How Brian Eno Created Ambient 1: Music for Airports (2019)
Sunset Mission by Bohren & Der Club of Gore is very very sleepy Jazz (they have released more albums, but this one is my favorite by a wide margin)
Long Ambients 1 & 2 by Moby - he was kind enough to make them available for download free of charge, too
Under Wires and Search Lights by Marconi Union
In A Silent Way by Miles Davis
Pretty much anything by Sigur Rós. It's not strictly speaking instrumental, but the lyrics are Icelandic, which I don't speak, so it's close enough
Cocteau Twins recorded many very ambient-ish albums. Not instrumental, but the "lyrics" are mostly glossolalia, so not distracting (at least for me).
If anyone reading this like Bohren & Der Club of Gore, also check out Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble.
And if you vibe with Sigurd Ros, check out Godspeed You! Black Emperor too.
Max Richter, John Cage, Tangerine Dreams, Klaus Schulze, Gavin Bryars, Richard Chartier, Asmus Tietchens, Tomaga, Boards of Canada, Stars of the Lid, William Basiniki, Joanna Brouk, Pauline Oliveros ...
I do way too much coding...
Pauline Oliveros
Yes yes yes! Finally someone who won't make fun of me for listening to Horse Singd from a Cloud.
You should add Laurie Spiegel to your list, something tells me you'd enjoy.
Actually, check out the whole Ultimae catalogue: https://bandcamp.com/ultimae
How we used to find music: go to the record store every week to listen to whatever you couldn't afford, look at P2P networks at people who like similar music as you, and browse their collections. Eventually, use Discogs to search. Or simply talk with other people (at parties, on the internet) who also like the same music.
How we can find music nowadays: Spotify (and such). I mean, seriously. Their suggestions can open you up to a plethora of new artists. If you then look at the top 10, chances are you'll like some of their work. I found a lot of music this way, for all kind of genres. As Valve's Gabe used to say: piracy is a service problem. Though I am not sure Spotify is so good for the artists, given they earn pennies via that.
..and it is still nowhere to getting and downloading and listening 24/7 to every new release (or, well... trying to), using SMB to the NAS (which automatically gets the releases from a scene FTP) and Winamp locally to add some .m3u files.
Concerning games, Datassette released a brilliantly beautiful arcade shooter called (Utopia Must Fall)[https://store.steampowered.com/app/2849680/Utopia_Must_Fall/], with lots of retro sounds.
The track "5:23" is included in the 2008 video game Grand Theft Auto IV and appears on the soundtrack album The Music of Grand Theft Auto IV. In the digital release it is listed as "Maiden Voyage". This track is very similar to, but does not credit, the song "Love on a Real Train" by Tangerine Dream from the Risky Business soundtrack. They had remixed the song for a then upcoming Tangerine Dream remix album but had their effort rejected so released it as 5'23 instead.
Ulrich Schnauss - Far Away Trains Passing by Album, particularly the songs "passing by" and "knuddelmous"
Kromattic "song "porcelain"
Peardiver - song "hangout"
lechiffrebeats - song Moonlight Garden
Lori Travel - song "apple lamp"
King of Woolworths - Song "Theydon"
Aisake - song "autumn Leaves"
Christopher Willits - song "wide"
Northscape - song "approaching the trig point"
Kiasmos - song "blurred"
Celer - song "Diphenhydramine"
Tony Anderson - song "Ariana"
East Forest - Album "Music for Mushrooms: A soundtrack for the Psychedelic Practitioner"
If you're on Apple Music, look for the shared playlist Lo-Fi Chill: https://music.apple.com/ca/playlist/lo-fi-chill/pl.1d5ead185...
I know people love Music for Airports but I think it is incredibly boring compared to what Eno did with Bowie.
Beyond that the first few albums by The Orb are top notch.
Balam Acab - See Birds and Wander/Wonder are incredible.
And maybe Glitch (music) might be of interest as a starting point, especially the "Clicks & Cuts Series" which gave me a lot of pointers to interesting niche artists.
Mort Garson: Mother Earth's Plantasia
Hiroshi Yoshimura: Surround
Satoshi Ashikawa: Still Way (Wave Notation 2)
Shameless plug... Search BirdyMusic.com in Spotify/Apple Music/YouTube Music to hear some ambient music algo generated based on realtime Birdnet detections and weather in my backyard.
In fact, the use of loops described in this article reminded me of what Reich called "phases", basically the same concept of emerging/shifting melodic patterns between different samples.
There are some great less-well-known artists on there - if you tap the album art it'll link you to their Bandcamp if they have one
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGMYnukvmgiXXFxuTKDvZfw-e...
