ILX AMBIENT ALBUMS POLL: the voting thread. Voting ends on Sunday, June 23rd.

I nominated Bohren and Der Club of Gore - Black Earth and it's not in the Pastebin

Oh, I must've missed that. I'm sorry. I edited the Google sheet to include it, and here's a new Pastebin link with it:

https://pastebin.com/N3CgEGMV

I'll ask the mods to change the Pastebin link in the opening post.

Btw, I've only received one ballot so far, hope there'll be many more. :)

Still listening!

yeah I have two weeks! I haven't even thought about it yet

My top ten will be easy enough, but the next twenty will require some listening!

Btw, I've only received one ballot so far, hope there'll be many more. :)

― Tuomas, Thursday, June 6, 2019 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol maybe I’ll exert more influence over this poll than I’d thought. Stars of the Lid ftw.

I fully expect my fridge to win through the power of write-in votes, ILM don't let me down.

Recently I’ve read about how both la monte young and Richard D James we’re heavily inspired by being beat the hum of electricity, particularly near electrical towers. Fridge buzz is classic ambient imo

After starting to piece together a list, a couple glaring omissions from my past attempts at building my own personal ambient top 10 or top 20:

Hammock - Maybe They Will Sing For Us Tomorrow
Voice of Eye - Vespers

Both artists had other works nominated, but these two are pretty seminal for them, respectively. Surprised about the Hammock omission in particular... Maybe They Will Sing For Us Tomorrow is not only one of their best, but easily the most "ambient" of all their releases. I've not yet heard Voice of Eye's Transmigration, so perhaps that can potentially place on the lower end of things.

In any case, for those who haven't yet heard it, check out They Will Sing For Us Tomorrow:
https://open.spotify.com/album/7gi9H6xQKjHG4KlPn9bYsS?si=T1T9dt2KS9iGUC8mYpQ1YQ

Voice Of Eye is a great example of one I need to spend more time with, I really liked their "early" 2LP that came on VOD, but haven't re-listened to it in years

Recently I’ve read about how both la monte young and Richard D James we’re heavily inspired by being beat the hum of electricity, particularly near electrical towers. Fridge buzz is classic ambient imo

One of those "Trance-Europe Express" compilations from the early nineties, which came with a large booklet of interviews and other articles, had a tongue-in-cheek guide to various electronic music genres. IIRC all the other genres had longer texts to explain them, but ambient defined with just one sentence: "Could be your refrigerator." :)

My finds so far have been Dreamweapon and Hymnvs. Both brilliant.

There's a bunch I'd stan for, not least the Laraaji/Blues Control album.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3jB7kp8LU-I

Laraaji's laugh at the end of that track...

my first pass through (not even counting the vast amount I don't know) gave me 127 albums on a longlist...

Laraaji used to do laughter workshops!

I think an ILM poster may have gone to one?

https://s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/prod.retreat.guru/images/178490/slide/5.jpg

Bump! Three ballots in so far.

Ambient voters just kinda drift toward the finish line

I would so go to that Laraaji workshop/camp thing.

I have my ballot pretty much done, I just feel bad because there must be several albums in the nom list that I would vote for but don’t have time to preview :-(

I mean preview all the noms to see which ones I would want to hear in full

Spent the day listening to Jon Hopkins' Late Night Tales, would have nominated it if I'd known about it last week!

Ambient voters just kinda drift toward the finish line

otm, i'm letting my list grow organically and unobtrusively

I have my ballot pretty much done, I just feel bad because there must be several albums in the nom list that I would vote for but don’t have time to preview :-(

I'm 100% going to vote but just letting everything float about before leaving it right until the last second.

Grateful Dead is ambient right?

if you're far enough away from them, yes

is grayfolded ambient? Never heard it myself

Voted!

I went through the nominations doc at the weekend and my initial shortlist came to 47 albums - there are loads of things on there I've never heard so I'm going to explore it a bit more before voting (will try to give anything mentioned in this thread a go too).

Looking forward to checking out some of the lower placing albums as imagine all the ones finishing higher will be the more well known albums.

Are you accepting mixed ballots Tuomas or is that too much hassle?

Sure, you can do a mixed ballot, just mark it clearly where the weighted part ends and the unweighted starts. And remember that the maximum number of points you can allot is 2550, so the sum of the weighted and unweighted parts can't be more than that.

