Also a huge Eno fan here. Put together, I probably have listened to Music for Airports, Another Green World, Taking Tiger Mountain and Discreet Music more than any other artist. Maybe Philip Glass comes in at a close second.
Anyways, in 2016, Tero Parviainen (@teropa) shared this really cool long-form exploration called "JavaScript Systems Music – Learning Web Audio by Recreating The Works of Steve Reich and Brian Eno" that I enjoyed tremendously (and I don't even like Javascript!)
Thanks for sharing. I've been on a path of algo music with JavaScript (I also do not enjoy JavaScript) and have mostly just guess-and-checked my way through it. I'm going to work through this as my advent of code project.
Yesterday I put up a little dictionary of synth sounds that I'm building out to help me on my journey (https://synthrecipes.org). The goal to be able to export any particular sound in a format for different live coding environments. Sounds are defined in a JSON format like https://synthrecipes.org/recipes/acid-bass.json. I'll open source it today so other can submit sounds.
Music is funny. I played the closed hi-hat sound (https://synthrecipes.org/#closed-hi-hat) a couple of times and my brain instantly started playing AC/DC's, Back in Black. I probably haven't listened to that song in 15 years and now I'm shuffling AC/DC on Spotify.
When you feel bored listening to this sort of music you are already half way to the Alpha state (I heard it called that by Quincy Jones). Go a little further, and when your brain fully disengages you can use the space/quiet/calm to go to new places and come up with some amazing ideas.
>To dig deeper into this style of tape loop ambient music, check out William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops. William Basinski used a similar concept to Brian Eno, only the tapes he used rapidly deteriorated upon playback, causing the musical material to degrade over the length of the recording.
I've never "bought" the story of Disintegration Loops that Basinski tells about its creation. The idea he composed it literally during the 9/11 attacks was just a silly attempt to add gravitas to abstract music. The more you think about it, the more off-putting it becomes. Reminds me of Stockhausen's stupendous remark about 9/11 being "the biggest work of art there has ever been".
In the same vein, tape doesn't normally just deteriorate before your eyes. The gradual change in sound of the loops is more likely due to the guitar pedal chain he was running his loops into (Basinski tends to omit this part of its creation).
I went to see William Basinski 'live' in Liverpool at Yoko Ono's Tung Auditorium. William stood in front of his MacBook, waving his arms like a conductor and drinking red wine.
Halfway through, he said he was tired with travelling and left the stage.
The audience continued to sit there for another hour, staring at the lid of the MacBook that was making the music. When it finished, we applauded the MacBook and left.
Despite being categorically "non-narrative" music, the longevity of both records is almost entirely dependent on these narratives behind them. Ambient 2-4 are musically much more interesting, but the memetic quality of its origin story has given Ambient 1 (and the Basinski record) undue attention over time. Conceptually pure, yes! Sonically compelling, maybe. At least the Eno's approach was novel.
Also, Stockhausen was not entirely wrong. It was insensitive and poorly phrased, but 9/11 is undoubtedly the defining aesthetic image of our time.
One of my first ambient records I bought after I got into Music for Airports by Eno. Still one of my favorites. After those two I got into Stars for the Lid.
This. He was digitizing older works on tapes where the ferrous material starts breaking away from the plastic, literally disintegrating the sound. It's what happens to old tape.
I often use the general algorithm for 2/1 as my "hello world" when I'm building new generative music systems. You don't need too many ingredients to set it up, and it yields some surprisingly decent sounding results.