I listen to it while I work.
Edit:
Also if you're a programmer and what to learn a new programming language, then check out SuperCollider[2]. You can use that to create your own ambient sounds. SC has a great library for creating user interfaces along with creating sound.
now that is fun to watch :)
But if I had to pick one: Stars of the Lid - The Tired Sounds of Start of the Lid
some of the artists below are not strictly speaking ambient as in brian eno kind of ambient
jogging house, r beny, biosphere, anthony childs (surgeon doing ambient), abul mogard, alessandro cortini, alva noto (glitchy ambient), benoit piouliard, bing & ruth, bvdub, mu tate, jake muir, ulla, log et3rnal, space afrika, heurco s, donato dozzy - plays bee mask, imaginary softwoods, jo johnson, koen holtkamp, mountains, kyle bobby dunn, oneohtrix point never, neel, pendant, romeo poirier, domenique dumont, …
I don't see it a masterpiece in the same way I see Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" is. The reason? Because I don't think there is a better Jazz album, ever, where as with Eno's early Ambient work, I think it was surpassed very quickly.
That said I'll give it another listen today and see if I can hear the magic.
Am I missing something?
If Guthrie does it for you (with or without Elizabeth Fraser?) perhaps The White Arcades also fits the bill, it's a Guthrie, Eno, Budd collaboration.
One thing to admire about Eno is just how deeply and broadly connected he was as an engineer and contributor to so many artists and albums.
David Bowie owes much to Fripp, Eno, Belew, ... etc.
I love this album. I often listen to it when programming
Me too. Its been a coding zone favourite of mine for many years.
The classical/instrumental version by Bang on a Can[1] is good too.
[1] https://www.discogs.com/release/1140705-Bang-On-A-Can-Brian-...
Anyways, in 2016, Tero Parviainen (@teropa) shared this really cool long-form exploration called "JavaScript Systems Music – Learning Web Audio by Recreating The Works of Steve Reich and Brian Eno" that I enjoyed tremendously (and I don't even like Javascript!)
Check it out at: https://teropa.info/blog/2016/07/28/javascript-systems-music...
Yesterday I put up a little dictionary of synth sounds that I'm building out to help me on my journey (https://synthrecipes.org). The goal to be able to export any particular sound in a format for different live coding environments. Sounds are defined in a JSON format like https://synthrecipes.org/recipes/acid-bass.json. I'll open source it today so other can submit sounds.
--
Edit: I've open sourced the repo so others can improve existing sounds and add new ones. https://github.com/bradly/synth-recipes/tree/main
Music is funny. I played the closed hi-hat sound (https://synthrecipes.org/#closed-hi-hat) a couple of times and my brain instantly started playing AC/DC's, Back in Black. I probably haven't listened to that song in 15 years and now I'm shuffling AC/DC on Spotify.
Also, the "Sub bass" link might be broken:
What stands out here was that Eno used very simple sounds and looped them. This was not a complicated rube-goldberg machine he built to finally get to these masterpieces. It was simple recordings of voices, looped.
Reggie Watts makes incredible, and non-traditional, electronic house music, basically just his voice and looping machine (granted he does have a 4 octave range, but...). So organic and human.
Same for Matthew Herbert, see his manifesto: https://prruk.org/personal-contract-for-the-composition-of-m.... It is all organic.
This is what makes me a little sad when I play with all the amazing open source tools on Linux. Ardour is great. Hydrogen is great. Sonic-PI is incredible.
But, the UI's are not the best. Getting started requires a ton of reading and researching. It is a long way to just "play" (I mean playing like a child, not playing piano).
For example, I wish Sonic-PI had a better way of writing music than JUST writing out ruby. I like ruby as a language, and I'm surprised there is not a way to easily extend the Sonic-PI tool so I can plugin my Novation drum pad and easily trigger samples and notes. I can absolutely watch for MIDI notes from Novation, and take actions in ruby code, but it kills my creativity to do it that way. I wish I could build a tiny set of buttons that shows me that which is not a stream of logs. I never feel like Sonic-PI puts me into a creative mode. It feels like trying to jam the beauty of a harp into emacs. And, I love emacs.
Open source music software could have bespoke custom UIs for any user. I'm a command line guy so I'm part of the problem. But, these tools should be customizable to make our own bespoke UIs which match the beginner level, or the advance level, or anything in between.
But, the UI's are not the best.
Try jumping into any DAW without "a ton of reading and researching".
