Ambient music is a genre of music that emphasizes tone and atmosphere over traditional musical structure or rhythm. It is often "peaceful" sounding and lacks composition, beat, and/or structured melody. It uses textural layers of sound that can reward both passive and active listening and encourage a sense of calm or contemplation. The genre is said to evoke an "atmospheric", "visual", or "unobtrusive" quality. Nature soundscapes may be included, and the sounds of acoustic instruments such as the piano, strings and flute may be emulated through a synthesizer.
...I Care Because You Do is a studio album by the electronic music artist and producer Aphex Twin. It was released on 24 April 1995 through Warp Records. It contains material recorded between 1990 and 1994 and marked James's return to a beat-driven sound following the ambient work Selected Ambient Works Volume II (1994), and pairs abrasive rhythms with symphonic and ambient elements. The cover artwork is a self-portrait by James.
Geir Aule Jenssen is a Norwegian electronic musician and composer who records as Biosphere. A resident of Tromsø within the Arctic Circle, Jenssen is well known for ambient and ambient house pieces, often inspired by Arctic or mountain settings, and his use of loops and peculiar samples from science fiction and natural sources. His 1997 album Substrata was voted by the users of the Hyperreal.org website in 2001 as the best all-time classic ambient album. He has also composed several film scores.
Dark ambient is a genre of post-industrial music that features an ominous, dark droning and often gloomy, monumental or catacombal atmosphere, partially with discordant overtones. It shows similarities with ambient music, a genre that has been cited as a main influence by many dark ambient artists, both conceptually and compositionally. Although mostly electronically generated, dark ambient also includes the sampling of hand-played instruments and semi-acoustic recording procedures.
Drone music, drone-based music, or simply drone, is a minimalist genre of music that emphasizes the use of sustained sounds, notes, or tone clusters called drones. It is typically characterized by lengthy compositions featuring relatively slight harmonic variations. La Monte Young, one of its 1960s originators, defined it in 2000 as "the sustained tone branch of minimalism." Music containing drones can be found in many regional traditions across Asia, Australia, and Europe, but the genre label is generally reserved for music originating with the Western classical tradition. Elements of drone music have been incorporated in diverse genres such as rock, ambient, and electronic music.
Jóhann Gunnar Jóhannsson was an Icelandic composer who wrote music for a wide array of media including theatre, dance, television, and film. His work is stylised by its blending of traditional orchestration with contemporary electronic elements.
Murcof is the performing and recording name of Mexican electronic musician Fernando Corona. Corona was born in 1970 in Tijuana, Mexico and raised in Ensenada. He was for a time a member of the Tijuana-based Nortec Collective of electronic musicians under the Terrestre project name. In 2000, he returned to Tijuana. Since 2006, Corona has been living in Barcelona, Spain.
William James Basinski is an American avant-garde composer based in Los Angeles, California. He is also a clarinetist, saxophonist, sound artist, and video artist.
Loscil is the electronic/ambient music project of Scott Morgan from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Morgan launched the project in Vancouver in 1998 while a member of the multimedia collective Multiplex, which curated audiovisual events at an underground cinema called The Blinding Light. The name Loscil is taken from the "looping oscillator" function (loscil) in Csound.
Thomas Meluch is an American multi-instrumentalist, writer, and photographer, best known by his pseudonym Benoît Pioulard.
Vampire Rodents was a sound collage and experimental music ensemble based out of Phoenix, Arizona, although its core members originally came from Canada. The creative nucleus of the project comprised vocalist and composer Daniel Vahnke and keyboardist Victor Wulf. Daniel Vahnke was primarily influenced by 20th-century classical and avant-garde music, whereas Wulf drew from new age, ambient and synth-driven pop music. Their work also dabbled in big band, bebop, musique concrète, industrial, electro, Indian classical and Greek music.
Sedimental is an independent recording label based in Greenfield, Massachusetts releasing mainly experimental, sound art, noise, free jazz, avant garde and drone music. It began 20 years ago in Austin, Texas with the first album from ambient-drone group Stars of the Lid and their debut Music for Nitrous Oxide in 1995. It has followed up to present day with specialized releases from Phill Niblock, Kyle Bobby Dunn, Francisco Lopez, Brendan Murray, and Alessandro Bosetti. Most of which are limited editions of 500 copies.
A Young Person's Guide is a double album release from Canadian composer Kyle Bobby Dunn. It was recorded over a period of six years in Greensboro, North Carolina, Calgary, Alberta, Cypress Hills, Saskatchewan, and parts of New York and New Jersey.
Ways of Meaning is a full length vinyl, digital download and art edition album from Canadian composer Kyle Bobby Dunn. It was recorded at Bunce Cake studios in Brooklyn by the composer in 2010. The recordings are mostly quiet songs that are shorter in length from his earlier material and the 2010 release, A Young Person's Guide to Kyle Bobby Dunn. Interviews with the artist found that the songs were mainly recorded using guitar, laptop and organ as predominant sound sources - although touches of strings, choir, horns, and even electronic samples and textures are seemingly heard in certain songs. His music highly retains the spirit of contemporary classical composers like Arvo Pärt and like Pärt's music there's an austere and meditative quality that is both oddly attractive and extremely powerful.
Blanck Mass is a British electronic solo project by Ivor Novello Award-winning composer Benjamin John Power. He is a founding member of Fuck Buttons.
Bring Me The Head of Kyle Bobby Dunn is a full length double compact disc album from Canadian composer Kyle Bobby Dunn. It was recorded at Bunce Cake studios in Brooklyn and remote parts of Canada. The compositions are mostly long, slowly evolving minimal works created from electric guitar processing. The album is his second double album since 2010's Low Point release, A Young Person's Guide to Kyle Bobby Dunn.
The soundtrack for Patience (2012), a film by Grant Gee, was composed and produced by English musician Leyland James Kirby under his ambient music project the Caretaker. The official soundtrack album was issued on 23 January 2012. Unlike other albums of the Caretaker that used old recordings of playful and bright ballroom music, Kirby's score for the film uses a 1927 recording of Franz Schubert's song cycle for voice and piano Winterreise (1828) as its main audio source. It also differs from other works of the project where hissing sounds are used instead of crackles, the loops are shorter in lengths, and the non-musical aspects of each track serve as the foreground of the mix. The soundtrack was favorably received by professional music journalists.
Yair Elazar Glotman is a composer and musician based in Berlin.
31 VII 69 10:26 - 10:49 PM / 23 VIII 64 2:50:45 - 3:11 AM The Volga Delta is an album by American musicians La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, released in 1969 on Heiner Friedrich's Edition X label as a limited edition 12-inch vinyl.
Dissolution Grip is the fourteenth studio album by ambient musician Joseph Kamaru, known as KMRU. It was released on September 29, 2023, via OFNOT. To create the album's sounds, Kamaru looked at the waveforms of field recordings, creating synthesizer sounds from the visuals. Dissolution Grip is an ambient, drone, and experimental album, consisting of two long-form tracks. The album received positive reviews from Loud and Quiet, Resident Advisor, and Pitchfork.
