ambient faves (2016)

votes for the pitchfork ambient list  

(with my blurbs for charting albums below) 

1/ brian eno - on land

2/ brian eno & harold budd - plateaux of mirrors

3/ aphex twin - selected ambient works vol 2

4/ seefeel - polyfusia

5/ laraaji - day of radiance

6/ Steve hillage - rainbow dome music

7/ cluster - II

8/ manuel göttsching - e2-e4

9/ brian eno - discreet music

10/ aphex twin - selected ambient works 89-93

11/ fripp-eno – (no pussyfooting)

12/ david sylvian - gone to earth (instrumentals disc)

13/ david bowie - low (side 2)

14/ mixmaster morris - flying high

15/ the orb - adventures beyond the ultra world

16/ edgar froese - aqua

17/ klaus schulze - mirage

18/ ralph lundsten - cosmic love

19/ seefeel - quique

20/ brian eno - music for airports

might have included if i'd heard them then

ernest hood - neighborhoods

k.leimer - music for land and water

michael turtle - phantoms of dreamland

arnold aard - electro-sonnances

ron nagorcka - loveregana: music from a tasmanian forest

knud victor - ambiances / images

kankyo ongaku compilation

angel rada  - upadesa

runners up/edge cases (e.g.with song element)

hugo largo - drum / meddle

spacemen 3 - playing with fire 

ar kane - 69 

eno - another green world

eno - before and after science

oneohtrix point never - rifts

budd / fraser / guthrie / raymonde - the moon and the melodies

other contenders

zoviet france, moon wiring club, focus group,ingram marshall, catherine christer hennix, jon hassell, thomas koner, huerco s, celer, dolphins into the future, orphan fairytale, cocteau twins,global communications, ann southam, other eno / budd / cluster / harmonia / laraaji / fripp-eno / seefeel, kwjazz, laurie spiegel,the caretaker, roj, ryuichi sakamoto, nik pascal, virginia astley,matsuo ohno, michel longtin,craig kupka, david pritchard 

Aphex Twin, Selected Ambient Works Volume II (Warp), 1994

With Selected Ambient Works 85-92, Richard D. James established “ambient techno” as a viable concept rather than a contradiction-in-terms.  But soon this serene offshoot of banging ravefloor music became its own New Age-y cul-de-sac.  Bloody-minded as ever, for his early ’94 follow-up, James switched from chill-out to chilling: ominously featureless soundscapes woven from abstract textures and eerily fixated pulses. Gone, for the most part, were those lovely Aphex melodies shimmering like dew-drops on a spider web. The project’s forbidding aura was intensified by the absence of track titles: all 24 tracks were identified only by texture-swatches (such as lichen or weathered stone) as if to deliberately exacerbate the listener’s sensation of being lost.  There was beauty here still, but of a peculiar and unsettling kind: the opener, for instance, modulates a voice into a baby-talk squiggle, then ripples it through hall-of-mirrors echo.  James trailed the project – which proved as influential as its predecessor had been, with similarly mixed results –by talking about the inspiration he’d drawn from experiments with lucid dreaming: techniques that allow the sleeper to steer the storyline of a nocturnal adventure. True or not, the effect of this music feels exactly like being inside a dream – not necessarily idyllic, more like the kind whose strangeness haunts you long into your waking day. 

Brian Eno, Ambient 4: On Land (EG), 1982

The climax of Eno’s supremely fertile New York period, On Land is ironically an attempt to leave – psychologically - the very city in which he’d produced so much astonishingly innovative work.   The working title Empty Landscapes reveals just how oppressive Eno had come to find Manhattan’s hyperactive bustle. Drawing on inspirations from film (Fellini’s Amarcord) and art (Pierre Tal-Coat’s pastoral paintings) Eno was above all working from personal memory: faded impressions of the unpopulous East Coast of England where he’d grown up. Some tracks are named after places (Leek Hills, Dunwich) he’d frequented as a child, while another (“Lantern Marsh”) gets it title from an evocative name he’d seen on a map. Aiming for “a nice kind of spooky” and a “feeling of aloneness,” On Land pushes much deeper into abstraction than Music For Airports: Eno drastically processed the instrumental sounds until unrecognizable and wove in natural-world timbres such as stones and frog noises.  The glinting, amorphous result has barely any ancestors in music. On Land was a deeply conceptual project: Eno wrote 25 thousand words of notes to articulate what he was trying to do and invented a three-speaker system that listeners could set up to intensify the feeling of sonic engulfment.  But On Land ultimately works on a purely emotional level: a heartsick 34-year-old expatriate mentally prepares himself for the homecoming that will follow in a few years.  “On Land” is only a missing consonant and a shifted vowel from “England”.

 

Laraaji, Ambient 3: Day of Radiance (EG ) 1980

Serendipity was in full effect the day Eno strolled through New York’s Washington Square Park and came across Laraaji playing his plangently chiming autoharp.  The actor-musician had already released one album, 1978’s Celestial Vibrations,  but the note inviting him to make a record that Eno dropped into his busker’s hat gave Laraaji access to a much larger audience.  Born Edward Larry Gordon, Laraaji had explored the concept of cosmic music for some years using electrified and adapted versions of the zither and hammered dulcimer. He believed that these and similar metallophonic instruments like gongs induced a trance state that broke down the self’s boundaries and unloosed the bonds of Time.  Not that the first side of Day of Radiance is relaxing, exactly:  “The Dance” seems to flood your mind with almost-painful brightness. But the flipside’s two-parter “Meditation” gently unspools folds of glimmering texture in a slow-motion cascade.  Although Radiance was a career highpoint, Laraaji would record a bunch more wonderful albums (including Flow Goes The Universe for Eno’s latterday label All Saints). The fact that Laraaji’s other main occupation is working as a laughter therapist reminds us of the higher purpose – at once practical and mystical – behind Radiance. This is music for healing and making whole.