An introduction to Ambient Music

Ambient is relatively rare in that it’s a genre that can be traced back to one artist, and first and foremost, ambient is the creation of Brian Eno.

That said, the broader sensibility – music of moods, of environments, sound as part of quotidian experience – has its forebears, some of which we will discuss shortly. Ambient is also a surprisingly limber, pliable genre, perhaps partly due to its tendency towards the self-effacing and the anonymous. And if ambient is currently experiencing a moment of heightened awareness, that’s partly due to the way it caresses the sensorium and moves toward pleasure, offering calm and refuge from the 21st century storm, and partly due to its aforementioned malleability: we can see ambient cropping up across the musical spectrum, from the cosmic R&B of Solange and King, to the modular electronics of Caterina Barbieri and Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, through to recent micro-movements like chillwave and vaporwave.

A New Age

Enthused by his discovery, Eno would bring a number of other musicians into his orbit as he continued to explore the possibilities of ambient music. Harold Budd, Jon Hassell and Laraaji would all release albums recorded by, and/or in collaboration with, Eno; some of the ideas he was exploring would influence his production of groups like Talking Heads. Laraaji’s Ambient 3: Day Of Radiance was recorded after Eno had encountered the artist busking on electric zither in Washington Square Park; Laraaji would go on to make a number of luscious, benign albums across the following decades. He also intersected with New Age, a genre that ran alongside ambient music for much of the 1980s and beyond, the two feeling like shadow sisters.

New Age certainly shares some of the tonality and pacing of ambient music, and it has gifted the world with some stunning composers – see Joanna Brouk, Pauline Anna Strom and Trans-Millenia Consort, J.D. Emmanuel, and Emerald Web. Framed through its various use values – an accompaniment to meditation; a sound to accompany healing; music for relaxation and contemplation – New Age chimed with a post-countercultural turning to the mystical, the hermetic and the esoteric, a drive toward alternate knowledges and visions of other ways that life could be. While it’s easy to create a caricature of the New Age artist as heavy with the crystals and mantras, it’s also a music that speaks to a desire for guidance out of the confusions of late capitalism. At its very core, New Age is about emotional transformation: not there to be ignored, but rather to become one with, as an aid in spiritual practice.

The Chill Out Room

By the late 1980s, ambient music occupied a complex position within the musical landscape. The genre had established itself to such a point that it could sustain as its own thing – see, for example, the Venture Records catalog, a sub-division of Virgin Records that focused on ambient and electronic music from artists like Hans-Joachim Roedelius (Cluster), Holger Czukay (Can) and David Sylvian (Japan) – but it was also just as likely to exist as part of a broader aesthetic palate. Elements of ambient music, combined with minimalism, systems music, and pop, cropped up in the independent music scene, for example, through the neo-Romantic aesthetic of the 4AD label, and the reverb-laden dream-pop of groups like Dif Juz, This Mortal Coil and Cocteau Twins (the latter even worked with ambient legend Harold Budd).

But ambient’s next, and perhaps most unlikely, extended moment of broader cultural relevance would happen across the late 1980s and early 1990s, as an adjunct to the second Summer Of Love and the explosion of rave culture. This seismic cultural shift, playing out in England in particular, was soundtracked not just by acid house and hardcore, but by what was going down in the chill-out room. For a time there, the dancefloor became a space of musical heterogeneity, where ambient met techno and house – genres informed by the fundamentally black American expressions of dance music. Indeed, the fiercely brittle minimalism of epochal productions by the likes of Cybotron, Jeff Mills, Robert Hood and Phuture makes another significant contribution to the development of ambient house and electronica.

This should come as no surprise, given some of the influences on early techno producers such as Juan Atkins and Derrick May, who had turned their ears towards electronic pop from Europe: Kraftwerk were fundamental to their collective worldview; they also drew from German Krautrock artists like Manuel Göttsching, and English industrial acts Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire. What all of these producers shared was an attention to sonic detail, and a capacity to understand the power and potential of timbre and repetition as fundamental ways to ensnare and enrapture the listener. It’s a relatively small step from the pulsing, synthetic grids of Göttsching’s E2-E4 to the shivery space-textures of early ‘90s ambient/techno producers like The Irresistible Force – techno and house are the through-line, aesthetically, that allowed this development.

But techno and house also offer the soundtrack to the collective dreaming that was rave culture – clubs with walls slick with sweat; tens of thousands of ravers in a field; drugs, depth-charge bass and bleary bonhomie on the dancefloor. Someone had to soundtrack the comedown, and here’s where other influential albums, like Steve Hillage’s Rainbow Dome Musick, would come into play; Hillage recalls walking into a chill-out room to find Alex Paterson of ambient-house legends The Orb DJing his 1979 classic, which was originally recorded for the Rainbow Dome at London’s Festival for Mind-Body-Spirit. Some of the cannier producers of the era would draw on ambient music as one tool in their production arsenal, aerating techno, house, and later jungle, with the blissed-out drifts and voluptuous drone dreams of ambience.