Granted, there are hardware drum machines and sequencers that you can "play" with as a completely fresh user, but these tend to be the exception rather than the rule. The newer generation of hardware sequencers (say the Elektron series) are quite impenetrable without spending a significant amount of time learning about what they can do and how to do it.
Open source music software could have bespoke custom UIs for any user.
from the voice of experience, I'll tell you that this makes user support almost impossible, or at least, extremely difficult and frustrating.
But, when I use open source, I assume user support == "me supporting it". That often means reading the docs, reviewing source code, (and lately, asking claude...)
I'm just saying I want to be permitted to build my own UI, easily. I think that should be front and center in the design decisions. I sheepishly think of Sonic-PI, and how incredibly hard Aaron has been working for years and know he was rightly focused on the backend pieces, which are incredibly complex. I don't think he should do the "UI-only-for-me-and-not-for-thee" work, but maybe as a community we can start doing better about making bespoke UI possible.
we only have three colour themes - standard, dark and high contrast.Theming Sonic Pi beyond this is only possible by hacking the source code and it’s not something I’ve had the time to make user friendly. However, if others would like to work on this, I’m happy to consider contributions.
This seems like a pretty reasonable statement from him; I'm sure others would appreciate the work, if you have the time.
There is definitely a learning curve, but after reading the basics and poking through the examples, you realize you can do anything.
Lots of C libraries have wrappers already written and you can also write your own. I wrote a curl wrapper and pulled live data from sources such as weather APIs, assigned different facets of the data to different instruments and dynamics. You can write GL shaders and generally create your own interfaces.
It's also fully networked with sample-accurate synchronization, so that it's very easy to construct distributed computation and physical interaction. This is where the cyberphysical programming aspect comes into play.
Extempore has support for MIDI devices, and I've really pushed my gear to the limit with it. It is also very low level; you even write your own DSP. But you create libraries over time so that spontaneous jams don't require twenty minutes of fiddling first.
It took a lot of time to feel comfortable in the environment when I first got into it years ago, but with modern agentic IDRs such as Cursor, you should have a much, much easier time. It's great for writing algorithmic music and really great for freeform jam sessions. Lots of built in goodies that will really inspire you.
Also it's LISP.
To dig deeper into this style of tape loop ambient music, check out William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops. William Basinski used a similar concept to Brian Eno, only the tapes he used rapidly deteriorated upon playback, causing the musical material to degrade over the length of the recording.
I've never "bought" the story of Disintegration Loops that Basinski tells about its creation. The idea he composed it literally during the 9/11 attacks was just a silly attempt to add gravitas to abstract music. The more you think about it, the more off-putting it becomes. Reminds me of Stockhausen's stupendous remark about 9/11 being "the biggest work of art there has ever been".
In the same vein, tape doesn't normally just deteriorate before your eyes. The gradual change in sound of the loops is more likely due to the guitar pedal chain he was running his loops into (Basinski tends to omit this part of its creation).
Halfway through, he said he was tired with travelling and left the stage.
The audience continued to sit there for another hour, staring at the lid of the MacBook that was making the music. When it finished, we applauded the MacBook and left.
Quite surreal. Very enjoyable though.
Also, Stockhausen was not entirely wrong. It was insensitive and poorly phrased, but 9/11 is undoubtedly the defining aesthetic image of our time.
But even with almost 30 years of listening to this stuff, sometimes a really obvious one slips through the cracks.
I hadn't heard of or listened to Tim Hecker until just this year. And oh man, I haven't felt this way about finding a "new" artist in a long time. If you want a good entry point start with his mid-career Ravedeath, 1972[0] and its companion Dropped Pianos (both of which feature the MIT Piano Drop on the cover) and work forward and backward from there.
I had a similar experience with Abul Mogard. Whoever they really are is a genius of immense soundscapes.
The most recent one[0] I made was done when I was playing around with Rust, WASM, and WebAudio. (You'll need to press somewhere to start the sound)
This Sonic Pi example really blew my mind when I first heard it. Such a rich sound out of three notes.
use_synth :hollow
with_fx :reverb, mix: 0.7 do
live_loop :note1 do
play choose([:D4,:E4]), attack: 6, release: 6
sleep 8
end
live_loop :note2 do
play choose([:Fs4,:G4]), attack: 4, release: 5
sleep 10
end
live_loop :note3 do
play choose([:A4, :Cs5]), attack: 5, release: 5
sleep 11
end
endhttp://www.echoesofbluemars.org/
I think their bluemars stream is great.
Ambient Music must be able to accomodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.
I've always found ambient to be perfect for listening while working. Now I understand why!
How Brian Eno Created Ambient 1: Music for Airports (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33172448 - Oct 2022 (127 comments)