Top 100 Ambient Albums

302. http://soundcloud.com/shamantis/j-biebz-u-smile-800-slower

I just saw that on someone's Facebook! I haven't listened yet, though.

WHOA, this is really, really awesome! What was done to it to make it not sound choppy/fragmented?

its this paulstretch programme

sounds like Belong

http://sourceforge.net/projects/hypermammut/files/

it's open source - i'm tripping out to ambient 'Tik Tok' right now

http://hypermammut.sourceforge.net/paulstretch/

Please note that this is suitable only for extreme time stretching (e.g. if have a melody of 3 minutes and you want to listen it in 3 hours).

ha, someone's already updated the wikipedia page for '9 Beet Stretch': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9_Beet_Stretch

the real landmark timestretching ambient piece is Carl Stone's 'Shing Kee' from 1986, which expands 4 seconds of Schubert to 16 minutes from the album 'Mom's'. it's got some uptempo things on it that kept me from posting it to this list earlier, but I used to program tracks 1-4-5 to sleep to, so...

303. Carl Stone - Mom's

love the new album by bacteria earth.

http://middlesearecords.wordpress.com/

Hey Milton, I never did thank you for that recommendation in feb '09 - which is still on my late night listening playlist, so thanks!

How the fuck is DJ Shadow - Endtroducing ambient? By that reasoning, any DJ set with a minute long beatless break is ambient too.

just ran across this today. very good and actually ambient.

http://www.archive.org/details/JOAT006

xxx-post: OK the paulstretcb utility is really awesome, but why the fuck can't you save it as an .mp3?? you really do have to save it to .wav? anybody know how to convert these things? i tried converting it to an mp3 using vlc media player and it failed miserably. harumph!

you can do it w/ itunes

180. Brian Eno - Thursday Fucking Afternoon

Haven't heard this one -- is it rare??

Ok so this is the place where I am supposed to talk about the Environments series? I bought 5 today for $4 and this is the description

Environments 5 (1974)

Side One: Ultimate Heartbeat (20:00)

A stethoscope heartbeat recording which can be used to calm infants, aid meditation or enhance lovemaking.

Side Two: Wind in the Trees (34:00)

The soft rush of wind rustling the leaves of a grove in late autumn.

The girl behind the counter fell just short of high fiving me once she read the description on the back. What part of the series was included on the Voyager album?!

I don't know, but when I die I hope I wake up on the Psychologically Ultimate Seashore.

The front cover states that the human heartbeat side can be played at 33 or 45. I can report that switching back and forth is pretty fun.

Also look at the cover image
http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8491/8407641043_afd705b639_z.jpg

The trees sound kinda like soft washes of static with birds.

I've been listening a lot to Blamstrain's "Disfold" album from 2006 on Sending Orbs... it's sort of a city version of an Environments album. Field recordings from train stations and city streets mixed into a narrative about a relationship. I love it.

Pitchfork just posted their 50 best ambient albums of all time:

“As ignorable as it is interesting.” That’s the classic definition of ambient music, stated by Brian Eno in 1978 on the sleeve notes to his album Ambient 1: Music for Airports. And he should know, since he basically invented the genre three years earlier with his album Discreet Music. But while Eno’s definition of ambient has been cited continuously in the decades since, the sphere of music he first defined has broadened, especially if you judge by how that word is used by listeners. “Ambient” is now used to describe all kinds of music, from tracks you can dance to all the way to harsh noise. For our exploration of the greatest ambient albums, we polled critics for their favorites, with the suggestion that “ambient” meant, in part, music that creates an environment, something like a cloud of sound, be it soothing, sad, haunting, or ominous. We also suggested that our take on ambient music shies away from heavy rhythms and tends more toward “drifting” than “driving,” which meant de-emphasizing ambient house. And we considered the fact that not all albums in a given artist’s catalogue qualify as ambient. Taking into account our writers’ interpretation of those loose guidelines, here’s our list of the 50 best ambient albums.

01. Brian Eno - Ambient 1: Music for Airports
02. Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works Volume II
03. William Basinski - The Disintegration Loops I-IV
04. Terry Riley - A Rainbow in Curved Air
05. The KLF - Chill Out
06. Stars of the Lid - The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid
07. Oval - 94diskont
08. Pauline Oliveros/Stuart Dempster/Panaiotis - Deep Listening
09. Tim Hecker - Harmony in Ultraviolet
10. Fripp & Eno - Evening Star

11. Gas - Pop
12. Laurie Spiegel - The Expanding Universe
13. Brian Eno - Apollo
14. The Caretaker - An Empty Bliss Beyond This World
15. Robert Ashley - Automatic Writing
16. Terry Riley - Persian Surgery Dervishes
17. Alice Coltrane - Turiya Sings
18. Stars of the Lid - And Their Refinement of the Decline
19. The Orb - Orbus Terrarum
20. Oneohtrix Point Never - Replica

21. Grouper - A I A : Alien Observer
22. Fennesz - Endless Summer
23. Keith Fullerton Whitman - Playthroughs
24. Brian Eno - Ambient 4: On Land
25. Folke Rabe - What??
26. Iasos - Inter-Dimensional Music
27. Oneohtrix Point Never - Rifts
28. Pauline Oliveros - Accordion and Voice
29. David Behrman - On the Other Ocean
30. Julianna Barwick - The Magic Place

