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.