The most recent one[0] I made was done when I was playing around with Rust, WASM, and WebAudio. (You'll need to press somewhere to start the sound)
This Sonic Pi example really blew my mind when I first heard it. Such a rich sound out of three notes.
use_synth :hollow
with_fx :reverb, mix: 0.7 do
live_loop :note1 do
play choose([:D4,:E4]), attack: 6, release: 6
sleep 8
end
live_loop :note2 do
play choose([:Fs4,:G4]), attack: 4, release: 5
sleep 10
end
live_loop :note3 do
play choose([:A4, :Cs5]), attack: 5, release: 5
sleep 11
end
end
I trained myself to take a power nap to track “2/2” on that record. After a really hard workout, getting cleaned up, having a bite to eat and drifting off for 30 minutes so many times it has a warm spot in my heart. I like that music can serve as “functional”. I also recommend Mindspring Memories if you have nostalgia of the personal computing boom for a unique ambient. To me it evokes what trying out a Phillips CD-i at my local department store felt like in 1991. YMMV
Reading this article makes me want to point out the difference between commercial music software and open source software.
What stands out here was that Eno used very simple sounds and looped them. This was not a complicated rube-goldberg machine he built to finally get to these masterpieces. It was simple recordings of voices, looped.
Reggie Watts makes incredible, and non-traditional, electronic house music, basically just his voice and looping machine (granted he does have a 4 octave range, but...). So organic and human.
This is what makes me a little sad when I play with all the amazing open source tools on Linux. Ardour is great. Hydrogen is great. Sonic-PI is incredible.
But, the UI's are not the best. Getting started requires a ton of reading and researching. It is a long way to just "play" (I mean playing like a child, not playing piano).
For example, I wish Sonic-PI had a better way of writing music than JUST writing out ruby. I like ruby as a language, and I'm surprised there is not a way to easily extend the Sonic-PI tool so I can plugin my Novation drum pad and easily trigger samples and notes. I can absolutely watch for MIDI notes from Novation, and take actions in ruby code, but it kills my creativity to do it that way. I wish I could build a tiny set of buttons that shows me that which is not a stream of logs. I never feel like Sonic-PI puts me into a creative mode. It feels like trying to jam the beauty of a harp into emacs. And, I love emacs.
Open source music software could have bespoke custom UIs for any user. I'm a command line guy so I'm part of the problem. But, these tools should be customizable to make our own bespoke UIs which match the beginner level, or the advance level, or anything in between.
Try jumping into any DAW without "a ton of reading and researching".
Granted, there are hardware drum machines and sequencers that you can "play" with as a completely fresh user, but these tend to be the exception rather than the rule. The newer generation of hardware sequencers (say the Elektron series) are quite impenetrable without spending a significant amount of time learning about what they can do and how to do it.
> Open source music software could have bespoke custom UIs for any user.
from the voice of experience, I'll tell you that this makes user support almost impossible, or at least, extremely difficult and frustrating.
But, when I use open source, I assume user support == "me supporting it". That often means reading the docs, reviewing source code, (and lately, asking claude...)
I'm just saying I want to be permitted to build my own UI, easily. I think that should be front and center in the design decisions. I sheepishly think of Sonic-PI, and how incredibly hard Aaron has been working for years and know he was rightly focused on the backend pieces, which are incredibly complex. I don't think he should do the "UI-only-for-me-and-not-for-thee" work, but maybe as a community we can start doing better about making bespoke UI possible.
You think open source has a UX problem? Try learning to play a guitar. It’s so bad it makes some people’s fingers bleed. People spend years learning how to play and they still say they have a long way to go!
You should check out Andrew and Ben's work, Extempore.
There is definitely a learning curve, but after reading the basics and poking through the examples, you realize you can do anything.
Lots of C libraries have wrappers already written and you can also write your own. I wrote a curl wrapper and pulled live data from sources such as weather APIs, assigned different facets of the data to different instruments and dynamics. You can write GL shaders and generally create your own interfaces.
It's also fully networked with sample-accurate synchronization, so that it's very easy to construct distributed computation and physical interaction. This is where the cyberphysical programming aspect comes into play.
Extempore has support for MIDI devices, and I've really pushed my gear to the limit with it. It is also very low level; you even write your own DSP. But you create libraries over time so that spontaneous jams don't require twenty minutes of fiddling first.
