Top 100 Ambient Albums

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"

kids today just can't be bothered to listen to records a few dozen times before forming opinions on them. terrible.

My fondness for the KLF's Chill Out may be down to the cassette being stuck in my car stereo for a couple of months.

"bryter layter" is my favorite nick drake record because all my other nick drake records got stolen

Made another ambient mix. caution, there are beats in the last 2 minutes of the mix. https://www.mixcloud.com/biznotic/ancient-heavenly-connection

for me, Suzanne Ciani's Seven Waves is album of the season

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06nWn98x_ek

mmmm, prismacolor ambient

http://windsmeasurerecordings.net/catalog/wm18/

michael t. bullock and andrew lafkas ceremonies to breathe upon

currently loving the new Biosphere album, Departed Glories:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLMDIG4sJes

Since winter is coming, I guess I could also share this mix I made a couple of years ago:

https://soundcloud.com/kukka-dj/winterchill

It starts with an electronic pop tune, but the rest of it is mostly ambient.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11JITPeYAWs

really great

i'd like to check that out!

suzanne ciani wheeie posted upthread is doin the trick rn

also I'm listening to Seven Waves at the moment but this looks super interesting

https://open.spotify.com/album/5NeWznX1xhs9KzsNh5PZQT?si=1NH6pf0wSTefbjgZghhqAQ

that looks super cool

lots of stuff here i haven't heard: https://daily.bandcamp.com/2017/03/17/contemporary-ambient-music-list

That Daru album I posted upthread is seriously good. Apparently he did the music for avatar the air bender

Got rly into virgins by Tim hecker this winter
That is a album of feeeeeelz