Best ambient albums of all times?

HiKite

Hi folks,

I'm trying to fill my "walkman" with lots and lots of ambient, melodic music; we're having a baby soon and need some chilled background sounds! I found this list online, and have some of these albums already, eg Brian Eno and Aphex Twin: http://www.scaruffi.com/music/ambient.html

I'm just looking for some more suggestions, as I'm probably missing some recent gems!

Cheers,

e.

old gregg

Biosphere - Substrata


always gets my number 1 vote. You can get it direct from the good folks at Touch Music

John

+1 for Biosphere.

Stars of the Lid are worth checking out, Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid and And Their Refinement of the Decline are good places to start.

Coil's Time Machines is another great one.

Nurse With Wound Soliloquy for Lilith too.

ZWEI_VIER_ZWEI

Klaus Schulze - Timewind

Krieg

Thanks for the names so far, I just listened to biosphere and it gets a thumbs up from me.

My own favourite
Sephiroth - cathedron

ball ox

Carefull with the Aphex twin if you want him to grow up sane :eek::D

ZWEI_VIER_ZWEI

Also, I don't know how minimal you want your ambient, but if the answer is very, check out Steve Roach, guy lives in the desert in Arizona and churns out lots of cool, hypnotic ambient records.

If you're interested, try Reflections in Suspension, his second (1984) and probably most famous album, or my personal favourite, Midnight Moon from 2000, which features some very dark, spacious ambient pieces with some heavily distorted (not in the noisy sense) acoustic guitars...

Another Klaus Schulze recommendation, try out Farscape, a recent 2CD collaboration he did with Lisa Gerrard (Dead Can Dance), largely percussionless, again with a slightly dark tone to some of the tracks, and very electronic, heavily sequenced. Not quite 'ambient' as such though.

SPK's Zamia Lehmanni (Songs of Byzantine Flowers (1986), if you've heard of SPK before you're probably thinking angle grinder accompaniment to garbage can tub-thumping, but this album is completely different to the rest, lots of samples, choirs, chanting, (sampled) orchestration and all that. Very interesting album.

Robert Rich & B. Lustmord - Stalker (2006), an album they made to accompany the Tarkovsky movie. If you've ever seen the film, you can probably guess what the music sounds like, lush and slow moving to match the cinematography, deep, dense and forboding sounds add to the sense of discord. Somewhat like Biosphere.

Ash Ra Tempel/Manuel Goettsching - Inventions For Electric Guitar (1974), as the title suggests, this is electric guitar music, but it has more in common with Tangerine Dream than rock. In fact, the back of the album includes the disclaimer "Music, effects and sounds are played with the electric guitar only. There are no other instruments used!", and you'd be forgiven for thinking the big Moog or an ARP appears on the record. Included this one because it's a lot brighter than the rest :-)

A few youtube clips so you can check out some of the stuff I mentioned...(not embedded so I don't ruin the thread with 5 videos on top of one another!)


Robert Rich & Lustmord - Stalker

Ash Ra Tempel - Inventions For Electric Guitar

Klaus Schulze & Lisa Gerrard - Farscape

SPK - Zamia Lehmanni

Steve Roach - Midnight Moon

ntlbell

[SIZE=+1]Woob 1194[/SIZE]

ZWEI_VIER_ZWEI

Since you mentioned having a baby, check out Soothing Sounds for Baby by Raymond Scott. Don't be put off by the name, this is really really first class electronic music by one of the true pioneers, way ahead of his time, there before Kraftwerk, there before Silver Apples, Raymond Scott.

Raymond Scott - Soothing Sounds For Baby

DominoDub

ZWEI_VIER_ZWEI wrote: »

Since you mentioned having a baby, check out Soothing Sounds for Baby by Raymond Scott. Don't be put off by the name, this is really really first class electronic music by one of the true pioneers, way ahead of his time, there before Kraftwerk, there before Silver Apples, Raymond Scott.

Raymond Scott - Soothing Sounds For Baby

Was in this tread early on but you beat me to it as was reading about him last week http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/apr/24/jazz-electronicmusic

Scubadevils

ZWEI_VIER_ZWEI wrote: »

Since you mentioned having a baby, check out Soothing Sounds for Baby by Raymond Scott. Don't be put off by the name, this is really really first class electronic music by one of the true pioneers, way ahead of his time, there before Kraftwerk, there before Silver Apples, Raymond Scott.

Raymond Scott - Soothing Sounds For Baby

Must check that out too, cheers.

My 4 year old daughter has been listening to ambient music every night since she was about 2, especially the various ambient works by Eno which are perfect as they are mainly atmospheric ambience - some of the Fax releases are in a similar vein, especially the following by Tetsu Inoue -

http://www.discogs.com/Tetsu-Inoue-Ambiant-Otaku/release/99901

I would also highly recommend the ambient compilations from Merck (label), Aurora 1 & 2, both really excellent...

http://beta.bleep.com/index.php?page=release_details&releaseid=15137

http://beta.bleep.com/index.php?page=release_details&releaseid=15144

The Pop Ambient compilations are also excellent from the label Kompakt...

http://beta.bleep.com/index.php?page=release_details&releaseid=9004#

Oh and +100 for Substrata, an absolutely essential release.

John

As an experiment, if I have a child they're going to be reared exclusively on Merzbow.

Scubadevils

John wrote: »

As an experiment, if I have a child they're going to be reared exclusively on Merzbow.

Might drive the child insane - Could also throw in some Pan Sonic for good measure.

John

Too mellow! Japanoise all the way!