It took a lot of time to feel comfortable in the environment when I first got into it years ago, but with modern agentic IDRs such as Cursor, you should have a much, much easier time. It's great for writing algorithmic music and really great for freeform jam sessions. Lots of built in goodies that will really inspire you.
Drone Zone on SomaFM (free internet radio) was how I discovered a lot of that stuff. Although they don't play the old classics as much these days, it's still good and they have a few similar stations there https://somafm.com/player24/station/dronezone
I recommend Stair (2:22:22) by datassette for focus and ambient background. The artist recorded the sound of downtown Chicago overnight from his hotel and then processed and mixed this together with processed sounds from MS-DOS strategy game soundtracks from the 80s. Brilliant.
Not OP but I also often to listen to ambient while programming. A couple recommendations would be "Music for Nine Post Cards" and other works by Hiroshi Yoshimura, and "Music for 18 musicians" and others by Steve Reich.
In fact, the use of loops described in this article reminded me of what Reich called "phases", basically the same concept of emerging/shifting melodic patterns between different samples.
I'll second Max Richter's Sleep. Timeline by Edith Progue might interest you too. The later is my favorite xcalm down" CD even before Max Richter's, when I'm too restless to sleep.
And maybe Glitch (music) might be of interest as a starting point, especially the "Clicks & Cuts Series" which gave me a lot of pointers to interesting niche artists.
Biosphere - Shenzhou and Cirque, Stars of the Lid - The Tired Sounds of The Stars of the Lid are favorites of mine. I would also include everything by Microstoria which is not ambient but it works to the same end.
A good place for experimental music is ubu web, in fact Brian Eno is also over there[1].
Edit:
Also if you're a programmer and what to learn a new programming language, then check out SuperCollider[2]. You can use that to create your own ambient sounds. SC has a great library for creating user interfaces along with creating sound.
For a good intro the Sleepbot Environmental Broadcast radio is well worth listening to. Also their write up on how and why they produce the broadcast is really interesting.
A lot of great recs in this thread, but I'll a couple others I didn't see listed yet:
Mort Garson: Mother Earth's Plantasia
Hiroshi Yoshimura: Surround
Satoshi Ashikawa: Still Way (Wave Notation 2)
Shameless plug... Search BirdyMusic.com in Spotify/Apple Music/YouTube Music to hear some ambient music algo generated based on realtime Birdnet detections and weather in my backyard.
i have a 5hr playlist on spotify called lost in the sea of ambien which happens to have many of the artist recos here. title is a reference to haruomi hosono who said he got lost in the sea of ambient in the 80s after leaving ymo.
I've never really understood the appeal honestly. I feel it's more of a "masterpiece" in a historical sense, because it was an early electronic / ambient work which no one had really heard before and that gave it a huge cult following. Which is understandable, but outside of that, I don't see how it's any more interesting than basically any other ambient work of which I would say there is much much much better. Robin Guthrie comes to mind...
I don't see it a masterpiece in the same way I see Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" is. The reason? Because I don't think there is a better Jazz album, ever, where as with Eno's early Ambient work, I think it was surpassed very quickly.
That said I'll give it another listen today and see if I can hear the magic.
Eno has been an inspiration for my entire music listening life. U2's Achtung Baby and Zooropa - both of which Eno was a partner in making - came out in my preteens. It's tough for a kid in the rural midwest to find Brian Eno, but as soon as I got to a place with cultural access I was all over his work. And once Pandora and internet radio came out I was able to go deeper and in to contemporary composition and other related genres.
But even with almost 30 years of listening to this stuff, sometimes a really obvious one slips through the cracks.
I hadn't heard of or listened to Tim Hecker until just this year. And oh man, I haven't felt this way about finding a "new" artist in a long time. If you want a good entry point start with his mid-career Ravedeath, 1972 [0] and its companion Dropped Pianos (both of which feature the MIT Piano Drop on the cover) and work forward and backward from there.
