Top 100 Ambient Albums

So, cos I had nothing better to do, here's my corny top 50 ambient albums list to complement the "cool" one Pitcfork did:

2350 Broadway - 2350 Broadway 4
310 - Snorkelhouse
Air Liquide - Nephology: The New Religion
Alio Die - Deconsecrated and Pure
Alquimia - Coatlique: Goddess of the Earth
Autumn of Communion - Autumn of Communion
Baked Beans - Baked Beans
Biosphere - Patashnik
Constance Demby - Novus Magnificat: Through the Stargate
Constance Demby - Sacred Space Music
Cosmic Baby - Stunde Null
Datacide - Flowerhead
Deep Space Network - Big Rooms
Dots - Dots
Dreamfish - Dreamfish
Elodie Lauten - Inscapes from Exile
Exquisite Corpse - Inner Light
France Jobin - The Illusion of Infinitesimal
Freida Abtan ‎- The Hands of the Dancer / The Temple of the Dreamer
Gas - Königsforst
Global Communication - 76:14
Higher Intelligence Agency & Biosphere - Polar Sequences
The Irresistible Force - Global Chillage
Ishq - And Awake
Jochem Paap - Vrs-Mbnt-Pcs 9598 I
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith - Tides
Khan & Walker - Empire State Building
The McLean Mix - Rainforest Images
Meg Bowles - Blue Cosmos
Meg Bowles - The Shimmering Land
Minilogue - Blomma
Move D & Namlook - Raumland trilogy
Music to Films - Music to Films
Natasha Barrett - Trade Winds
Oliver Lieb - Constellation
Oliver Lieb - Inside Voices
Organic Cloud - Organic Cloud
Psychick Warriors ov Gaia - Ov Biospheres and Sacred Grooves
Raica - Lucent Glances
Robert Rich - Somnium
Shades of Orion - Shades Of Orion 2
Sheila Chandra - ABoneCroneDrone
Solar Quest - Orgship
Susumu Yokota - Sakura
Tangerine Dream - Zeit
Vangelis - Soil Festivities
Vladislave Delay - Anima
Woob - Woob 1194
Zalys - Sublime
Zenith - Zenith

Oh man soil festivities
What a strange recording

There's a lot of FAX in it, but IMO it's pretty inexcusable for any top 50 ambient list to completely ignore the most important ambient label (and the most prolific ambient producer) of the last 25 years, so I tried to balance that a bit.

(xpost)

IMO Soil Festivities is Vangelis' best attempt to do "proper" ambient. Albums like Beauborg or Invisible Connection are a bit too on-the-nose avant-garde for my tastes, and stuff like The City is a bit too cheesy, but on SF he gets it right.

fun list, Tuomas. Zeit would go on my list as well, epic gloomy space ambient.

i must check out that Minilogue album

Anima too but that's another borderline "waht is ambient" case. it's a little too lively and unstable (?) for proper zoning out. Entain is the most "ambient" of his albums, i think. just imo/ime.

i was too young for the late80s/early90s period when "ambient" also referred to ambient house/techno

zeit is so heavy like dark ambient ground zero kinda

If it has beats at all, it shouldn't be considered as an ambient album, imo. Here's an ambient mix I did this weekend with my friend. There are no beats.

https://www.mixcloud.com/biznotic/ambient-excursions-to-44/

rong

or right, i don't know lol

some of the things on the pfork list are like "if it doesn't have beats at all, it can be considered an ambient album"

I never really got why the aphex twin collected ambient work- sounding stuff like fsol is considered ambient, it's p banging and also distracting with the off-kilter beats

I wasn't there at the time but I think "ambient" mostly was being used as a prefix to -house or -techno.

Which makes a lot more sense given most of that stuff is too soft and slow to dance to (at a time when house and techno were almost exclusively conceived of as club or dancing oriented), but predates and doesn't fit in with the "intelligent" frame that started to sweep through circa 1993.

Selected Ambient Works Vol II is "proper" ambient tho.

right, it was more shorthand... like calling hardcore techno "hardcore"

I think that large swathes of Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld (esp. the last three tracks on disc one and "A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain...") do in fact meet a narrower definition, but I can appreciate not wanting to include an album that also features "Little Fluffy Clouds" and "Perpetual Dawn" etc.

makes sense, thx tim. and yes of course vol ii is the good shit ~_~

that's a good example of why words are so annoying, you can't just make a list of humming ambient drone without someone being like WHY DOESNT BRITISH TECHNO THAT U CANT DANCE TO FROM 2002 IN THERE

qn: do u pronounce it << auhm-bient >> or whatever?

the 'b' is silent

<i>IMO Soil Festivities is Vangelis' best attempt to do "proper" ambient.</i>

not an official release, but what you want to hear is his soundtrack to "microneurosurgery with videotapes" also called the Tegos tapes. most of the online recordings edit out the narration but it still leaves you with about twelve hours of ambient vangelis. it's as fantastic as you might hope that would be.

here's a collection of them on soundcloud:

https://soundcloud.com/kitlightning/sets/tegosauron

try case 4, for example

I don't even follow my own proclamation most of the time. Plastikman's Consumed album is full of beats but functionally, it works like an ambient album to me.