31. Ashra - New Age Of Earth
32. La Monte YoungMarian Zazeela - The Tamburas Of Pandit Pran Nath (An Homage)
33. Steve Roach - Structures from Silence
34. Charlemagne Palestine - Four Manifestations On Six Elements
35. Laraaji - Ambient 3: Day of Radiance
36. Windy & Carl - Depths
37. Tim Hecker - Virgins
38. Biosphere - Substrata
39. Suzanne Ciani - Buchla Concerts 1975
40. Max Richter - Sleep

41. Brian Eno/Harold Budd - The Pearl
42. Ekkehard Ehlers - Plays
43. Eluvium - Talk Amongst the Trees
44. Microstoria - snd
45. Huerco S. - For Those Of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have)
46. Edgar Froese - Epsilon in Malaysian Pale
47. Jon Hassell - Vernal Equinox
48. Ernest Hood - Neighborhoods
49. Bing & Ruth - Tomorrow Was the Golden Age
50. Deathprod - Morals and Dogma

Psyched that Alien Observer is on there.

pfork is garbage but this is a decent list. Personally I could give a fuck about Stars of the Lid and Grouper and some others but overall, not much to complain about

This is a pretty good list but are Oneohtrix Point Never and Tim Hecker really worthy to be included with two albums? Lots of canonical classics missing I guess but that might be refreshing, I mean Global Communication and Bohren have a high enough profile already.

I wouldn't trust any ambient top list with no FAX label albums in it at all...

was going to be either you or me tuomas to say that ..

In general, this list seems to totally prefer the "cool", minimal side of ambient, and totally ignore to more hippieish side that has been just as important for 25+ years. So no Namlook, Tetsu Inoue, Mixmaster Morris, Constance Demby, PWOG, etc.

Plenty of older new age hippie stuff in there though, although not the 90s variety.

hahaha, that's a list made by people afraid to admit in public that they like Future Sound of London.

It is interesting to see that the critical revaluation of new age 'cheese' is in full swing - Pauline Oliveros, Iasos, Ashra, Suzanne Ciani, that stuff was critically off-limits for a long while. I mean, Yanni, Enigma or Enya aren't going to pop up on this kind of lists anytime soon, but the more respectable end of new age is definitely back in focus.

if Eluvium is on this list there's no credible reason the first two Enya albums wouldn't be, except Pitchfork finds her way too unbeardly

Two Stars of the Lid albums in the top 20 is a bit rich for me personally, but I mean these lists are what they are.

I thought Enya was hip again now, shows what I know.

FSOL's Lifeforms absolutely deserves to be on here somewhere.

Music for Airports is obviously important and what have you but for me On Land, Apollo and The Pearl are all superior records.

Ah well substitute Kitaro for Enya then.

I'm actually surprised at the PF love for Laraaji, I thought that was always considered as the dud one in the Eno series.

It's good, but the first half of it hardly seems to fit even the self-imposed rules that Pitchfork had for this list... it's pretty frantic for an ambient album.

Interesting enough list, albeit kind of arbitrary as to what fits and what doesn't. Biggest omission for me is no Labradford (unless I missed it).

Just listening to David Behrman for the first time in a while - On the Other Ocean and Leapday Night are both fabulous (and both a massive influence on Jim O'Rourke).

"but the more respectable end of new age is definitely back in focus."

where you been?

pauline has been a hipster icon for ages in the states. jon hassell on the other hand has not. that is a more recent development. ciani-love definitely came about during the first wave of hepcat reappraisals.

Replica is just the wrong choice for an OPN "ambient" album. the only straight up ambient thing he ever did was the Rifts collection and parts of R Plus Seven. Replica is a collage record.

It's a pretty good list. It's also very coherent for pitchfork, these are artists and albums they've been pushing for years, of course there's going to be missing stuff but it wouldn't make sense for P4K to give FSOL recognition, per example, when they rarely mention them or rate them high. Take it for what it is.

i do wonder if people who weren't listening the first time are listening to 90's-era stuff lik gas, orb, oval, klf? do they speak to the iBud crowd?

all the album links on the pitchfork list should have gone to this. and it should be #51 on the list:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peXoHKKA3d4

i do wonder if people who weren't listening the first time are listening to 90's-era stuff lik gas, orb, oval, klf? do they speak to the iBud crowd?

― scott seward, lunes 26 de septiembre de 2016 18:22 (twenty-four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I dont think that most of the readers of p4k are actually that young anymore.

i like a lot of what's on here but it's undeniably on-trend wrt new age. like, erik satie should really be on a list that's actually interested in uncovering what ambient is, just as much as eno should be. i love laurie spiegel but i don't think she's ambient at all. eliane radigue 'fits' better i think. (don't mean to weigh token women artists here.) psycho-acoustic sound art type stuff feels connected to the ambient concept imo. maryanne amacher. robert ashley was a good call. in general there seems to be a fear of experimental classical / institutional sound art that isn't outsider-y enough. i love minimalism but solely focusing on it betrays a certain predictable pov.

tbr though 'ambient' may have made sense for eno in a specific context but it's a terrible category.

Yup, too broad, too subjective. Eno had a more specific definition

But when I make playlists I operate in a v subjective way with definitions

I mean even playback volume comes into play here

pretty broad list, a lot of stuff i dont think of as ambient. Its a little rude to characterize minimalists/pure drone artists as ambient, isnt it?

there's a LOT of stuff on there i wouldn't call ambient. but lots of good stuff so i don't care.