25 influencial albums to Ambient Music - Progressive Rock Music Forum

1 Brian Eno
Ambient 1: Music for Airports
(Editions EG)
It's no surprise that this 1978 recording topped the
list. As the first of Eno's four Ambient albums, this
record staked out a new frontier, declaring new land
open for exploration. And it's lovely music too.
Inspired by earlier tape-loop constructions such as
"Discrete Music" and "The Heavenly Music
Corporation," the four compositions on Airports are
long, slow, cycling patterns of sparse piano and
wordless voices. Loops of different lengths combine
in unpredictable ways, creating lushly layered clouds
of sound, punctuated by poignant silences. John
Cage's ideas of indeterminacy loom large, as well
as the tenets of minimalism, as the patterns recur
but don't quite repeat, creating a flowing pool of
sound that is consistently self-similar, yet never quite
standing still. The first edition of the LP also
presented Eno's manifesto on ambient music, the
first formal use of the term. "An ambience is defined
as an atmosphere or a surrounding influence: a tint"
the notes read, continuing "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." These
compositions, identified only as1/1, 1/2, 2/1 and 2/2,
denoting their positions on a vinyl LP, stand as
almost ideal examples of this aesthetic, engaging
yet aloof, simple without being simplistic. Although
never a commercial success, the record has been
popular among musicians, and perhaps by virtue of
its status as the first record overtly titled "ambient,"
there's little doubt that Music for Airports deserves its
position here as the most influential ambient album
of all time.

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2 Steve Roach
Dreamtime Return
(Fortuna)
This 1988 double-disk masterpiece, inspired by
Roach's visits to the Australian outback and his
experience with its wilderness and Aboriginal culture
(and his work with didgeridoo master David
Hudson), is likely Roach's most popular work to
date. This journey into Aboriginal mythology (the
Dreamtime was an Eden-like period of natural
harmony presaged by the arrival of extraterrestrial
ancestors) remains an ambient trademark and truly
original work. Dreamtime combines tribal
percussion, synths, and location recordings of
Aboriginal sounds throughout the 14 tracks,
brilliantly bringing into focus what the ancient
dreamtime period in Australian prehistory may have
been like, based on both legend and geological
data. This poll brought to our attention an interesting
and passionate division that separates Roach fans
as to which of his albums is his finest: Dreamtime
Return or Structures from Silence (see No. 4).

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3 Wendy Carlos
Sonic Seasonings
(East Side Digital)
This 1972 recording predated the categories of
ambient or new age music, but using only her Moog
Synthesizer and recorded environmental sounds,
Carlos created the prototype for ambient recordings
on the double LP Sonic Seasonings. In the format of
Vivaldi's baroque classic "Four Seasons," Sonic
Seasonings remains an aural experience
unmatched musically and unsurpassed in
originality. "Spring" provides a rainstorm; "Summer"
conveys relentless heat; "Fall" visits an oceanside
campfire; and "Winter" conveys the bitter coldness of
that season's brutal wind. Carlos re-mastered the
recent reissue that also contains a previously
unreleased 40-minute two-part suite from 1986 titled
"Land of the Midnight Sun."

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4 Steve Roach
Structures from Silence
One of the pioneers of the American spacemusic
scene, initially inspired by German synthesists such
as Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream, Roach has
explored styles from quiet contemplation to raging
sequencer storms, from organic tribal grooves to
twitchy electronic rhythms, frequently pointing the
way for others to follow. One of his most influential
works is the 1984 release Structures from Silence.
This recording is a soothing, enveloping
soundscape, ideal for quieting the mind and calming
the body. The gentle ebb and flow of warm
synthesizer textures are based on the rhythm of
breathing, and entrains the listeners' own respiration
to its serene pace. It's useful: for setting a tone in a
room, for aiding in meditation, for easing the
transition to sleep, but it's also sensually pleasing.

