Essential Ambient Albums: 1978 – Today

The ambient album that started it all. Although ambient music had long existed in various forms, it was Brian Eno’s album series of the same name that widely coined and popularized the term, proposing in its liner notes that “Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.” Whether in an airport or (recommended) home listening, Ambient 1 delivers on that premise with a suite of tracks that pull the listener in and let them drift in equal measure.

Colorful new age icon Laraaji’s breakout album is the stuff of legend: a ing Brian Eno heard the musician busking with a modified zither in NYC’s Washington Square Park and dropped into his case a note inviting him to the studio to record. The result would be the third release in Eno’s landmark Ambient series, with one side a hypnotic, multi-layered polyphony of zither and hammered dulcimer, and the other a more typically muted ambient meditation.

A pioneering woman of Important Records label. The collected works are a double album of stately, deeply immersive ambient music that very much reward attentive listening.

Elvis competing for airtime across the radio dial, while the silvery twang of pedal steel guitars, Tuvan throat singing, synthesizers and train horns all drift in and out of the mix. Like many KLF ts, today Chill Out sounds as much like an elaborate prank as it does a compelling work of art, but along with Cauty’s like minded work with the Orb, it repositioned the ambient album for a new generation and a new context.

Either of Aphex Twin’s most inhospitable yet enveloping worlds.

GAS alias has, over the course of seven albums and four decades, achieved something almost unheard of in the anonymous world of ambient music: to create and maintain an instantly recognizable and wholly unique sound. Working with samples sourced from vinyl, Voigt smears classical strings and brass – and the crackle from these old records – until they become a hushed, enveloping atmosphere as amorphous as the name GAS might suggest. Floating over a steady bass drum thump, the denatured tones rise and fade, bright swells flickering in and out like shafts of light in the forest that gives Konigsforst its name.

The Disintegration Loops were created by American avant-garde composer William Basinski playing tapes of previous recordings on loops and recording the gradual degradation as the tapes pick up noise and decay and fall apart. Famously completed on 9/11, the album cover features a photo taken at the time by Basinski from his Brooklyn rooftop of the New York City skyline in silhouette and obscured by the clouds of smoke and debris. Basinski dedicated Disintegration Loops to the victims of 9/11, and in the aftermath of that event, the work took on an almost mythical status among ambient music, a rare album whose composition and somber, unraveling effect seemed to capture a historical sense of sadness in real time.

Texas duo A Winged Victory for the Sullen and other projects, and has hinted at the possibility of releasing posthumously completed Stars of the Lid recordings.

As NIVHEK, Portland musician Liz Harris records albums that range from lo-fi folk to equally tape-hissing ambient, all primarily made with her voice, guitar, layers and layers of tape, and only occasional piano or other instruments. On 2011’s A I A: Dream Loss, her voice appears in a typical spectral shimmer on tracks like “Dragging the Streets (First Heart Tone),” surrounded by drifting echoes of guitar, but elsewhere voice and other sounds blur together into meditative wordlessness.From uncomplicated arrangements, Harris draws out deeply compelling soundscapes, and Dream Loss plays out, as its title suggests, like a reverie always on the edge of slipping away.

Founded by ex-the KLF circa Chill Out and the birth of ambient house, and the album neatly captures the Orb’s playful spirit and their generous lifetime’s contributions to the electronic cannon.