Ambient Recommendations

Glad you liked, the article don

https://homenormal.bandcamp.com/album/places-for-peace

self-promo: i put together an album recently; it's ambient leaning, but some parts a bit noisy. was quite influenced by dntel, microstoria, mego

http://elin.bandcamp.com/album/secret-work

one of my favorite albums from the last few years is h hunt's Playing Piano for Dad. anyone else a fan. i ran across it on ryuichi sakamoto's Kajitsu playlist, which got a write-up in the NYT (i think) and features a bunch of quiet songs he chose for a friend's restaurant. in listening to that, i ran across h hunt and have been listening to the album ever since.

it's on a label called tasty morsels, and i was reading about them last night. this is everything i think a label should be:

https://insheepsclothinghifi.com/tasty-morsels/

I always want to hear music that isn't necessarily ambient but is so spare as to verge on "ambient". "Still" music with lots of space between notes. So I made some of my own...

https://www.twitter.com/musicophiliamix/status/1497749153639714819

https://archive.org/details/stgigaarchive/St.GIGA+001/

Someone has uploaded a huge treasure trove of recordings of the 90's Japanese satellite radio station St.Giga, which specialized in ambient music, field recordings, smooth jazz, and chillout deep house. The station based their broadcasting schedule on the day's tide charts, with the music's intensity rising and falling with the tide. They often layered original field recordings under the music they were playing, and they frequently interspersed original poetry readings from minor Japanese celebrities. These recordings are extremely varied in tone and genre. They're such a joy to listen to, this stuff has been soundtracking my work days for the past two months.

amazing find

wow

holy moly

Oh wowzer THANK YOU. I have literally been on a mission to find as many St Giga recordings as I can. This is incredible.

wow that's impressive

very much enjoying Playing Piano for Dad

i'm listening to Green Pupil - A right now. i am feeling good

i'm just taking a quick skim through the wikipedia for St. GIGA, but i have already learned

- it was created as a subsidiary of a tv provider called WOWOW.
- The core management team made the executive decision to create a subsidiary named St.GIGA. The name was selected by a popular poll of "persons on the streets" because the executives agreed that they knew nothing about music
- in 2003, St. GIGA became Club COSMO

St GIGA also released a series of field recordings CDs called Sounds of the Earth. I've been trying to snag them whenever I see them on Soulseek etc - I've got FLACs of volumes 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7 and 12 - plus the "Sound Calendar 1999" album. If anyone has any other volumes or St GIGA recordings that they want to trade then do please message me! They're beautifully recorded.

There's also a few rips of music shows on Nicovideo - I've tried to arrange the ones I could find onto a playlist here: https://www.nicovideo.jp/mylist/70333292

OK so I downloaded the whole thing. For me these mp3s are actually .mov files that think they're mp3s, so lots of programs had trouble opening them. On mac I was able to open in quicktime and then export them as "audio only" and it converts them to m4a. Just wanted to make sure I mentioned in case any of you have the same problem.

can anyone upload a zip of audio files for us dummies?

I added them without issue to iTunes. Win10.

Odd

Oh, I downloaded what was labeled as the M4A files, maybe you did not?

Archive org process:
download options : mpeg4 audio
click on the download button
audio opens in browser
right click: save audio as :
(win didn't give me any choice but mpeg4 audio)
just dragged and dropped into itunes.

maybe its the bit when the audio opens in my browser?

The Sounds of the Earth field recordings bamboohouses mentioned look really interesting - from their discogs entries anyway.

It’s the save audio as part, without that step nothing but QuickTime could make sense of the files for me.

Yeah my introduction to St. GIGA was through some of those field recordings I stumbled on years ago. I’m a sucker for raw audio of forests and beaches in general.

Lastly on the file thing, to clarify I followed that exact download process but on Mac downloading the file after it opens in browser gave a file that still needed to be re-saved as audio only. Macs I guess!

End of Spacey Night - A is great.

Agreed, and all of Spacey Night - B is great too. An all-out deep house/world fusion assault. These DJs had great taste in house music imo. They love unconvincing synthesized horns as much as I do.

Yeah love the house music parts. I think I heard Susumu Yokota at one point.

self-promo: i put together an album recently; it's ambient leaning, but some parts a bit noisy. was quite influenced by dntel, microstoria, mego

http://elin.bandcamp.com/album/secret-work

― maelin, Monday, March 7, 2022 10:57 PM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

gorge

St Giga files: if I downloaded them individually on a mac, I had to rename from .m4a.mp3 to .m4a. But the torrent option just downloaded them all as m4a files.

This St. Giga archive is amazing. I think this has just claimed my whole year of music listening.

yeah it is incredible. i also loved the artwork for each one when imported to itunes

...your files came with artwork? Well shit. How do I get that?

i dl'd via torrent--maybe that's it?

Yeah seems like the torrent was the way to go. I had all sorts of trouble with the other method, clearly.

The other files also had the artwork (and are properly tagged) if just renamed from mp3. But yep the torrent is the easiest way.

The other files wouldn't even import into Apple Music for me, which I went into above. The only way to make them usable was to have Quicktime save as audio only file. Every other program wasn't able to load them.