If ambient music is defined as something you can chill to, nothing precludes it from having beats. There's plenty of albums by proper, recognized ambient artists that have unobtrusive, chilled down beats.

Obviously there are types of ambient house and ambient techno, where the latter genre is more important, and which have fairly banging 4/4 beats. That's one of the reasons I don't consider the From Within albums or Selected Ambient Works I to be proper ambient. But there are also distinguished types of ambient beats. There are even some tunes I'd consider to be ambient where percussion is the main element.

I think it should be beatless. But then: Gas.

If beatlesness was an absolute requirement, a lot of acclaimed ambient albums would have to be disqualified: Microgravity, Patashnik, Organic Cloud, all albums by Air, Silence, Woob, Gas & The Irresistible Force, most Atom Heart, etc.

I'm fine with that - it'd make it 'neater' as a genre descriptor. As it is, it's kinda messy and vague. (It doesn't keep me awake at night. But still.)

Drawing clear genre boundaries is impossible anywhere.

What's more interesting in discussing these lists (or at least, treating them as some sort of 'critical consensus') are the blind spots and shifts in focus - new age used to be one of those, it's now firmly back in the canon. 90's ambient (incl -house and -techno) is receding. But large swathes of the ambient landscape (ha!) still lay undiscovered - lots of soundtrack work (film and increasingly, video game), dark ambient (Lustmord, Cold Meat Industry, Thomas Köner etc), psybient (Shpongle, Ott, Ultimae Recs etc).

Even within this debate re beats or no beats, some of those 0PN records on their list seem pretty far removed from ambient.

Rifts made sense. Replica made no sense.

yeah, the absence of ambient artists in this list from labels like Projekt/Hic Sunt Leones/Cold Meat Industry makes sense, as goth + world music is still terminally uncool. It's sad though, artists like Robert Rich and Alio Die have been putting out amazing work, often collaborating to great effect, for 20-30 years now. I'm surprised there's nothing by any Em:t artists... obviously Woob's 1194 but also magical releases like Lucid Dreams 0096:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuQj1txL2Bs

Scanner doesn't seem to get any love these days either.

I think we can all agree that one defining characteristic of ambient is Beatleslessness.

the easily cornball intersection of world music + new age/ambient is highly highly beloved of me

The Em:t albums seem to have sort of suffered the same fate as FAX: they're out of print and not so easy to acquire. I kinda feel lists like this are compiled by people who weren't listening to this stuff in the '90s, and these days the newcomers don't have an easy access to it, so it's dropped off the radar. Which is sad, because their catalogue include some of the best electronic music of all time.

here have a mix..

https://www.mixcloud.com/crystalsprings/evening-fog-mix/

dude made his own list:

http://www.self-titledmag.com/2016/09/30/100-best-ambient-albums/

dude's list runs pretty close to my tastes but I don't know if that makes the list very useful for me wrt new discoveries.

nice list, weird that it's framed as a rebuttal when it deliberately excludes albums from the p4k list.. it's really just "another hundred great ambient albums" and obviously that's a totally good thing to post but the disconnect is odd, i'll go ahead and blame clickbait culture (sorry)

also because his list features plenty of artists from the pitchfork list. kinda getting into narcissism of small differences territory.

good for dude

Dude also made a pretty remarkable ambient album of his own (Daydreaming, 2007)

duane pitre - organized pitches occurring in time

The Beach Boys Pet Sounds
The Beatles The Beatles
Bob Dylan Highway 61 Revisited
David Bowie Hunky Dory
Radiohead The Bends

another mix

https://soundcloud.com/coppersprings/local-fertilizer-mix

No FAX (or Rather Interesting) on that guy's list either, what's wrong with people? Have Namlook/Inoue/Atom Heart/etc been completety scratched off the ambient canon?

Namlook's Air I appears (assuming that we're talking about the same list.) I think that'd be my choice of Fax titles as well if I could choose only one. Okay, maybe Ambiant Otaku. Damn.

I think it's like Tuomas said, the FAX stuff being unavailable for an entire generation of listeners means it drops out of the canon for many... same goes for Woob, although 1194 was re-released a few years back.

Looks like Global Communication's Pentamerous Metemorphosis is also out-of-print, which is a shame because it is easily a top ten all-time ambient album.

I think it's the other way round, i.e. people don't care much for that stuff so it becomes unavailable and then drops out of the canon. FAX label has no God-given right to be remembered, it has to earn it.

hahaha, yeah like that Laraaji album "earned" a spot on the Pitchfork list by being called Ambient 3 and being released on Editions EG.

i mean it's p obvious that pfork peeps couldn't think of 100 ambient albumss, they threw fennesz and terry riley in there for some reason. who cares, though, right?

well, I think ILX exists to sequester challops by binding it with our own best-of lists, we're cultural environmentalists aren't we?