Bump.

i'm also going through things on the list. will take a good while, really, but since i'm looking for work/underemployed/mostly writing at the moment, it's a perfect time to be listening all day.

After starting to piece together a list, a couple glaring omissions from my past attempts at building my own personal ambient top 10 or top 20:

Hammock - Maybe They Will Sing For Us Tomorrow
Voice of Eye - Vespers

Both artists had other works nominated, but these two are pretty seminal for them, respectively. Surprised about the Hammock omission in particular... Maybe They Will Sing For Us Tomorrow is not only one of their best, but easily the most "ambient" of all their releases. I've not yet heard Voice of Eye's Transmigration, so perhaps that can potentially place on the lower end of things.

― octobeard, Thursday, 6 June 2019 23:04 (six days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm a huge fan of Hammock although more for their post-rock/shoegaze than for their ambient, but I particularly like Mysterium and I should've nominated that, it's entirely without drums. They really go all-in with the melodrama (those song titles alone...) and I suppose that can be a turn off for some, but I still think it works.

Voice Of Eye are fantastic and I could've nominated Vespers just as well as Transmigration.

really like this Minor Shadows record by 1 Mile North. Thanks to whoever nominated it.

Oh, also: can there be a downloadable Google doc made of the nomination list? I ask only because I really want this list in perpetuity, as I know there's no way I can listen to everything I haven't heard before votes are due.

And I hope everyone will keep mentioning stuff here that they've discovered and liked so I can have a listen too before ballots are due!

1 Mile North was me! Always good to be near the top of the noms list...

I'd also stan for Peter Wright. Kiwi relocated to London (I think). Snowblind is excellent and so is Angels Fell Where The Kestrels Hover.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfGrZj6HawM

This Aes Dana record is pretty standard mellow psy-trance and really shouldn't be in this poll. Like, it's pretty openly psy-trance.

It has beats yes but not much more than say FSOL, Global Communication or Biosphere? It definitely has long stretches of typical ambient, esp the latter half of the record. But far enough if ppl think it's not ambient enough.

*fair enough*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju2RrrtzsHM

I was listening to the first Baked Beans albums for the first time in years because of this poll, and I think it makes a strong case against the "ambient music has no beats" argument. It has steady beats throughout, but they're not used for propulsion rather than mood and texture... Like in the track above, they help to deliver the mood of some remote desert at dusk, which is an image the track conveys perfectly, and I'm not sure if it could do that without any beats.

Adding beats to ambient is like bitters in a drink: A few drops may spice it up a bit, but if you keep shaking the bottle, you will eventually cross the line from tasty into nasty.

xp to Tuomas, in that case, i'd have nominated a lot more stuff from Chain Reaction records, because so many of those tracks are ambient using beats or percussive elements as texture and atmosphere.

(that is to say, i don't think that Baked Beans track is ambient, and neither is the Aes Dana. Though at least Baked Beans released good material).

hey I nominated Multila!

sleeve, i noticed that! :-) i would have nominated Fluxion's Bipolar Defect if I'd known that sort of stuff was viewed as acceptable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rgz693taU3c

(that's just a sampling from the whole 2xLP, obviously)

i had never heard of Alio Die and am totally smitten with Aura Seminalis, whoever nominated it I kiss you.

Same but Phaedra: yes, Zeit: no :) It's so arbitrary, and I like that.

Shame 'Music for the Rothko Chapel' wasn't nominated. I'd hit that as ambient. Piano & String too classically classical for me?

Same but Phaedra: yes, Zeit: no :) It's so arbitrary, and I like that.

Heh, it's the other way around for me.

Zoning out, music escorting you to a personal and highly particular ambient zone = ambient, to me. So I voted for Tired Sounds.

I sent an unweighted ballot yesterday and didn't get a confirmation.

Hmm, I wonder what's up with that... Did you send it to the address below?

