Top 100 Ambient Albums

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?

i thinkmaybe we should FAX tuomas an anagram

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.

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.

(and there's tons of stuff on those charts that's also out of print)

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?

Top ten for me. Some certainly stretch the criteria.

Upper Astral - Higher Self Rendezvous
Mirror - Die Spiegelmanufaktur
Steve Roach - Structures From Silence
Ones/Hands - 1997-2005
Climax Golden Twins - Lovely
Bernhard Günter ‎– Un Peu De Neige Salie
Graham Lambkin & Jason Lescalleet - Photographs
Omit - Quad
Andrew Chalk - Gold Fall
Robert Turman - Flux

hahaha, that Rate Your Music "ambient" list also has... a lot of Loreena McKennitt albums on it.

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

no, it's not by straight rating- the number of ratings also has a large effect. the #23 album has over 2,000 ratings, whereas inoue's "organic cloud" has under 100. it doesn't make statistical sense to simply go by average rating in this case.

Well that kind of rating system is obviously biased against albums with small and/or limited pressings, such as most of the FAX catalogue; they're never gonna have as many people voting for them.

you're misunderstanding how maths works but i think it's a system which works to reinforce a certain ahistoricist kind of canon-building

The weighting needs to give more weight to reviews by people who are familiar with all of the releases, not just the ones that are easy to find. That's more effort than a web site trying to rank all music via crowdsourcing is going to put in though, and it's also why the recommended ambient albums list from Hyperreal from 2001 (http://music.hyperreal.org/epsilon/info/2001_classic_ambient.html) is still a better list than what Rate Your Music generates today.

That's a good list, yeah. Interesting that Tetsu Inoue is rated so high, but I can't argue that his first two FAX albums are proper ambient classics... Tho personally I rate the first two Shades of Orion (Namlook/Inoue) albums even higher.

hahaha, that Rate Your Music "ambient" list also has... a lot of Loreena McKennitt albums on it.

― erry red flag (f. hazel)

That's what happens if you include new age. There's also those Silent Hill soundtracks which receive insanely high ratings (I assume mostly by nostalgic gamers who don't really listen to anything else?) and are not very ambient, there's a few run-of-the-mill droney mood pieces but mostly a shit ton of (very inept) alt rock with drum machines, which sounds like a demo from Garage Band presets.

I think the RYM system doesn't have a bias against albums with few votes (unless it's a few dozen), but it puts much less weight to a rating if it's the only thing the reviewer has rated or if he just rates everything 5 or 1, etc. It's a bit like IMDB ratings.

Can we argue some more about why a bunch of Finnish teenagers who think Madvillain is the best rap album of all time don't rate the Fax catalog

ts: teenagers who think madvillain is the best rap album of all time vs. 40 year olds who think paul's boutique is the best rap album of all time

wow, the #1 new age album is apparently Hosianna Mantra by Popol Vuh

well yeah

Robert Turman - Flux

this album rules, btw

lol RYM ratings... jeez... not an insignificant amount of people are just going through their slsk downloads, previewing a few tracks and then rating them..

xpost you're exactly who I thought of when I saw that! then I thought 'aw, Seligpresung is only at #18"