Scubadevils

I've only heard Merzbow on youtube and could tolerate about 1 minutes worth!

DominoDub

John wrote: »

As an experiment, if I have a child they're going to be reared exclusively on Merzbow.

Was thinking about this tread at the Fennesz gig last night ,,not so strange now

Loved white noise when I was a kid ,,Hair dryer was oK but the "Hoover" was the best

http://www.lullaby.org.uk/

John

Felixdhc wrote: »

I've only heard Merzbow on youtube and could tolerate about 1 minutes worth!

I take it you won't be buying the Merzbox then?

DominoDub wrote: »

Was thinking about this tread at the Fennesz gig last night ,,not so strange now

Loved white noise when I was a kid ,,Hair dryer was oK but the "Hoover" was the best

http://www.lullaby.org.uk/

If you saw a chap with a camera (I appeared to be the only person with a camera) in a black t-shirt and grey jeans, that was me.

ZWEI_VIER_ZWEI

DominoDub wrote: »

Was in this tread early on but you beat me to it as was reading about him last week http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/apr/24/jazz-electronicmusic

Wow, that's a really cool article :-) Would love to see his house!

I think one of the guys from Devo owns the original Electronium, he had a go at trying to get it up and working, but without any instructions the entire thing was far too complicated...

DominoDub wrote: »

Loved white noise when I was a kid ,,Hair dryer was oK but the "Hoover" was the best

Haha!
I never liked hair driers, but my dad had an old angle poise light that I would spend hours flexing and plucking the springs to get different sounds, no wonder I grew up to love the likes of Einstuerzende Neubauten and Test Dept :-D

DominoDub

If you saw a chap with a camera (I appeared to be the only person with a camera) in a black t-shirt and grey jeans, that was me.

Nice pics John love the one with the BLUE light beam on his head.

May just have seen you , will say hi next time , I was one of the people standing in front of you just like the scene out of "close encounters of the third kind" watching the alien music !

John

ZWEI_VIER_ZWEI wrote: »

Haha!
I never liked hair driers, but my dad had an old angle poise light that I would spend hours flexing and plucking the springs to get different sounds, no wonder I grew up to love the likes of Einstuerzende Neubauten and Test Dept :-D

I used to do that too!

DominoDub wrote: »

Nice pics John love the one with the BLUE light beam on his head.

Cheers!

May just have seen you , will say hi next time , I was one of the people standing in front of you just like the scene out of "close encounters of the third kind" watching the alien music !

Do, it's always nice to meet folk at gigs. We should really have a gig buddy thread or something...

zenmonk

We had a baby in november and he listenst to Eno (Apollo) and some jazz too but the music to American Beauty is his fave.

HiKite

This is brilliant, a whole untapped realm for me; my better half likes most of the suggestions too, so many thanks all! Timewind is going down a treat at the mo..

rcaz

Do you specifically want to stick to electronic stuff?

If not, Arvo Part!

Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten

Spiegel im Spiegel

John

Part is beautiful, especially any of the recordings with The Hilliard Ensemble. Miserere is incredible.

cornbb

More non-electronic stuff: Morgan Feldman's Coptic Light - http://www.last.fm/music/Morton+Feldman/_/Coptic+Light

John

Just a word of good news to Biosphere fans, new live album out next month on Touch. A promo arrived today and I'm just listening to it now, it's pretty good so far!

damonjewel

Popol Vuh - the soundtrack to the movie Aguirre is a good start. In the garden of Pharoahs is another good start.

Scubadevils

John wrote: »

Just a word of good news to Biosphere fans, new live album out next month on Touch. A promo arrived today and I'm just listening to it now, it's pretty good so far!

Cool... look forward to that.

Another great one is 76:14 by Global Communication...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/76-14-Global-Communication/dp/B000024DL2/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1242170213&sr=8-2

Its not their very best work - quite pricey for what I would consider their very best...

http://www.discogs.com/sell/item/4998621?ev=bp_titl

DominoDub

Have the Original free card sleeve CD copy of "Blood-Music-Pentamerous-Metamorphosis" that came with the Chapterhouse album. Picked it up for £4.99 around the time in Freebird records back in the Day. (One for sale at €249.00 now discogs LOL )

http://www.discogs.com/Chapterhouse-Retranslated-By-Global-Communication-Blood-Music-Pentamerous-Metamorphosis/master/16312

eviltimeban

I'd recommend "Sakura" by Susumu Yokota. And of course the Brian Eno classics.

There's some homegrown stuff too in this vein, from Geisha: www.myspace.com/thesoundsofgeisha.

You can download the geisha album in full here.

Scubadevils

DominoDub wrote: »

Have the Original free card sleeve CD copy of "Blood-Music-Pentamerous-Metamorphosis" that came with the Chapterhouse album. Picked it up for £4.99 around the time in Freebird records back in the Day. (One for sale at €249.00 now discogs LOL )

http://www.discogs.com/Chapterhouse-Retranslated-By-Global-Communication-Blood-Music-Pentamerous-Metamorphosis/master/16312

Wow, never knew it was originally free with the Chapterhouse album, I only have a digital version of the remix but been seriously tempted several times to fork out for the actual release. I did pick up the Blood Music album there a few months back which in itself is a very good album.

Another huge recommendation for ambient listening - Loscil, any of his albums...

http://www.discogs.com/artist/Loscil

Pan American is another favourite of mine, every album is really excellent, just picked up his latest today in Tower Records and again a huge recommendation...

http://www.discogs.com/PanAmerican-White-Bird-Release/release/1654938