertile ground.

hmmm my favorite stuff seems to have elements of both, like Biosphere's Cirque seems dark ambient adjacent. ambient that isn't goth or metal but is kinda subterranean.

I've been really into the "arctic" side of dark ambient these days. My drift-off-to-sleep soundtrack for the past week has been Thomas Köner's Aubrite and Kaamos back-to-back. Aubrite in particular feels special to me. There's nothing creepy about it--just pure, deep, all-enveloping darkness.
https://staalplaat.bandcamp.com/album/aubrite

Koner is all time but I don't reach for him much at the moment. As mentioned above, the brighter, calming stuff is where I'm at right now. I don't know that particular album though - will give it a listen.

idk if it's considered "all the way" ambient music, but william tyler's latest definitely reaches into areas of floating melancholy, if not quite full on "DARK AMBIENT."

Lots of stuff to check out. Thanks, all.