August 11, 2004

A comprehensive guide to ambient music An excellent site with sound clips and reviews. Try Harold Budd, David Sylvian (of Japan) especially Gone to Earth, Jah Wobble, Ryuichi Sakamoto etc. Otherwise known as 6 degrees of Eno.

This site has been around for ages, since I started surfing at least, but google says it hasn't been posted to meta or monkeyfilter yet.

posted by calimehtar 20 years ago
  • Interesting. Having just become acquainted with internet radio, I find myself pumping ambient and trance around the apartment for as many hours as I can stand (about 8 of 24) and had just dug through some of the various subgenres on wiki to try to trace its roots and learn to differentiate the types. Nice resource.
  • Check out the wikipedia entry. I've been working my way through Brian Eno's discography (its frickin' huge!) the past few months in rough order, just got Apollo the other day.
  • That's the page where I started! I
  • hey, what the...?! the preview had that right! well, I guess that's just my 3/4 cents.
  • A good sort of primer set for ambient is A Brief History of Ambient in case anyone was wondering. I have three volumes (2 CDs each) but I don't know if any more were produced after the mid-90's. I can also recommend Narcosis - A Dark Ambient Compilation, for the more moody amongst you. No link available - the original publisher is Nova Tekk Records, a German company with a very German site.
  • Man -- I thought I was an ambient expert.. WRONG!
  • You young people with your "ambient" ... I call it furniture music. I also note that a net search for "The listener is helpless before boredom" produces nothing. Stupid internet.
  • This went straight to the blog. Nice find.
  • Can I just say- I love David Sylvian. There, now you all know my dark secret.
  • Hey, cool! I built some neat webby stuff with sleepbot's master, Dan, back in the day. He has a bunch of other neat stuff up there, but hasn't added anything for YEARS now, silly man. In particular, please note the excellent Morgan's tarot, which I first saw as b/w transparent gifs over Netscape default grey sometime around '95 (?) Music fanciers may wish to click the flashing ACK at his slightly-hidden Drummond Base. I wish and hope Dan picks up steam again - he does neat things.
  • Ah, Morgan's Tarot! A full-out hippie gave me a deck she had been using in the early 70s (thank you, wherever you are), and I spent several years shuffling and laying out those cards. When the originals began to get a bit frayed, I got another several years ago, but it doesn't seem to have the same mojo. I'd be hard pressed to pick my favorite card, but I do have my own, The Path. And, though the intro to the site is way serious, the card description is juist hippy-dippy enough.
  • *quotes self* I also note that a net search for "The listener is helpless before boredom" produces nothing. Better result now!