Music Ambient

PC, what do you think of ambient music? Which are your favourite ambient albums and artists? What do you think makes "good" ambient?

Ambient is a huge genre and this thread is deliberately vague, so hopefully we'll get a range of thoughts here.

Anything easy-listening with minimal lyrics, preferably none, but melodious vocals work, too. It happens to be the type of music I listen to most often.

Some of my good buddies use the term "lounge" music. Basically the type of music you'd listen to, transform into an over-sized potato, and collapse into the depths of your sofa cushions.

I don't particularly have a favorite album or artist, unfortunately. I'll hear songs I recognize or like, but I rarely ever follow up and track down the original artist or the track title. Lately I've been working on personal Pokemon fan projects so all I've been listening to are orchestral arrangements or high-tempo remixes of existing themes :pink_boogie:

I'm a huge ambient music lover <3

I'd say the best way to describe ambient music is that, like VisualJae said, it has minimal lyrics, features natural sounds of some sort (sounds of the sea, the wind, birds chirping, etc.), and it tends to be a bit more on the downtempo side. Ambient music is generally made to fade into the background and not be too intrusive.

A few of my favorite artists are Royksopp, Ulrich Schnauss, Fieldtriqp, Sensiva, and DJ Krush (though his music isn't 100% ambient, most of what he produces is more or less ambient music with a hip-hop beat placed over it). There's so many more great artists out there, but these are the ones I listen to regularly! ^_^

In Space by Royksopp


Her And The Sea by Ulrich Schnauss


44100th Galaxy by Sensiva

Ahhh, Royksopp brings back memories.

You know how I discovered them?

GEICO caveman commercial. "Remind Me."

DJ Krush is more trip-hop, I would think.

VisualJae said:

Ahhh, Royksopp brings back memories.

You know how I discovered them?

GEICO caveman commercial. "Remind Me."

DJ Krush is more trip-hop, I would think.

Click to expand...

Haha, that's how most people know of them~ A friend introduced me to their music, and then I realized they were from the Geico commercial when I heard Remind Me for the first time.

Yea, DJ Krush is definitely a trip-hop artist. There's a few of his songs that I think could be considered ambient though, like Song 1 from Zen, or to a lesser extent Pretense from Jaku.

Emanciraptor's Dusk to Dawn and Soon it Will Be Cold Enough are my favourite ambient albums to date. You can listen to them all the way through and whilst it blends perfectly in the background while you're working it doesn't bore you.

Julian Kruse is also another good artist. Fallen from The Sky shows that ambient music doesn't have to be repetitive and the change half way through keeps you interested.

ambient is one of my new favorite genres -- it can either fade into the background effortlessly or make everything you do seem more important or something in between, and that is Valuable. some of my favorites:

"Music for Twin Peaks Episode #30" by Stars of the Lid
"Rhubarb" by Aphex Twin
"Melancholia" by William Basinski
"First Light" by Harold Budd / Brian Eno
"Rundgang um die transzendentale Säule der Singularität" by Burzum
"Snow (Dusk, Dawn)" by Taylor Deupree
"Ouverture de Peter Hodge Transport" by Kyle Bobby Dunn
"Plays John Cassavetes I" by Ekkehard Ehlers
"Pop" by Gas
"Heavy Water / I'd Rather Be Sleeping" by Grouper (songier than everything else I've posted but still rather ambient)
"Incurably Optimistic!" by Tim Hecker (possibly my favorite ambient piece of all time)
"Betrayed in the Octagon" by Oneohtrix Point Never (more progressive electronic than ambient, but still)
"Outside your house; the lights went out & there was nothing" by Ricky Eat Acid
"Requiem for Dying Mothers" by Stars of the Lid
"Sorry That I've Become This Monster I Love You a Lot" by The Wind-Up Bird (album's just called Whips but that's what the song-titles spell out and that's Gr8 to me)
"Lighthouse" by Windy & Carl
"We Played Some Open Chords & Rejoiced, for the Earth Had Circled the Sun Yet Another Year" by A Winged Victory for the Sullen

Ambient is my favourite. I like all kinds but usually lean towards dark or tribal. here's some you might not have heard before.

A Murder of Angels
Earn (drone/ambient)
Final; many many albums, all are good.
Yen Pox
Gimu

O Yuki Conjugate (perfect discog)
A Produce
Harold Budd
Mathias Grassow

David Sylvian (personal favourite)

Some more good ones:

A Long, Long Way by Röyksopp
Sink Like A Stone by Fieldtriqp
Light On The Land by Nujabes
44100th Galaxy by Sensiva
North Cormorant Obscurity by Rykard
Artificial Silence by Zymbosis
Endless Road by Lazybatusu

Some of them are relaxing, and some of them are a little on the darker side. What I like best though is ambient music that's a somewhere in between c:

I don't really know what counts as "ambient" but if it's what I think it is (primarily instrumental, often electronic, and not structured like pop music) then I have a good amount of this kind of music.

Serph, Kashiwa Daisuke, Boards of Canada, haruka nakamura, Murcof, World's End Girlfriend, Lunar, and others. I listen to a fair amount of classical-ish and rock/post-rock/whatever music which kind of overlaps with this music in my head so some of these artists might not be what people are thinking of.