Essential Ambient Albums: 1978 – Today

The ambient album that started it all. Although ambient music had long existed in various forms, it was Brian Eno’s album series of the same name that widely coined and popularized the term, proposing in its liner notes that “Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.” Whether in an airport or (recommended) home listening, Ambient 1 delivers on that premise with a suite of tracks that pull the listener in and let them drift in equal measure.

Colorful new age icon Laraaji’s breakout album is the stuff of legend: a passing Brian Eno heard the musician busking with a modified zither in NYC’s Washington Square Park and dropped into his case a note inviting him to the studio to record. The result would be the third release in Eno’s landmark Ambient series, with one side a hypnotic, multi-layered polyphony of zither and hammered dulcimer, and the other a more typically muted ambient meditation.

A pioneering woman of early electronic music, Pauline Oliveros coined the term “deep listening” in 1989 to describe a practice meant to “heighten and expand consciousness of sound in as many dimensions of awareness and attentional dynamics as humanly possible.” (In some ways, this feels like a rebuke to Eno’s 1979 “ignorable” proposition a decade earlier.) Oliveros expounded on “deep listening” with an album of the same name recorded with Stuart Dempster and Panaiotis in 1989, as well as with a follow-up credited to the Deep Listening Band, both of which are collected in a 2020 reissue by the Important Records label. The collected works are a double album of stately, deeply immersive ambient music that very much reward attentive listening.

The KLF were started by A&R man and former Echo & the Bunnymen manager Bill Drummond and ex-Brilliant guitarist and Orb co-founder Jimmy Cauty as an insurgent novelty act, making cheeky, sample-plundering proto-mashups – hence the name Kopyright Liberation Front – always with one jaundiced eye on the pop charts. By the turn of the decade, though, these efforts had solidified into some genuine house music anthems on tracks like “3AM Eternal” and “What Time is Love?” But they would also lead the KLF somewhere else: On an imaginary ambient road trip through the American South, with evangelical preachers and Elvis competing for airtime across the radio dial, while the silvery twang of pedal steel guitars, Tuvan throat singing, synthesizers and train horns all drift in and out of the mix. Like many KLF joints, today Chill Out sounds as much like an elaborate prank as it does a compelling work of art, but along with Cauty’s like minded work with the Orb, it repositioned the ambient album for a new generation and a new context.

Either of Richard D. James’ seminal ambient works could make this list, but 1994’s Selected Ambient Works Vol. II takes its stated premise to the most extreme, largely dispensing with the drum machine rhythms and ambient house of “Selected Ambient Works 85-92” for more traditional, though no less inventive, takes on ambient electronic music. Across 24 mostly untitled tracks and nearly three hours of run time, James charts out an immersive series of unique yet interrelated atmospheres and vast, barren ambient landscapes. In a career of summoning alien sounds from digital devices, SAW II remains one of Aphex Twin’s most inhospitable yet enveloping worlds.

Wolfgang Voigt’s long-running GAS alias has, over the course of seven albums and four decades, achieved something almost unheard of in the anonymous world of ambient music: to create and maintain an instantly recognizable and wholly unique sound. Working with samples sourced from vinyl, Voigt smears classical strings and brass – and the crackle from these old records – until they become a hushed, enveloping atmosphere as amorphous as the name GAS might suggest. Floating over a steady bass drum thump, the denatured tones rise and fade, bright swells flickering in and out like shafts of light in the forest that gives Konigsforst its name.

The Disintegration Loops were created by American avant-garde composer William Basinski playing tapes of previous recordings on loops and recording the gradual degradation as the tapes pick up noise and decay and fall apart. Famously completed on 9/11, the album cover features a photo taken at the time by Basinski from his Brooklyn rooftop of the New York City skyline in silhouette and obscured by the clouds of smoke and debris. Basinski dedicated Disintegration Loops to the victims of 9/11, and in the aftermath of that event, the work took on an almost mythical status among ambient music, a rare album whose composition and somber, unraveling effect seemed to capture a historical sense of sadness in real time.

Texas duo Stars of the Lid began as a noisy, lo-fi recording project relying mainly on heavily effects-processed guitars to create desolate ambient drones. But by 2007’s swan song And Their Refinement Of The Decline, collaborators Brian McBride and Adam Wiltzie had begun incorporating muted orchestral elements – cello, clarinet, harp, a children’s choir – into their achingly slow washes and swells of sound. Encompassing elements of minimalism and neoclassical, Stars of the Lid’s spare yet expansive ambient compositions land like the aural equivalent of a Rothko painting slowly growing to encompass the entire room. McBride passed away at the age of 53 in 2023, but Wiltzie continues to make music with A Winged Victory for the Sullen and other projects, and has hinted at the possibility of releasing posthumously completed Stars of the Lid recordings.

As Grouper, and as one-off project NIVHEK, Portland musician Liz Harris records albums that range from lo-fi folk to equally tape-hissing ambient, all primarily made with her voice, guitar, layers and layers of tape, and only occasional piano or other instruments. On 2011’s A I A: Dream Loss, her voice appears in a typical spectral shimmer on tracks like “Dragging the Streets (First Heart Tone),” surrounded by drifting echoes of guitar, but elsewhere voice and other sounds blur together into meditative wordlessness.From uncomplicated arrangements, Harris draws out deeply compelling soundscapes, and Dream Loss plays out, as its title suggests, like a reverie always on the edge of slipping away.

Founded by ex-Killing Joke roadie Alex Paterson and the KLF’s Jimmy Cauty, the Orb’s 1991 debut The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld may be their most historically significant album, helping as it did to establish the subgenre of ambient house and containing their best known track “Little Fluffy Clouds.” And while you could add nearly any album from the Orb’s long and sprawling catalog to this list, their 14th studio album COW / Chill Out, World! might be their purest, easiest-listening ambient effort, a suite of 10 breezily passing, numerically themed tracks that float along on bright, looping samples, field recordings, and nature sounds. The title Chill Out, World! calls back to the Orb’s early kinship to the KLF circa Chill Out and the birth of ambient house, and the album neatly captures the Orb’s playful spirit and their generous lifetime’s contributions to the electronic cannon.