Weird - I also listened to ambient music for almost a decade before hearing about Tim Hecker. I have to second the recommendation, although I started in a different place - when I first heard Harmony in Ultraviolet, it was like something clicked into place. Ambient music had been missing something and I hadn't even known it.
I had a similar experience with Abul Mogard. Whoever they really are is a genius of immense soundscapes.
Readit News
Anyways, in 2016, Tero Parviainen (@teropa) shared this really cool long-form exploration called "JavaScript Systems Music – Learning Web Audio by Recreating The Works of Steve Reich and Brian Eno" that I enjoyed tremendously (and I don't even like Javascript!)
Check it out at: https://teropa.info/blog/2016/07/28/javascript-systems-music...
Yesterday I put up a little dictionary of synth sounds that I'm building out to help me on my journey (https://synthrecipes.org). The goal to be able to export any particular sound in a format for different live coding environments. Sounds are defined in a JSON format like https://synthrecipes.org/recipes/acid-bass.json. I'll open source it today so other can submit sounds.
--
Edit: I've open sourced the repo so others can improve existing sounds and add new ones. https://github.com/bradly/synth-recipes/tree/main
Music is funny. I played the closed hi-hat sound (https://synthrecipes.org/#closed-hi-hat) a couple of times and my brain instantly started playing AC/DC's, Back in Black. I probably haven't listened to that song in 15 years and now I'm shuffling AC/DC on Spotify.
Also, the "Sub bass" link might be broken:
https://synthrecipes.org/#Sub-bass
Both are - in my opinion, of course - awesome. Though the Jon Hassel collaboration may take a while to grow on you.
I've never "bought" the story of Disintegration Loops that Basinski tells about its creation. The idea he composed it literally during the 9/11 attacks was just a silly attempt to add gravitas to abstract music. The more you think about it, the more off-putting it becomes. Reminds me of Stockhausen's stupendous remark about 9/11 being "the biggest work of art there has ever been".
In the same vein, tape doesn't normally just deteriorate before your eyes. The gradual change in sound of the loops is more likely due to the guitar pedal chain he was running his loops into (Basinski tends to omit this part of its creation).
Halfway through, he said he was tired with travelling and left the stage.
The audience continued to sit there for another hour, staring at the lid of the MacBook that was making the music. When it finished, we applauded the MacBook and left.
Quite surreal. Very enjoyable though.
Also, Stockhausen was not entirely wrong. It was insensitive and poorly phrased, but 9/11 is undoubtedly the defining aesthetic image of our time.
The most recent one[0] I made was done when I was playing around with Rust, WASM, and WebAudio. (You'll need to press somewhere to start the sound)
0: https://pbat.ch/isorhythms/
This Sonic Pi example really blew my mind when I first heard it. Such a rich sound out of three notes.
What stands out here was that Eno used very simple sounds and looped them. This was not a complicated rube-goldberg machine he built to finally get to these masterpieces. It was simple recordings of voices, looped.
Reggie Watts makes incredible, and non-traditional, electronic house music, basically just his voice and looping machine (granted he does have a 4 octave range, but...). So organic and human.
Same for Matthew Herbert, see his manifesto: https://prruk.org/personal-contract-for-the-composition-of-m.... It is all organic.
This is what makes me a little sad when I play with all the amazing open source tools on Linux. Ardour is great. Hydrogen is great. Sonic-PI is incredible.
But, the UI's are not the best. Getting started requires a ton of reading and researching. It is a long way to just "play" (I mean playing like a child, not playing piano).
For example, I wish Sonic-PI had a better way of writing music than JUST writing out ruby. I like ruby as a language, and I'm surprised there is not a way to easily extend the Sonic-PI tool so I can plugin my Novation drum pad and easily trigger samples and notes. I can absolutely watch for MIDI notes from Novation, and take actions in ruby code, but it kills my creativity to do it that way. I wish I could build a tiny set of buttons that shows me that which is not a stream of logs. I never feel like Sonic-PI puts me into a creative mode. It feels like trying to jam the beauty of a harp into emacs. And, I love emacs.
