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.
Hard rock or heavy rock is a heavier subgenre of rock music typified by aggressive vocals and distorted electric guitars. Hard rock began in the mid-1960s with the garage, psychedelic and blues rock movements. Some of the earliest hard rock music was produced by the Kinks, the Who, the Rolling Stones, Cream, Vanilla Fudge, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. In the late 1960s, bands such as Blue Cheer, the Jeff Beck Group, Iron Butterfly, Led Zeppelin, Golden Earring, Steppenwolf, Grand Funk, Free, and Deep Purple also produced hard rock.
Delerium is a Canadian new-age ambient electronic musical duo that formed in 1987, originally as a side project of the influential industrial music act Front Line Assembly. Throughout the band’s history, their musical style has encompassed a broad range, including dark ethereal ambient trance, voiceless industrial soundscapes, and electronic pop music. They are best known for their worldwide hit "Silence". The band is known to feature female guest vocalists on their albums since their 1994 album Semantic Spaces.
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.
Lycia is an American dark wave band formed in 1988 in Tempe, Arizona. The main personnel of the band are Mike VanPortfleet, Tara VanFlower and David Galas. Although only achieving minor cult success, the band is notable for being one of the ground breaking groups in darkwave and ethereal wave styles. Their 1995 album The Burning Circle and Then Dust received some attention for the power pop hit song "Pray" and "remains a high point of American dark rock", according to AllMusic. Lycia's music is characterized by rich soundscapes and layers of echoed guitars, dark and ethereal keyboards, doomy drum machine beats, VanPortfleet's melancholic, whispered vocals and Vanflower's vivid voice. Trent Reznor and Peter Steele are some of their more well-known fans.
Chill Out is the debut studio album by British electronic music group The KLF, released on 5 February 1990. It is an ambient-styled concept album featuring an extensive selection of samples, portraying a mythical night-time journey throughout the U.S. Gulf Coast states, beginning in Texas and ending in Louisiana. Chill Out was conceived as a continuous piece of music, with original KLF music interwoven with samples from songs by Elvis Presley, Fleetwood Mac, Acker Bilk, Van Halen, 808 State and field recordings of Tuvan throat singers.
Bark Psychosis are an English post-rock band/musical project from east London formed in 1986. They are one of the bands that Simon Reynolds cited when coining "post-rock" as a musical style in 1994, and are thus considered one of the key bands defining the genre.
Washing Machine is the ninth studio album by the American experimental rock band Sonic Youth, released on September 26, 1995, by DGC Records. It was recorded at Easley Studios in Memphis, Tennessee, and produced by the band and John Siket, who also engineered the band's previous two albums. The album features more open-ended pieces than its predecessors and contains some of the band's longest songs, including the 20-minute ballad "The Diamond Sea", which is the lengthiest track to feature on any of Sonic Youth's studio albums.
Space music, also called spacemusic or space ambient, is a subgenre of ambient music and is described as "tranquil, hypnotic and moving". It is derived from new-age music and is associated with lounge music, easy listening, and elevator music.
Hearts of Space is an American weekly syndicated public radio show featuring music of a contemplative nature drawn largely from the ambient, new-age and electronic genres, while also including classical, world, Celtic, experimental, and other music selections. For many years, the show's producer and presenter, Stephen Hill, has applied the term "space music" to the music broadcast on the show, irrespective of genre. It is the longest-running radio program of its type in the world. Each episode ends with Hill gently saying, "Safe journeys, space fans ... wherever you are."
Hot Trip to Heaven is the fifth studio album by British rock band Love and Rockets, released in 1994 on Beggars Banquet in the United Kingdom and American in the United States. Released after a five-year hiatus, the album saw the band drop their former gothic, alternative rock sound in favour of a hi-tech electronic, ambient direction, taking influences from ambient techno artists such as The Orb and Orbital, while retaining the band's psychedelic focus. The group were first intrigued in making electronic music at the start of the decade.
Pharos is the second studio album by the experimental ambient group Seti, which was released in 1995.
Savvas Ysatis is a Greek electronic musician.
Taylor Deupree, is an American electronic musician, photographer, graphic designer and mastering engineer. He is most known for the founding of the 12k record label, along with his work as a member of Prototype 909, and his collaborations with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Marcus Fischer, Stephan Mathieu, Savvas Ysatis, Christopher Willits and others. In 2008, Taylor Deupree was the Président d'Honneur of the Qwartz Electronic Music Awards 5th in Paris (France).
Feel The Noize – Greatest Hits is a compilation album by the British rock band Slade. It was released in January 1997 and reached No. 19 in the UK charts, remaining in the charts for six weeks. The success of the compilation encouraged other bands of the Glam Rock era to release their own 'Greatest Hits' packages. At the time, a resurgence in Seventies music was happening, due to the constant mentions from Blur's Damon Albarn and Oasis's Noel Gallagher.
Space-themed music is any music, from any genre or style, with lyrics or titles relating to outer space or spaceflight.
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.
Mirror is the fourth studio album by English experimental space rock band Flying Saucer Attack, released by FSA Records and Drag City on 17 January 2000. Lead member David Pearce recorded the album, his second solo project released with the Flying Saucer Attack name, with the assistance of one-time collaborator and English producer Rocker from 1997 to 1999 during a long period of depression. The album builds upon the sampling and noise approaches of the band's previous album, New Lands (1997), exploring electronic experimentation with influences from drum and bass and industrial music, in addition to the lo-fi noise pop and gentle psychedelic folk that he originally established the band's style with.
The Berkeley SETI Research Center (BSRC) conducts experiments searching for optical and electromagnetic transmissions from intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations. The center is based at the University of California, Berkeley.
