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.
― brimstead, Tuesday, 27 September 2016 23:22 (seven years ago) link
i was too young for the late80s/early90s period when "ambient" also referred to ambient house/techno
― brimstead, Tuesday, 27 September 2016 23:24 (seven years ago) link
zeit is so heavy like dark ambient ground zero kinda
― savvinesslessness (map), Tuesday, 27 September 2016 23:25 (seven years ago) link
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/
― brotherlovesdub, Tuesday, 27 September 2016 23:39 (seven years ago) link
rong
― brimstead, Tuesday, 27 September 2016 23:41 (seven years ago) link
or right, i don't know lol
― brimstead, Tuesday, 27 September 2016 23:42 (seven years ago) link
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"
― brimstead, Tuesday, 27 September 2016 23:43 (seven years ago) link
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
― flopson, Tuesday, 27 September 2016 23:51 (seven years ago) link
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.
― Tim F, Tuesday, 27 September 2016 23:59 (seven years ago) link
right, it was more shorthand... like calling hardcore techno "hardcore"
― brimstead, Wednesday, 28 September 2016 00:00 (seven years ago) link
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.
― Tim F, Wednesday, 28 September 2016 00:02 (seven years ago) link
makes sense, thx tim. and yes of course vol ii is the good shit ~_~
― flopson, Wednesday, 28 September 2016 00:04 (seven years ago) link
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
― flopson, Wednesday, 28 September 2016 00:16 (seven years ago) link
qn: do u pronounce it << auhm-bient >> or whatever?
― flopson, Wednesday, 28 September 2016 00:17 (seven years ago) link
the 'b' is silent
― ( ^_^) (Lamp), Wednesday, 28 September 2016 00:22 (seven years ago) link
<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
― erry red flag (f. hazel), Wednesday, 28 September 2016 01:22 (seven years ago) link
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.
― brotherlovesdub, Wednesday, 28 September 2016 02:11 (seven years ago) link
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.
― Tuomas, Wednesday, 28 September 2016 06:00 (seven years ago) link
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.
― Tuomas, Wednesday, 28 September 2016 07:18 (seven years ago) link
I think it should be beatless. But then: Gas.
― Sunn O))) Brother Where Art Thou? (Chinaski), Wednesday, 28 September 2016 07:20 (seven years ago) link
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.
― Tuomas, Wednesday, 28 September 2016 07:42 (seven years ago) link
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.)
― Sunn O))) Brother Where Art Thou? (Chinaski), Wednesday, 28 September 2016 11:42 (seven years ago) link
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).
― Siegbran, Wednesday, 28 September 2016 11:59 (seven years ago) link
Even within this debate re beats or no beats, some of those 0PN records on their list seem pretty far removed from ambient.
― sctttnnnt (pgwp), Wednesday, 28 September 2016 13:21 (seven years ago) link
Rifts made sense. Replica made no sense.
― I look forward to hearing from you shortly, (Karl Malone), Wednesday, 28 September 2016 14:14 (seven years ago) link
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.
― erry red flag (f. hazel), Wednesday, 28 September 2016 16:39 (seven years ago) link
the easily cornball intersection of world music + new age/ambient is highly highly beloved of me
― I wish you could see my home. It's... it's so... exciting (Jon not Jon), Wednesday, 28 September 2016 16:42 (seven years ago) link
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.
― Tuomas, Wednesday, 28 September 2016 18:14 (seven years ago) link
here have a mix..
https://www.mixcloud.com/crystalsprings/evening-fog-mix/
― brimstead, Thursday, 29 September 2016 21:06 (seven years ago) link
dude made his own list:
http://www.self-titledmag.com/2016/09/30/100-best-ambient-albums/
― scott seward, Friday, 30 September 2016 18:25 (seven years ago) link
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.