Beyond The Yellow Haze by Emeka Ogboh, treated found sounds from Lagos.

lol the artwork for one of the st. giga tracks is deep space 9

The other files wouldn't even import into Apple Music for me, which I went into above. The only way to make them usable was to have Quicktime save as audio only file. Every other program wasn't able to load them.

Did you try just renaming from .m4a.mp3 to .m4a, though?

I don't believe it was that simple... I had to resave the files as m4a vs. just renaming. But they also didn't appear as "m4a.mp3" just ".mp3" so the problem wasn't exactly clear at the time.

https://billowobservatory.bandcamp.com/album/stareside - will be buying this next Friday (full album releases the week after). All four album tracks on Spotify hit my ambient sweet spot.

Billow Observatory is the project of trans-Atlantic duo Jonas Munk (Denmark) and Jason Kolb (Michigan). Initially planned as a small side-project from their main work in Manual and Auburn Lull respectively, the two quickly realized their collaborative experiments merited more time and attention. Using heavily treated cavernous guitars, subtle synths, and crackling radio transmissions, their self-titled debut was released in 2012 as a double LP and established Billow Observatory as purveyors of unhurried, highly detailed ambient immersion. The release pair of II: Plains/Patterns in 2017, and III: Chroma/Contour in 2019, on Munk's own Azure Vista Records, introduced a subtle underpinning of rhythm, pulse, and stutter among the washes, expanding their sound with a hint of understated electronica.

Marking 10 years since debuting on Felte, 2022 sees the release of Stareside, their most forcefully elegant undertaking to date. A record of swaying quarantine temperament, Stareside's 9 tracks thread the needle between hope and hopelessness - daydreaming whilst watching the world go mad in the blink of an eye. Not shy of overt rhythm, soaring motifs, and daunting undercurrents, Stareside veers wildly in new directions, yet keeps one hand near the record bin of comforting nostalgia (think early Warp Records, Jon Hassel, and Conny Plank to name a few).

nice, thanks!

In the beginnings of my hunt for more info of the music featured on (at the moment) "Sound of Coral - A" I stumbled on your posts, OneSecondBefore, on selectbutton! Small internet!

There is some stuff on St.GIGA in Toop's Ocean of Sound. I clipped this last time I read it.

“Sounds and music which match the wave patterns of this guiding line will be selected and transmitted to harmonize with each cycle. By matching the wave patterns of nature and the melodic patterns of music in this way, a powerful and deep world of sound will be realised. This world of sound, filled with the vibrations of nature, will draw people into an unusual mental space where they can experience the sweet beginnings of life itself, reminiscent of the start of existence as an embryo within amniotic fluids …”

Hiroshi Yokoi - St.GIGA station handbook (1990)

i loved Ocean of Sound, devoured it, and yet have no recollection of it talking about St Giga. but there it is, in Ch 6:

amniotic fluids

Devised in 1990 by Hiroshi Yokoi, a pioneer of twenty-four hour FM radio transmission in Japan, St GIGA was the first Japanese satellite station. The concept was inspired by a Kurt Vonnegut story called “The Sirens of Titan”, in which cave-dwelling creatures called Harmoniums eat beautiful sounds and shine with light. The only words they know are “I’m here” and “I’m glad you’re there”, the perfect distillation of radio’s most basic principle. Programmed according to tidal patterns, sunrise and sunset and the changing phases of the moon, rather than Greenwich standard time, the station works upon principles which would be regarded in the UK as symptoms of delusional mania.

“The cyclical patterns created by these various natural forces are combined to form a single line which is used as the guiding line for programme scheduling”, writes Mr Yokoi in the radio station handbook. “The movements of this ‘guiding line’ are irregular and, rather than conforming to the Greenwich time line, form a cyclical pattern based on the natural rhythms that synchronise with human behaviour and emotions. Sounds and music which match the wave patterns of this guiding line will be selected and transmitted to harmonize with each cycle. By matching the wave patterns of nature and the melodic patterns of music in this way, a powerful and deep world of sound will be realised. This world of sound, filled with the vibrations of nature, will draw people into an unusual mental space where they can experience the sweet beginnings of life itself, reminiscent of the start of existence as an embryo within amniotic fluids … We are about to enter a period of major historical change not often witnessed in the long history of mankind. I believe that people involved in media have an important obligation to fulfil. This is to truly grasp the spirit of the period. And at the same time to use their imaginative powers and practical skills to create a ‘dream tide’.” Those who understand the St GIGA programme best, and thus its main target audience, Hiroshi Yokoi claims, are “unborn babies sleeping quietly in amniotic fluids”.

i have to admit, when i finally found the passage (skimming through pages) and found the rest of the text, i kind of felt like man in the high castle when coming across the part after the ellipses:

"... We are about to enter a period of major historical change not often witnessed in the long history of mankind. I believe that people involved in media have an important obligation to fulfil. This is to truly grasp the spirit of the period. And at the same time to use their imaginative powers and practical skills to create a ‘dream tide’.”

that is an amazing belief

He was right - though not in perhaps the way he envisaged.

To go back to the OT, all of my ambient recommendations generally come in radio show form.

No Place Like Drone

Occasionally some of them are good.

Anyone able to identify the artist on the second half of "Dreamt Water-A"?

the extended twinkly synth part?

Some synth but also prominent glockenspiel & guitar, about 40 minutes into it.