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5 Michael Stearns
Planetary Unfolding
(Continuum Montage)
As suggested by the title, this album, first released in
1980, is often thought of as a classic of spacemusic,
portraying the sound of the cosmos itself. But the
slowly-evolving swirls of electronic arpeggiations
serve equally well as an enveloping atmosphere,
setting the tone for journeys in internal space.
Stearns's earlier works Ancient Leaves and
Sustaining Cylinders were even more ambient, but
as some of the first independent spacemusic
releases, they were not easily found. In addition to
releasing several more CDs that incorporate
electronic, acoustic and ambient sound, Stearns has
gone on to create many soundtracks for IMAX films
and other large-scale cinematic presentations. That
same sense of grandeur is heard here, as is the
music's ability to amplify images, either on the
screen or in the mind.

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6 Brian Eno
Ambient 4: On Land
(Editions EG)
Number four in Eno's ambient series, On Land
sounds most like what most people would think of
as ambient music, incorporating natural sounds, or
natural-sounding electronic effects, that evoke
tangible environments. Eno's original inspiration for
his ambient series came from natural sounds
intruding on composed music, but Music for Airports,
The Plateaux of Mirror and Day of Radiance had not
included these elements. On Land suggests terrain,
landscape, the ambience of a place. Even the song
titles: "Unfamiliar Wind (Leek's Hills)," "Dunwich
Beach Autumn 1960," or "A Clearing" seem to
suggest documentation of real or imagined
locations, field recordings from an unknown land.
Dark, murky thuds and hums, organic whirrs and
chirps blend with electronic and acoustic
instrumentation to create an engaging, slightly
ominous soundworld. Despite perceptions of the
style, the first three albums of Eno's Ambient series
were not synthesizer-based, instead starting with
acoustic instruments, albeit transformed, looped
and altered by studio processing. On Land included
more electronic timbres, although often
indistinguishable from the processed acoustic
sounds and effects. This combination of quiet
atmospheres and natural sounds best exemplifies
the central aesthetic of ambient music to follow.

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7 Jonn Serrie
And the Stars Go With You
(Miramar)
Jonn Serrie's name is synonymous with
spacemusic. The composer is renowned for his
numerous works commissioned by planetariums
around the world, and Serrie's 1986 debut album
And the Stars Go With You reshaped and redefined
ambient spacemusic. Serrie was working on the
Teacher in Space Project for NASA in '86, and
composed musical material for the event. The
Challenger disaster affected him deeply, and Serrie
expressed his feelings musically-the results
becoming his first album. In '88, the album was
used in the opening production ceremony of the
Christa McAulliffe Planetarium in Concord, New
Hampshire, and the music is dedicated to her
memory. Although Stars is more often associated
with "spacemusic" as opposed to "ambient," the line
separating the two subcategories is a blurry one,
and many listeners use this album as an
atmospheric backdrop, rather than a soundtrack for
their own space journeys.

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8 Terry Riley
A Rainbow in Curved Air
(Sony)
Rainbow is a gentle, melodic, flowing piece, which
swirls like a psychedelic dance. It features the use of
Riley's "time Lag accumulator," a two-tape deck
delay system. Rainbow features delayed electric
organ, harpsichord, and the rocksichord with
dumbek providing a sparse rhythmic section. This
intoxicating and seeming unending repetition of this
music became somewhat of a cult favorite with the
'60's counter-culture. His composition In C is often
credited with launching the minimalist movement,
and Rainbow, meant to simulate his all-night
improvised concerts, underscores the similarities
between minimalism, psychedelia, and
spacemusic. The repeating cycles of minimalism
are reflected in Eno's tape loops, Tangerine Dream's
sequencers and even Mike Oldfield's cycling
structures. This hypnotic piece is a good introduction
to Terry Riley's work which integrates repetition,
improvisation, drones, classical Indian ragas,
alternate tunings and electronics.