― Siegbran, Friday, 30 September 2016 19:05 (seven years ago) link
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)
― brimstead, Friday, 30 September 2016 19:20 (seven years ago) link
also because his list features plenty of artists from the pitchfork list. kinda getting into narcissism of small differences territory.
― a basset hound (strongo hulkington's ghost dad), Friday, 30 September 2016 19:34 (seven years ago) link
good for dude
― savvinesslessness (map), Friday, 30 September 2016 20:22 (seven years ago) link
Dude also made a pretty remarkable ambient album of his own (Daydreaming, 2007)
― doug watson, Friday, 30 September 2016 23:57 (seven years ago) link
duane pitre - organized pitches occurring in time
― braunld (Lowell N. Behold'n), Saturday, 1 October 2016 00:20 (seven years ago) link
The Beach Boys Pet SoundsThe Beatles The BeatlesBob Dylan Highway 61 RevisitedDavid Bowie Hunky DoryRadiohead The Bends
― Still D.U.C.K. (Noodle Vague), Saturday, 1 October 2016 01:17 (seven years ago) link
another mix
https://soundcloud.com/coppersprings/local-fertilizer-mix
― brimstead, Saturday, 1 October 2016 03:53 (seven years ago) link
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?
― Tuomas, Monday, 3 October 2016 11:54 (seven years ago) link
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.
― doug watson, Monday, 3 October 2016 13:52 (seven years ago) link
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.
― erry red flag (f. hazel), Monday, 3 October 2016 15:25 (seven years ago) link
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.
― heaven parker (anagram), Monday, 3 October 2016 15:35 (seven years ago) link
hahaha, yeah like that Laraaji album "earned" a spot on the Pitchfork list by being called Ambient 3 and being released on Editions EG.
― erry red flag (f. hazel), Monday, 3 October 2016 17:46 (seven years ago) link
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?
― brimstead, Monday, 3 October 2016 20:19 (seven years ago) link
well, I think ILX exists to sequester challops by binding it with our own best-of lists, we're cultural environmentalists aren't we?
― erry red flag (f. hazel), Monday, 3 October 2016 23:24 (seven years ago) link
i thinkmaybe we should FAX tuomas an anagram
― savvinesslessness (map), Monday, 3 October 2016 23:32 (seven years ago) link
I think with FAX it really is a case that the albums are so hard to find; especially after Namlooks death, when they disappeared from online stores and there wasn't any more Ambient World reissues (though that's gradually starting to change now that rights have been reverting back to his collaborators). Even in the '90s, some of those albums were like mythical objects, with everyone who managed to snatch a copy from those pressings of 500 or 1000 CDs praising them, while they remained impossible to acquire for the rest of us. I still remember how good it felt in the 2000s when Discogs.com and me having a proper job finally meant I could acquire some of those albums.
Of course there are duds among them, FAX released a new album once a week, but the quality of the best records is definitely high and their reputation is earned. So I really feel their low availability has caused them to drop from the canon... It's not a coincidence that the albums most likely to be included in this top 50 or top 100 lists are stuff like Air or Silence, which were reissued several times, while amazing records like Music to Films still remain obscure, because they only had that one 500 copy pressing.
― Tuomas, Tuesday, 4 October 2016 07:23 (seven years ago) link
It's not necessarily the availability, the FAX material just isn't that highly rated. If you take the Rate Your Music chart for 'big tent definition' ambient (ie including minimalism, new age and drone), the first FAX album only shows up at #174.
― Siegbran, Tuesday, 4 October 2016 11:24 (seven years ago) link
(and there's tons of stuff on those charts that's also out of print)
― Siegbran, Tuesday, 4 October 2016 11:26 (seven years ago) link
I don't understand how that list works...? Tetsu Inoue's Organic Cloud is at 202th spot, and has rating of 3.79, which is the same rating the album at 23rd spot has. It doesn't look like they are ordered by rating?
― Tuomas, Tuesday, 4 October 2016 15:45 (seven years ago) link