The Ambient Year (theverge.com)

i've been listening to ambient for years now. i don't find it boring; if anything I find anything with vocals and a beat distracting. there's a lot of forgettable ambient, as expected, but there's also numerous albums that i find moving and emotionally stirring.

some record labels: Touch, Room40, Miasmah, Geographic North, Music from Memory

playlists:

* https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6WPzVhcFhtUo9qKLz7cTcJ?si=...

* https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0HIfTbD7gaDP0rVPqSPNhX?si=...

* https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2dAsXvXqCrCKqzHAqgjgTD?si=...

> In the early days of despair, I looked at Spotify and decided that everything sounded bad. All songs were boring, and I was sick of everything. What that really meant was I was sick of myself.

Wow, what a concise way to articulate an experience I've felt this year. Overall, this piece is dripping in a kind of self-flagellation specific to our year 2020.

Depeche Mode - World In My Eyes (Ambient remix), 7m35s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKQR9zPqoUY

UNSAFE VISUALS!!!

I'm pretty eclectic in my tastes, but my wife is classically trained, but now even learning some jazz theory. After a few minutes of the album by KMRU, I got comments like, "What is that noise", "didn't they get in the piano lesson past hitting C" - as she sung C for about 15 seconds, and "it's the sort of music you play at end of a marriage", "imagine being the lift driver in that elevator". While I argued that you can vary things like timbre and rhythm and not just pitch, I will have to revert back to my headphones or car for such aural excursions.

I can highly recommend The American Dollar band.

https://open.spotify.com/artist/5r4OqYJL7JrtZlffx7FJlb?si=aE...

Cryochamber releases a lot of dark ambient [1], which can be a little too dark and depressing, but occasionally they release albums that transports a listener into snowstorms, space, or dystopian urban futures [2]. Many of the artists are on Youtube and there are also 24 hour streams [3].

[1] https://cryochamber.bandcamp.com/

[2] https://cryochamber.bandcamp.com/album/memory-417 ---- https://cryochamber.bandcamp.com/album/exo

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmF37mEMEDc

A good location for ambient music is the Hearts of Space service. https://v4.hos.com/home

https://v4.hos.com/about/a-brief-profile-of-space-and-ambien...

RIP Harold Budd, one of Eno's contemporaries.

https://www.npr.org/2020/12/10/944962303/harold-budds-music-...

Strangely enough, everybody seems to have forgotten of SEB (https://www.sleepbot.com/ambience/broadcast/).

Something a little less paralyzing (in the ambient music category) from Starfucker this year called Ambient 1: https://starfucker.bandcamp.com/album/ambient-1

Just wanted to plug some of my favorite ambient albums: Ambient for Airports (1 is my favorite, there are four I think.) and The Haxans Cloaks Execution. I don't listen to a lot of ambient, but theyre quite good.