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9 Harold Budd/Brian Eno
The Pearl
(Editions EG)
Four years after the release of The Plateaux of Mirror,
Budd and Eno returned to that earlier format and
created another subtle gem, beautiful and
melancholy at the same time. Again exploring the
interaction of sparse, Satie-like piano figures with
electronic processing that blurred and smeared the
edges of the sound, Budd and Eno created songs
with infinite layers to be explored, despite their
minimalist structure. The poetic titles such as "A
Stream with Bright Fish" and "Against the Sky" reveal
Budd's love of language, and suggest the imagistic,
dreamy world the music portrays. Like a pearl, these
tunes are simple, yet textured at closer inspection;
symmetrical from a distance, yet irregular in unique
ways; polished, yet organic.

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10 Steve Hillage
Rainbow Dome Musick
(Caroline)
An electric guitarist who first came to prominence
with the cosmic hippie psychedelic rock band Gong,
Steve Hillage has gone on to be an enduring
influence in ambient music. Hillage is a master of
the "glissando guitar," a technique that incorporates
rubbing the strings along the neck of the guitar with a
piece of steel, creating a sustained, fluid, voice-like
tone. His 1979 release Rainbow Dome Musick
features this plaintive sound, floating amidst
shimmering electronic atmospheres. The two long
pieces, "Garden of Paradise" and "Four Ever
Rainbow" are idyllic tone poems, almost static, with
subtle variations moving the music forward at an
imperceptible pace. Hillage has always considered
this music an expression of surrealism, and one can
hear that imagistic dream logic on this recording.

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11 Paul Horn
Inside the Taj Mahal
(Sony)
A pioneering figure in world music since the '60s,
Horn's repertoire ranges from contemporary jazz to
ambient. On the flutist's ground-breaking 1969
recording Inside the Taj Mahal, Horn performs his
meditative flute in the natural acoustic space of the
building's central dome. It's an interesting twist on
the ambient concept that the unique character of this
recording is based on the specific aural environment
of the location, rather than the music alone creating
the ambience. It was recorded unconventionally, with
one microphone close to the flute and another
placed at a distance, deeper in the structure. This
resulted in an exaggerated stereo image, one that
didn't give an "accurate" picture of the space, but an
evocative one. Horn later made recordings inside
other sonically unique buildings, such as the Great
Pryamid, cathedrals, temples and canyons.

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12 Tangerine Dream
Rubycon
(Virgin)
Along with Phaedra, this 1975 recording best
displays Tangerine Dream's classic sound,
reflecting the dark and claustrophobic environment
of walled-in Cold War Berlin, while evoking the
mysteries of outer space. The mixture of repetitive
sequencer cycles and spacey effects that mark this
period of the band's work inspired innumerable
energetic synthesizer excursions, and perhaps as
many quiet explorations of the ambiences of the
spaces between.
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13 Harold Budd/Brian Eno
Ambient Two: The Plateaux of Mirror
(Editions EG)
This album, along with The Pearl inspired a
thousand piano album imitators. But few ever
achieved the poignancy and quiet melancholy of the
originals. The serene piano performances were
processed by Brian Eno in real-time, so Budd could
respond to the altered sound as he played. His
subtle gradations of touch sent notes cascading into
dark echoes, ripples on the smooth plateau of
sound. Budd claims to have wanted to make
unabashedly pretty music, removed from the
cerebral abstractions of the avant-garde, but there's
a veil of melancholy shrouding the Plateaux that
keeps the music from becoming too sweet.

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14 Klaus Schulze
Mirage
(Thunderbolt)
Upon this album's release in 1977, "Crystal Lake,"
became one of the best-known pieces in all of
spacemusic. Symmetrical cascades of sparkling
crystalline notes, met with a majestic bassline,
resulted in some of the most enthralling electronic
music ever recorded. Despite occasional bombast,
Schulze's compositions have a restrained, cool,
detached feel that allows them to work equally well
as quiet atmospheres in the background, or as
big-screen feature films for the ears. He described
his music as "the background to a mental picture"
leaving half of the experience to the listener.
Originally a drummer, and at different times a
member of both Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra
Tempel, Schulze is one of the titans of electronic
music, his groundbreaking work influencing styles
from ambient to techno.