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

Try to resend it to that address and report in this thread when you've done it, let's see if it gets through.

i forgot to nom that jon gibson two solo pianos w/ bonus tracks disc AND suzanne brokesch NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Shame 'Music for the Rothko Chapel' wasn't nominated. I'd hit that as ambient. Piano & String too classically classical for me?

yeah, i'd definitely vote for Rothko if it was there! my fav morton feldman (that i've heard - still exploring!), and yes, definitely more 'ambient'

I'm with "Zeit: ambient", "Phaedra: not" camp, and voted accordingly. To me Phaedra has a bit too much sense of direction to count as ambient, whereas Zeit feels like floating in space. But I do understand the case for Phaedra being ambient too, and probably some other albums I voted have even more direction than that, it's not clear-cut.

Zeit is definitely ambient to me. Phaedra is too propulsive. And Stars of the Lid has to be ambient, dunnit? Not sure where else I'd place it. Emobient, maybe.

The only albums I sort of regret nominating and voting for are the two Growing albums. In both cases the first tracks are epic drones, and that’s what I think of when I think of them. But subsequent tracks really aren’t remotely ambient. Oh well. If I’m the only one who voted for them in the end you can strike them.

^^ I've had that, where in memory or in 'feeling' records are ambient to me, but when listening w/ this poll in mind I think: wait, no, actually...

Yeah, that happened to me too, I had to scrap a couple of albums from my ballot cos I remembered them as being ambient based on how they begin, but upon listening to them I realised they got way too progressive later on.

that was my reaction to listening to 76:14 again, i was surprised how beat-heavy a lot of it was

Ah thanks, Tuomas; I did manage to mess up your email. Ballot re-sent! Got your confirmation.

What is this other genre that some of you think these other artists ought to fall into, if not ambient? Too spaced out and atmospheric to be electronic, too melodic to be avant-grade. If I were to vote these albums into any poll, it would be this one.

A basic problem I have is that the albums I like best on the noms list don't necessarily seem purely ambient (i.e., I love Phaedra and voted for it but the arguments against it above make sense to me... but I don't love Zeit, so I didn't vote for it).

Actually, Chinaski's solution to this problem was probably better than mine. Still, I'll be pleased if anyone else votes for Tierbeobachtungen.

I’ve always thought of Biosphere’s Patashnik as ambient but there’s surprisingly little material without beats on it.

Patashnik definitely is some kind of a ambient/techno hybrid, as was Microgravity before it. To me, Substrata is the first true ambient album by Biosphere. For a guy who's known as ambient musician first and foremost, Geir Jenssen certainly has done a lot of music based on beats and rhythms. He even released an EP a couple of years ago, The Petrified Forest, which is an obvious throwback to that Patashnik sound. It's a great record, but again, it doesn't sound sound ambient enough for me to have nominated it.

Voted

Departed Glories is the one for Biosphere

voted!

voted!

Departed Glories is the one for Biosphere

You don’t have to choose just one though! 50 votes, plenty of space.

I’m also surprised at how many people feel this way about DG. Doesn’t reach the heights (or depths) of Substrata or Cirque for me, but maybe I need to open my ears.

(also had many instances as noted upthread of "shit, I should have nominated ambient album x)

^^ same here.

Voted!

voted with a split ballot, it turns out I can in fact pick only 25 ambient albums that are truly close to my heart

the only new one I included was one of the Voice Of Eye noms, I love that double LP of early stuff that VOD put out but had never checked out the later stuff.

I'd like to attempt a Spotify playlist of all the noms, but can't guarantee anything

There is a Spotify playlist

oh I missed that! thanks.

damn I coulda been shuffling all this time

for reference cuz I don't think it was linked in this thread:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4fPPFJHHNihMjlO9GVEs6F?si=hVKygUYXRJSuCafBZrfzlQ

The voting is now closed, thanks to everyone! I'll start the results rollout later today or tomorrow.

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

top 3 albums I slightly regret including on my ballot:

Belong - October Language (soothing noize ≠ ambient!)
Slowdive - Pygmalion (too pop! parts of it have a backbeat and proper hummable melodies!)
Tangerine Dream - Phaedra (too much chug-a-chug-a sequencer action!)

my ballot started out super purist, but then I got the notion of voting for 50 albums by 50 different artists, so I ended up padding it out with some stuff that wasn't a perfect fit, oops

anyways, here's some great cosmic horror ambient that idk if anyone else voted for:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE9RPDgCn2w

(Tholen - Sternklang)

Results rolling out here: The mind revealing itself to itself: the TOP 100 AMBIENT ALBUMS as voted by ILX