It would also find its way into the charts, thanks to the pop crossover potential of singles like The Grid’s 'Floatation', The Orb’s 'Little Fluffy Clouds' and Primal Scream’s 'Higher Than The Sun'. Perhaps at the pinnacle of this era of music would be Billie Ray Martin’s 4 Ambient Tales, an EP produced by The Grid. Martin had already seen success with electro-pop group Electribe 101, but with 4 Ambient Tales, she found an almost preternaturally sympathetic setting for her dolorous, gorgeously bleak blues plaints.

It’s a startingly effective combination of glossed, gaseous tones, and Martin’s lovelorn sighs. Similarly, One Dove’s Morning Dove White, co-produced by the late Andrew Weatherall, provided a gently psychedelic swirl of ambience and pop for Dot Allison’s mesmeric song mantras. In both cases, the chill-out room became a space for silent contemplation, for reminiscence and reflection.

Seldom Heard Music

One of the more surprising things about ambient music, given its directive to be ‘as ignorable as it is interesting’, is its capacity for nostalgia and longing; to unlock memory, melancholy and deep emotion in the listener. This is something that Eno himself found, when his Ambient 1: Music For Airports was performed by new music ensemble Bang On A Can: ‘When I heard it, I actually had tears in my eyes, and I couldn’t understand why,’ he told Andy Gill back in 1998. We can see this interest in the melancholic and memory-jogging properties of ambient music in recent work by The Caretaker, whose hauntological productions started out as submerged manipulations of ‘30s ballroom pop, or William Basinski’s mammoth Disintegration Loops, a seven-set collection of slowly disappearing micro-motifs, the music disappearing as Basinski’s tape loops corrode and oxidise.

German producer Wolfgang Voigt wanted to capture something else with his mammoth, psychedelic ambient productions as GAS: his intention, as he once told Rob Young, was ‘to crystallise or extract a very individual pop sound that would fit in with the subculture. A part of this vision goes back to the psychedelic drug experiences I made in the late 70s at Königsforst.’ Drawing from these formative memories, Voigt produced a very peculiar, highly compelling, series of albums, where thick, molasses-like drones, sampled from classical and other musics, would slowly unfurl over the muted four-to-the-floor thud of a bass drum. It somehow manages to be both murky and halatial, an elliptical world of sound that’s dense, humid, webs of tree branches giving way to trunks slick with peat and moss, matted organic matter crunching underfoot as you traipse through a forest that unfolds into an eternity.

While the GAS albums were released on German electronica imprint Mille Plateaux, Voigt has used his own label, Kompakt, to launch his Pop Ambient series and aesthetic. Through a long-running series of compilations, he’s captured a particularly lovely sound – a shimmering, lustrous expanse of glittering pop textures that nonetheless hum and vibrate in an aqueous pool of ambience. Voigt started producing in Cologne, a city which, in the nineties, allowed for eclecticism – it was a city of collectivism, where you could move between techno and acid at Kompakt, to electronica and experimentalism at the A-Musik record store, stopping off at the Liquid Sky Cologne nightclub, whose motto, inspired by the artist Dieter Roth, was ‘Selten Gehörte Musik’ – ‘seldom heard music’. Pop Ambient takes off from this openness, and its compelling for the way it enacts rapprochement with multiple genres. Ambient, pop, techno, modern classical, and minimalism all sit alongside each other here, comfortably, as though they were made to be together.

More traditional means are used by artists like Ellen Arkbro, Kali Malone and Sarah Davachi, who all work within frameworks that draw from classical music – for Davachi, that can mean medieval composition; for Malone, it’s about exploring the nuances of the pipe organ in slow-moving waves, allowing melodies to blossom slowly. Similarly, Julia Holter calls upon these and other means to create complex, emotionally riveting song cycles – 2018’s Aviary was a dense thicket of noise and song, where lengthy passages of minimalist movement were disrupted by 'cri de cœur' songs of great power.

There are more critical voices within ambient, too: Terre Thaemlitz uses some elements of ambient composition and processing to produce powerful, lengthy works that address questions of gender, identity, economics and politics. She has also written an essay, The Crisis Of Post-Spectacle “Live” Contemporary Ambient Performance, that perceptively discusses the tensions in performance practices, and understandings of ‘musical codes’, in contemporary ambient production. That this essay was written back in 1997, yet still resonates, suggests that there is still a lot more to learn and reflect upon within the field of ambient music.

In some ways, ambient now is the genre-less genre: it has expanded to absorb electronica, minimalism, contemporary classical, various mutant strains of dance music, post-rock, shoegaze, and more beyond. All of this suggests that a continual reframing of ambient as a set of 'parameters for, or practices of listening' could well be more productive, moving forward, than a simple reconfiguring of the genre’s coordinates. This also allows the music to push further still, to extend its current moment of heightened cultural relevance.

For now, with the plethora of ‘ambient listening rooms’ and clubs, of producers and artists grappling with some of ambient’s still-untapped possibilities, of blogs and reissue labels digging deep to find ambient and New Age esoterica to share with new generations of listeners, ambient’s combination of functionality and supine pleasure has plenty more places still to go.