Open source music software could have bespoke custom UIs for any user. I'm a command line guy so I'm part of the problem. But, these tools should be customizable to make our own bespoke UIs which match the beginner level, or the advance level, or anything in between.
Try jumping into any DAW without "a ton of reading and researching".
Granted, there are hardware drum machines and sequencers that you can "play" with as a completely fresh user, but these tend to be the exception rather than the rule. The newer generation of hardware sequencers (say the Elektron series) are quite impenetrable without spending a significant amount of time learning about what they can do and how to do it.
> Open source music software could have bespoke custom UIs for any user.
from the voice of experience, I'll tell you that this makes user support almost impossible, or at least, extremely difficult and frustrating.
But, when I use open source, I assume user support == "me supporting it". That often means reading the docs, reviewing source code, (and lately, asking claude...)
I'm just saying I want to be permitted to build my own UI, easily. I think that should be front and center in the design decisions. I sheepishly think of Sonic-PI, and how incredibly hard Aaron has been working for years and know he was rightly focused on the backend pieces, which are incredibly complex. I don't think he should do the "UI-only-for-me-and-not-for-thee" work, but maybe as a community we can start doing better about making bespoke UI possible.
There is definitely a learning curve, but after reading the basics and poking through the examples, you realize you can do anything.
Lots of C libraries have wrappers already written and you can also write your own. I wrote a curl wrapper and pulled live data from sources such as weather APIs, assigned different facets of the data to different instruments and dynamics. You can write GL shaders and generally create your own interfaces.
It's also fully networked with sample-accurate synchronization, so that it's very easy to construct distributed computation and physical interaction. This is where the cyberphysical programming aspect comes into play.
Extempore has support for MIDI devices, and I've really pushed my gear to the limit with it. It is also very low level; you even write your own DSP. But you create libraries over time so that spontaneous jams don't require twenty minutes of fiddling first.
It took a lot of time to feel comfortable in the environment when I first got into it years ago, but with modern agentic IDRs such as Cursor, you should have a much, much easier time. It's great for writing algorithmic music and really great for freeform jam sessions. Lots of built in goodies that will really inspire you.
Also it's LISP.
https://extemporelang.github.io/
Me too. Its been a coding zone favourite of mine for many years.
The classical/instrumental version by Bang on a Can [1] is good too.
[1] https://www.discogs.com/release/1140705-Bang-On-A-Can-Brian-...
Another favorite is Eno's Discreet Music. Gives me chills every time. One of my favorite records to fly to.
Sunset Mission by Bohren & Der Club of Gore is very very sleepy Jazz (they have released more albums, but this one is my favorite by a wide margin)
Long Ambients 1 & 2 by Moby - he was kind enough to make them available for download free of charge, too
Under Wires and Search Lights by Marconi Union
In A Silent Way by Miles Davis
Pretty much anything by Sigur Rós. It's not strictly speaking instrumental, but the lyrics are Icelandic, which I don't speak, so it's close enough
Cocteau Twins recorded many very ambient-ish albums. Not instrumental, but the "lyrics" are mostly glossolalia, so not distracting (at least for me).
Ulrich Schnauss - Far Away Trains Passing by Album, particularly the songs "passing by" and "knuddelmous"
Kromattic "song "porcelain"
Peardiver - song "hangout"
lechiffrebeats - song Moonlight Garden
Lori Travel - song "apple lamp"
King of Woolworths - Song "Theydon"
Aisake - song "autumn Leaves"
Christopher Willits - song "wide"
Northscape - song "approaching the trig point"
Kiasmos - song "blurred"
Celer - song "Diphenhydramine"
Tony Anderson - song "Ariana"
East Forest - Album "Music for Mushrooms: A soundtrack for the Psychedelic Practitioner"
If you're on Apple Music, look for the shared playlist Lo-Fi Chill: https://music.apple.com/ca/playlist/lo-fi-chill/pl.1d5ead185...