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15 Aphex Twin
Selected Ambient Works Volume 2
(Sire/Warner)
Richard D. James, the man behind Aphex Twin,
emerged from the British chillout scene. An
iconoclastic musical experimenter who built his own
synthesizers and claimed to create many of his
tunes through lucid dreaming, much of his work was
built around dancey beats and grating textures. But
this CD from 1994 features quiet, mysterious tone
poems, shadowy outlines seen from down a foggy
street. This is classic ambience in the Eno mold,
updated for the rave generation.

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16 Klaus Schulze
Timewind
(Universal)
Another classic from one of the pioneers of the
Berlin School of spacemusic, infused with washes
of white noise, twittering electronic sound effects and
the steady pulse of cycling sequencers. This 1975
recording is dedicated to Richard Wagner, and
Schulze aspires to that classical grandeur, even
providing a reproduction of his "score" for one of the
two side-long compositions. It's a multi-layered chart
mapping the positions and structures of leitmotifs
and harmonies, alongside diagrams of noise and
sample-and-hold filter modulations. His use of
decidedly electronic sounds gives Schulze's music
an otherworldly feel, and the slowly-building, linear
progressions of his compositions are hypnotic and
involving, pulling the listener into this imagined
space. This was the first of Schulze's albums widely
available in America and immediately became a
favorite of many in the electronic music scene.

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17 Tangerine Dream
Phaedra
(Virgin)
Released in 1974, this is the prototypical "Berlin
School" space music record, with churning
sequencers, lush electronic pads and warbling
Mellotron melodies. But there are also long
stretches of deep space journeys: collages of timbre
and texture. This period of Tangerine Dream's work
inspired legions of synthesizer knob-twisters, and
pointed the way for countless explorations of tone,
freed from the constraints of melody, harmony and
rhythm.

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18 Steve Reich
Music for 18 Musicians
(ECM)
Music for 18 Musicians features, you guessed it, 18
musicians on pianos, woodwinds, female vocals
and various mallet instruments. This 1974 work
features a repeated insistent staccato, subtle shifts
in the cycles allowing a careful listener to discover
new patterns in the matrix of sound. Inspired by the
richness of African and Indonesian
percussion-based music, and hearing parallels
between those cycling forms and his own
explorations of repetition through tape music, Reich
composed many percussive pieces, most notably
1970's Drumming. 18 Musicians examines some of
the same techniques, especially the motif of shifting
phase between layers of repeated patterns, but the
expanded instrumentation allows this to build to an
intoxicating lushness. Similar repeated patterns can
be heard in sequencer-based spacemusic, in fact
Tangerine Dream's "Love on a Real Train" bears an
alarming similarity to this work, although created on
very different instruments.

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19 Mike Oldfield
Tubular Bells
(Virgin)
After stints in rock bands and playing folk music with
his sister Sally, Mike Oldfield set out on his own in
1972 with a tape of a long, ambitious instrumental
composition he had been working on for several
years in his home studio. Though most labels
rejected it, up-and-coming entrepreneur Richard
Branson chose Oldfield's work to be the first release
on his new label:Virgin Records. The resulting
album was Tubular Bells, an original blend of
symphonic-style rock, classical, folk and world
music elements, featuring Oldfield playing over 25
instruments. The album's repetitious structure, with
instruments entering and exiting in a smoothly
shifting flow, shows a kinship with minimalism and
sequencer-based music, converging on the same
musical niche from an unexpected direction. Made
more famous as the soundtrack to the film The
Exorcist, Tubular Bells became one the of greatest
commercial success stories in contemporary music,
having sold over 20 million copies worldwide,
making it the greatest selling contemporary
instrumental album ever.

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20 Miles Davis
In a Silent Way
(Sony)
Ten years after the classic and cool Kind of Blue, In a
Silent Way is pure jazz ambience at its finest,
providing stimulating, yet calm soundscapes. On two
lengthy tracks, Miles, Wayne Shorter, Joe Zawinul,
Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, John McLaughlin,
Dave Holland, and Tony Williams provide
atmospheric solos and magical interaction. This
was almost completely unstructured music, with
Miles painting spontaneously with the broad palette
of talented musicians he assembled. These
sessions were sculpted further by Teo Macero, who
edited the raw sessions into concise, focused
dreamscapes. Four decades has not diminished the
importance of this groundbreaking recording.

