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

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.

Also enjoying Alio Die, although their discography has that bewildering vastness that lots of artists in this field have. Where to start?
(I used RYM and took a punt on Aura Seminalis. It's lovely.)

Chinaski, I also started by listening to that record, though the collaborations on the list are also pretty great.

I can help with some Alio Die recs! I nommed Aura Seminalis, glad people are digging it.

If you like Aura Seminalis, try Horas Tibi Serenas next, "In the Labyrinth Garden" might be his best single track ever. Those two albums are part of the Castles Sonorisations trilogy, the third being Tempus Rei which never really clicked with me.

Good albums from his early period (less drone and more found sound/field recordings/evocation of prehistory) are Under an Holy Ritual, The Hidden Spring (also part of a trilogy with Le Stanze Della Trascendenza and Leaves Net), and Suspended Feathers.

I like the Vocal Trilogy on Projekt, where he did an album each with vocalists who employ different styles - Asparas with Amelia Cuni, Eleusian Lullaby with Martina Galvagni, and Mei-Jyu with Chako (from Jack or Jive).

Post 2010 he has been wildly prolific and does a lot of collaborations with other artists... I really like "They Grow Layers of Life Within" from 2017 but mostly because I've listened to it so much over other recent work. If you like him, chances are you'll like whatever he releases. And it's all on Spotify, etc. so it's easy to poke around in his discography.

thank you!!

My favourite Alio Die albums are:

Deconsecrated and Pure: where he samples religious classical works, but like with Gas the source material is mostly unrecognisable. About as spiritual as ambient can get.

Amongs the Circling Spires, with Sylvi Alli: ethereal wordless singing by Alli combined with pristine drones, lovely.

La sala dei cristalli, with Mariolina Zitta: Zitta is a "cave music" specialist, she's done solo records (which are also awesome) based on her drumming and recording stalactites and stalagmites in Italian caves, as well as bat sounds (enhanced so the human ear can hear them). This is a collaboration where Alio Die adds his ambient touch to her stalactite/stalagmite music, and it's exactly as good as it sounds.

oh wow, just realized there was no Between Interval nominated

Bump! Remember, this is the last week you can vote.

Ballot submitted. Sentimentality really influenced my top 20. Hope it get some fringe records on the board.

I've squeezed my longlist down to 61 (unweighted). A litte more listening this week and I'm good to go.

Judging by the current situation, there'll be some controversial albums in the top 40, can't wait for the "not actually ambient" debates in the results thread. 😁

I fully expect a top 3 of Portishead, Burzum and Arvo Pärt.

Heh.

I'm afraid I won't have much time to dip into other people's noms, so I'll likely end up with an unadventurous list that solely reflects my ambient listening habits over the past 15-odd years.

I took Arthur Russell and E2-E4 off my ballot because NOT AMBIENT while simultaneously arguing with myself, 'well, they sort of are...'.

A useful question to ask oneself is 'would x musician/composer be offended if we were to suggest that their music is ambient?' In Arvo Pärt's case, I'm pretty sure the answer would be 'yes'. Vikernes too, most likely, but he can go fuck himself.

i dunno, that's very subjective, and a lot of musicians resist having their work being categorized as any genre. for example, just last night i was reading the liner notes for a. coltrane's A Monastic Trio, and it has an interview with her where she's talking about john coltrane preferring that his music not be thought of as "jazz"

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