Actually, check out the whole Ultimae catalogue: https://bandcamp.com/ultimae
https://datassette.bandcamp.com/track/stair-2-22-22
some of the artists below are not strictly speaking ambient as in brian eno kind of ambient
jogging house, r beny, biosphere, anthony childs (surgeon doing ambient), abul mogard, alessandro cortini, alva noto (glitchy ambient), benoit piouliard, bing & ruth, bvdub, mu tate, jake muir, ulla, log et3rnal, space afrika, heurco s, donato dozzy - plays bee mask, imaginary softwoods, jo johnson, koen holtkamp, mountains, kyle bobby dunn, oneohtrix point never, neel, pendant, romeo poirier, domenique dumont, …
In fact, the use of loops described in this article reminded me of what Reich called "phases", basically the same concept of emerging/shifting melodic patterns between different samples.
And maybe Glitch (music) might be of interest as a starting point, especially the "Clicks & Cuts Series" which gave me a lot of pointers to interesting niche artists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clicks_%26_Cuts_Series
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_%28music%29
Edit:
Also if you're a programmer and what to learn a new programming language, then check out SuperCollider[2]. You can use that to create your own ambient sounds. SC has a great library for creating user interfaces along with creating sound.
[1]: https://ubu.com/film/eno_77_interview.html
[2]: https://supercollider.github.io/
There are some great less-well-known artists on there - if you tap the album art it'll link you to their Bandcamp if they have one
https://domeniquedumont.bandcamp.com/
https://marylattimoreharpist.bandcamp.com/
https://archive.org/details/Tipper-CosmAmbientSet
https://williamtyler.bandcamp.com/
None of these artists are strictly ambient though
But if I had to pick one: Stars of the Lid - The Tired Sounds of Start of the Lid
https://woob.bandcamp.com/album/woob-1194
Mort Garson: Mother Earth's Plantasia
Hiroshi Yoshimura: Surround
Satoshi Ashikawa: Still Way (Wave Notation 2)
Shameless plug... Search BirdyMusic.com in Spotify/Apple Music/YouTube Music to hear some ambient music algo generated based on realtime Birdnet detections and weather in my backyard.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGMYnukvmgiXXFxuTKDvZfw-e...
I listen to it while I work.
I know people love Music for Airports but I think it is incredibly boring compared to what Eno did with Bowie.
Beyond that the first few albums by The Orb are top notch.
Balam Acab - See Birds and Wander/Wonder are incredible.
https://marsenjules.bandcamp.com/
https://echoes.org/
Dead Comment
I don't see it a masterpiece in the same way I see Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" is. The reason? Because I don't think there is a better Jazz album, ever, where as with Eno's early Ambient work, I think it was surpassed very quickly.
That said I'll give it another listen today and see if I can hear the magic.
Am I missing something?
If Guthrie does it for you (with or without Elizabeth Fraser?) perhaps The White Arcades also fits the bill, it's a Guthrie, Eno, Budd collaboration.
One thing to admire about Eno is just how deeply and broadly connected he was as an engineer and contributor to so many artists and albums.
David Bowie owes much to Fripp, Eno, Belew, ... etc.
But even with almost 30 years of listening to this stuff, sometimes a really obvious one slips through the cracks.
I hadn't heard of or listened to Tim Hecker until just this year. And oh man, I haven't felt this way about finding a "new" artist in a long time. If you want a good entry point start with his mid-career Ravedeath, 1972 [0] and its companion Dropped Pianos (both of which feature the MIT Piano Drop on the cover) and work forward and backward from there.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravedeath,_1972
I had a similar experience with Abul Mogard. Whoever they really are is a genius of immense soundscapes.