In Season: Icy Electronic and Ambient Albums for Winter

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.The artist’s sophomore release under the Aphex Twin moniker spans nearly three hours of alien soundscapes as vast and barren as an ice sheet. While many of his other compositions explode with frenzied tempos and rhythmic complexity, the bulk of these originally untitled tracks move like shifting winds, occasionally punctuated by faint rhythmic drips and crunches.

In a career defined by summoning arcane sounds from digital devices, SAW II stands out as one of Aphex Twin’s most inhospitable yet enveloping worlds.

The Ballasted Orchestra captures Texas duo Stars Of The Lid mid-evolution. Here, they stood between two distinct chapters. First, there was the lo-fi guitar drone of their early work such as 1995’s Music for Nitrous Oxide and Gravitational Pull vs. The Desire for an Aquatic Life, which came out the follow year. After Orchestra, the group released and what would eventually become the orchestral ambient of 2001’s The Tired Sounds Of and 2007’s swan song And Their Refinement Of The Decline, the era their most known for today.

Guitars are still the primary instruments here for Brian McBride and Adam Wiltzie, but they’re treated through effects until their tones are unrecognizable. In the opener “Central Texas,” machines buzz loud enough to nearly swallow the occasional scraps of melody that appear. And on songs like “Taphead” and the speculative soundtrack “Music for Twin Peaks Episode #30, Part 2,” they howl and blow like a cold wind across a ground of white noise and static, uninhabitable. 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.

Vancouver, BC musician and sound designer Scott Morgan is prolific. The artist has recorded and released over 20 albums of ambient electronic music under the name Loscil since 1999. However, on only his fourth album, Plume, released in 2006 via Kranky, he sccored a high mark in the catalog.

Morgan draws inspiration from the natural landscapes and ecosystems of the Pacific Northwest, and his albums tend to move with a tidal ebb and flow, and on Plume, an abiding air of cool and damp. Along with gaseous synth pads, Morgan incorporates chilly vibes, xylophone, and electric piano on tracks like melodic highpoint “Chinook,” rhythmic crackles on “Halcyon” and “Zephyr,” and vaporous hiss on “Steam,” creating a series of sometimes frigid but always welcoming environments.

Though experimental post-dubstep producer Burial’s geographic and spiritual home is that of the South London boroughs, his London is a frigid one. It’s a place perpetually plunged into noirish late-night fog and spitting rain — a desolate cityscape with empty streets and litter-filled alleys.

Burial’s tracks are haunted by muffled echos, swirling autotuned vocal samples, and the clicks and clatter of percussion sampled from keys jangling, gravel crunching, and tinny video game gun clip sound effects pulled from Hideo Kojima‘s grim Metal Gear Solid universe. His damp world permeates tracks like “Near Dark,” “Dog Shelter,” “Homeless,” and “In McDonalds,” each evoking a struggle to stay warm — ideally, alongside someone.

Sometimes the title of a work tells you exactly how to interpret it. Even without the guidepost, The Coldest Season from Detroit duo Echospace (presented by Deepchord) reveals itself with clarity. Using analog synthesizers, vintage equipment, and tape echoes, Echospace crafts a Detroit winter techno so deep it borders on ambient. Drifts of white noise and eddies of delay float over sparse, occasional rhythmic pulses. This is Cybotron’s Detroit gone post-apocalyptic ice age, the cosmic cars all silent and buried under snow.

From the snow-frosted gingerbread castle of Schloss Neuschwanstein on the album’s cover to its title referencing a town in the Alpine foothills, Steingarten signals an intentional departure form German producer Pole’s previous series of monochromatic digital dub ambient albums, simply titled 1, 2, 3, and Pole.

Dub is typically associated with heat and humidity, the sweat-drenched atmosphere of Jamaican sound clashes. While there is an undeniable geothermal heft to Pole’s bass tones here, they’re kept under a pristinely frozen surface of digital clicks and cracks, all run through echoes, delays, and the 4-pole filter from which Stefan Betke took the project’s name.

German electronic musician Hendrik Weber began his career in house music before scaling back for his Pantha Du Prince project. By the release of his third record under the alias, Black Noise, in 2010, his sound had fully embraced electro-acoustic dub and dance music. Weber processes instruments like marimbas and bells through chains of digital effects and delays, crafting minimal techno tracks that shimmer with cold, crystalline tones.

On Black Noise, steady pulses anchor the tinkling bells, driving them as they cluster and unfurl into unpredictable melodies. Warmth and burbling bass add depth, but Pantha Du Prince’s signature sound remains clean, icy, and clear. The result evokes the final weeks of winter, when the thaw begins, and the sun finally reappears.

Portland musician Liz Harris of folk-ambient alias Grouper recorded and produced the (as yet) one-off Nivhek project during a residency in the remote Russian city of ​​Murmansk, north of the Arctic Circle. And though the residency actually took place over the arctic summer – when sunlight vanishes for only minutes each night – and incorporated recordings from a previous stint in the temperate Azores, the finished work still manages to evoke wintry feelings of stillness and isolation.

Choral singing, solitary piano notes, and sustained, reverberating bell tones echo along with occasional field recordings of indistinct conversation and outdoor noise. The effect, across two works broken into four movements, is one of extreme, frozen solitude, an eerie trudge through a place suspended in dreamlike time.