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21 Ashra
New Age of Earth
(Caroline)
Guitarist Manuel Gottsching founded Ash Ra Tempel
in 1970 with synth pioneer Klaus Schulze and
Harmut Enke. Schulze left a year later, but on his
own, Gottsching continued plying the spaceways
with synthesizers and his signature echoed electric
guitar. In 1976, the name shortened to just Ashra, he
released New Age of Earth, well in advance of a New
Age category existing in record store bins. Tunes
such as "Sunrain" are driven by energetic rhythmic
sequences, but epic pieces like "Ocean of
Tenderness" and "Deep Distance" are slow floats
through puffy clouds of electronics.

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22 Global Communication
76:14
(Dedicated)
Revisiting the classic mid-70s sound of Tangerine
Dream on this 1997 album, Tom Middleton and Mark
Pritchard inserted just enough contemporary
touches to make this a favorite of the hipsters of the
1990's dance scene as well as nostalgic space
fans. Ticking clocks and sonar pings, filter sweeps
and thick drones duck in and out of unabashedly
electronic timbres and cycling patterns that would
have seemed familiar two decades earlier, but freed
from the excesses of swaggering solos. The tracks
and album itself are named simply for the music's
durations, a surprisingly abstract statement for this
evocative music.

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23 The Orb
The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld
(Island Red)
One of the 1980s British dance scene's most
eclectic characters, Alex Patterson had a love for
punk, dub, world music, progressive rock and
spacemusic and had listened extensively to Eno's
Ambient records as well. As a DJ in chillout rooms in
London clubs, he would integrate older spacemusic
with contemporary dance tunes. This 1991 release
displays a DJ's sense of collage and layering,
combining unlikely samples into surreal
soundscapes. This was a new type of ambient
music, incorporating dance rhythms and absurd
humor, yet ultimately creating the same effect as Eno
and Satie had described: useful music, in this case
designed for chillout rooms where ravers would
relax, talk, sleep or dance, experiencing the music
on several levels. This double album yielded two of
the enduring anthems of the rave/ambient scene:
"Little Fluffy Clouds" built around a sample from a
Rickie Lee Jones interview, and "A Huge Ever
Growing Pulsating Brain that Rules from the Center
of the Ultraworld," featuring the plaintive voice of
Minnie Ripperton, sampled from her hit "Loving You."

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24 Constance Demby
Novus Magnificat
(Hearts of Space)
This 1986 otherworldly opus from Demby has
become a true classic in the new age and
spacemusic frontier appealing to a wide variety of
music lovers. Rooted in worship music in the
western tradition, it's what the liner notes call
"Contemporary Classical Space Music." Imagine a
huge orchestra and choral work as interpreted by a
digital sythesizer. Like Serrie's And the Stars Go With
You, Novus is considered to be a high watermark in
the subgenre of spacemusic.

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25 Peter Gabriel
Passion
(Real World)
After his departure from the rock group Genesis in
the early 1970s, Peter Gabriel began exploring more
cerebral music and incorporating electronic,
avant-garde, and world music into his style.
Throughout the '80s, he also explored other interests
including soundtracks, multimedia projects, and
running his own label, Real World. Passion is the
soundtrack to the Martin Scoresese film The Last
Temptation of Christ, though due to legal
complications, it does not share its title. This
powerful album resulted from Gabriel's fascination
with world and Middle Eastern, Indian and African
sounds. These diverse elements are mixed together
into untraditional atmospheric collages that
somehow sound as if they were always meant to be
combined that way. It would be hard to find someone
working in the organic electronic field who does not
consider Passion one of the greatest achievements
in this genre. Despite scores if imitations, Passion
remains one of the best albums of
ethno-ambient/world fusion music ever made.