Essential ’90s Ambient Records

The missing link between the KLF’s Chill Out and the Orb‘s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld, Space kicked off the 1990s with an interstellar ambient journey. Originally intended to be the first Orb album, Space ended up with just KLF member Jimmy Cauty’s contributions, who scrubbed The Orb’s Alex Patterson’s contributions following a fight that caused Cauty to leave the group and focus on his other project, the KLF. This may explain why it’s so minimal compared with the more famous Chill Out, but that’s also part of its charm.

Space takes the listener on a lazy solar system tour, drifting from Mercury to Pluto. With plenty of synth wizardry, Cauty’s record is an extended jam session. Not only are there blissed-out moments of drone but also ’70s synth arpeggios, spaceship sound effects, and dramatic field recordings of fictional astronauts (and a disturbing rendition of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.”) All of which add to the pastiche journey through the kaleidoscopic mysteries of the cosmos.

Cauty summed up the release well in a 1991 interview with Record Collector, describing it as “a record for 14-year-old space cadets to go and take acid for the first time.”

To hear Cauty and Patterson in full flight, turn to the debut album from the Orb, The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld. The 1991 album is a titan among ‘90s ambient releases, and indeed, much like Brian Eno’s Ambient 1 (Music For Airports) did in 1978, it set the blueprint for mellow music to follow.

The Cauty/Patterson track is “A Huge Ever-Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules from The Centre of the Underworld.” Recorded (like Space and Chill Out) live at the KLF’s studio Trancentral, it was essentially an Alex Patterson DJ set combined with additional synthesizers and effects. For ‘90s ambient, it blew the barn doors open and let everyone know that anything goes, as long as it’s trippy and rhythmic.

In an example of parallel evolution, DJ Mixmaster Morris was, like Alex Patterson, also combining a variety of trippy music into a heady new whole. As the DJ for The Shamen and at clubs like Heaven (where Patterson also had a residence), Morris perfected a kind of aural psilocybin. 

Flying High, his debut full-length statement, dropped on hardcore techno label Rising High Records in 1992. Unrelentingly psychedelic yet consistently rhythmic, the album unfailingly lives up to its name. Despite releases in the U.K. and the U.S. (on Instinct) with there even being a VHS version of the album on Telstar Video Entertainment, it remains criminally unknown. Seek and ye shall be mind blown.

One way that ambient music reached new listeners was through compilations. One of the more significant comps of the time was Ambient Dub Volume 1: The Big Chill from Beyond Records.

Ambient Dub Volume 1 gave the world its first taste of Original Rockers, Banco De Gaia, and The Higher Intelligence Agency, three groups that would go on to release essential albums in their own right. Ambient Dub Volume 1 makes a solid listen on its own, though, packed with groovy cuts just rhythmic enough to keep your head nodding on the way home from the party and chill enough to help ease you back down to earth.

San Francisco’s Silent Records pivoted in the early ‘90s from noise to ambient. Working under the Fripp & Eno-inspired name, Heavenly Music Corporation, label head Kim Cascone dropped In A Garden Of Eden in 1993. It saw Cascone creating floaty and soothing ambient in a more classic ambient vein, almost kosmische at times, with assistance from ambient legend Steve Roach on didgeridoo. 

UK label Astral Industries put out a slightly truncated EP version of In A Garden Of Eden in 2018 on vinyl, a welcome move for people hunting for this quiet gem.

In 1994, Global Communication released their masterpiece, 76:14. However, the real album to track down is Pentamerous Metamorphosis, first released in late 1993. Technically a remix album, its full title is the mind-bogglingly unwieldy Chapterhouse Retranslated by Global Communication – Blood Music: Pentamerous Metamorphosis. 

The original Chapterhouse record is solid, but GC’s reworking is masterful. A stepping stone between their ambient thrash project Reload and the smoother tracks of 76:14, it’s a gorgeous concoction of sweeping synths, heart-tugging melodies, pre-IDM beats, and the occasional Chapterhouse sample for good measure.

Finally living up to the title’s promise, Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II loses the beats of the first album, Selected Ambient Works 85-92, in favor of three slabs of eerie, soundscape-impregnated vinyl. Aphex Twin was not the household name then that he is now, though his reputation as a boundary-pusher was growing. Woe to those who didn’t get the memo and bought SAW II expecting Brian Eno-style soothing listening.

Instead, most of SAW II feels like a soundtrack to the space between wakefulness and sleep. Equally as unsettling as it is dreamy, each of the record’s 20-plus tracks manage to be distinct vignettes and fit the cold, rusty vibe of the album cover. 

Selected Ambient Works Volume II was recognized as important — it sold more than 60,000 copies outside the US in its first year alone — and its accolades have only grown over time. This year, Warp Records (also a treasure trove of heady electronic music) is releasing several 30th-anniversary re-release packages. All, however, contain the same gorgeous, challenging, genre-defying, and thought-provoking music.

Substrata, released in 1997, might be Biosphere’s best-known ambient album, but it’s 1994’s Patashnik where everything first came together. The artist, born and raised inside the Arctic Circle in Norway, was a member of synth trio Bel Canto in the 1980s and later issued bleep techno as (shocker) Bleep before buying a sampler and reconfiguring his sound.

The result was Biosphere, a sleek version of ambient house that kept tempos upbeat but lightweight. Patashnik, released on R&S’ ambient sub-label Apollo, saw planets align and reached international audiences thanks to the inclusion of the track “Novelty Waves” in a Levi’s commercial. Moody, spartan, and yes cold, it’s an excellent album devoid of cliches.

The Orb gave the world ambient house. GAS, one of many projects by musician and Kompakt label head Wolfgang Voight, is concerned with ambient techno. Like a muffled, mutant version of techno, it combines a steady (if slightly suppressed) 4/4 kick with ambient-style synth loops and washes. Königsforst, the third album in Voight’s GAS series, makes explicit his attempt to combine nature and the club, named after the park where he experimented with acid as a youth. Streamlined and steamy, it’s like a train ride through a dark, misty forest.

The album has seen multiple versions issued on Mille Plateaux, with all tracks only found together on his 2016 Box album on Kompakt.

By the late 1990s, ambient was on the wane, the original, foundational splash of the Orb feeling very far away. However, Music Has The Right To Children by Scotland’s Boards of Canada arrived in 1998 and upended everything, with a unique and consciously lo-fi sound still being aped more than 25 years later.

Built on two excellent EPs, Twoism and Hi Scores, Music Has The Right To Children combines hip-hop, analog haze, IDM, and ambient. Over the years, the record, perhaps more so than any other record from the scene, has become a staple in the Western canon of contemporary music. The group’s subsequent albums 2002’s Geogaddi, 2005’s The Campfire Headphase, and 2013’s Tomorrow’s Harvest, are all held in similar esteem and explore the territory Children created.

Combining elements of hip-hop, IDM, and ambient, Boards of Canada managed to create their own genre of music. Self-consciously nostalgic for a fuzzy and refracted analog past, it’s just as relevant in our hyper-digital modern world as in 1998 — more so even.