Comment by krylon
Comment by krylon a day ago
I love this album. I often listen to it when programming, Ambient (or more generally: calm, instrumental music) helps me focus.
Comment by krylon a day ago
I love this album. I often listen to it when programming, Ambient (or more generally: calm, instrumental music) helps me focus.
This album helps me wake up, helps me go to sleep, helps me focus, and keeps me centered. Eno's works are so versatile.
Another favorite is Eno's Discreet Music. Gives me chills every time. One of my favorite records to fly to.
The radio show/podcast Echoes with John DiLeberto is a great way to find new ambient/chill music.
Sleep by Max Richter is great (and very long)
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).
Excellent recs.
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.
Here that is on spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3d3e49rSmge86cU4D4u8mn
Drone Zone on SomaFM (free internet radio) was how I discovered a lot of that stuff. Although they don't play the old classics as much these days, it's still good and they have a few similar stations there https://somafm.com/player24/station/dronezone
I generally find Deep Space One more appropriate for most of my coding, though I used Drone Zone a lot many years ago.
I've been supporting SomaFM for more than 20 years now, and am so grateful for it. Not just the ambient stuff, but Secret Agent and several others too.
Loscil - First Narrows album is great and was used in the game Osmos.
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 recommend Stair (2:22:22) by datassette for focus and ambient background. The artist recorded the sound of downtown Chicago overnight from his hotel and then processed and mixed this together with processed sounds from MS-DOS strategy game soundtracks from the 80s. Brilliant.
I'll second Max Richter's Sleep. Timeline by Edith Progue might interest you too. The later is my favorite xcalm down" CD even before Max Richter's, when I'm too restless to sleep.
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.
For me - Aes Dana (Season 5 is still my favorite) and Carbon Based Lifeforms (Hydroponic Garden, World of Sleepers, Interloper).
Actually, check out the whole Ultimae catalogue: https://bandcamp.com/ultimae
I guess I agree (used to be a massive 90's EBM collector together with my ex, though I kind of got out of the loop of EBM end of 00's / start of 10's). Seeing a Woob album from 1994 recommended a few comments below <3 for CBL, I do like the track ~42 degrees.
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.
music for programming podcast: https://musicforprogramming.net/latest/
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, …
Not OP but I also often to listen to ambient while programming. A couple recommendations would be "Music for Nine Post Cards" and other works by Hiroshi Yoshimura, and "Music for 18 musicians" and others by Steve Reich.
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.
A good place for experimental music is ubu web, in fact Brian Eno is also over there[1].
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.
There's also Strudel as a programmatic music composing app: https://strudel.cc/
I have an 'Ambient Radio' channel on https://ambiph.one, my soundscape generator: https://ambiph.one/?m=1-Ambient+Radio-bf100
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
Absolutely! For instrumental focus music, check out Nils Frahm or Max Richter. Do you prefer more electronic or acoustic sounds?
Woob 1194 by Woob. Immersive, maybe darker than most would like, but deep and very graphical sound.
For a good intro the Sleepbot Environmental Broadcast radio is well worth listening to. Also their write up on how and why they produce the broadcast is really interesting.
Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works {85-92,Volume II}.
A lot of great recs in this thread, but I'll a couple others I didn't see listed yet:
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.
Here's a playlist list of long-form ambient drone stuff I've been curating for a couple years now:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGMYnukvmgiXXFxuTKDvZfw-e...
I listen to it while I work.
i have a 5hr playlist on spotify called lost in the sea of ambien which happens to have many of the artist recos here. title is a reference to haruomi hosono who said he got lost in the sea of ambient in the 80s after leaving ymo.
The best is the instrumentals on David Bowie's Low IMO.
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.
If drone with later neoclassical touch then Marsen Jules has delivered very stable and top tier. Brilliant guy.
The Dead Texan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zebxXliFtg
Aphex Twin's "Digeridoo" is incredible. It's a 4-song EP so it repeats often, but that's a feature for me.
Yeah, everything's interconnected as Tangerine Dream got to work on GTA V soundtrack. There is this note about that track on Wikipedia:
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.
I've never really understood the appeal honestly. I feel it's more of a "masterpiece" in a historical sense, because it was an early electronic / ambient work which no one had really heard before and that gave it a huge cult following. Which is understandable, but outside of that, I don't see how it's any more interesting than basically any other ambient work of which I would say there is much much much better. Robin Guthrie comes to mind...
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?
People have many tastes; some like Steve Reich, others Wim Mertens, Michael Nyman, or even Shostakovich.
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-...