Monday, 02. June 2008
Ambient Music Guide
Sitting, listening, chilling. Music for background or foreground. Music for tripping, for relaxing, or for making us uneasy and challenging us with a new perspective. At the start of the third millennium music to chill-out to makes perfect sense. As the Western world becomes faster, more complex, more rife with nervous energy, the joy of listening to instrumental music that expresses both our external environment (both man-made and natural) and our inner spaces (both emotional and mental) is now more popular than at any other time in the history of recorded sound.

Such music has many names: ambient, new age, contemporary instrumental, experimental, spacerock, chillout, ambient techno, ambient trance, mood music, world music, new acoustic music. The protests of some musicians and A&R people notwithstanding, I believe one of these names in particular - ambient - is a perfectly useful signpost for the phenomenon. It points to music across a hugely diverse spectrum: from the gorgeous solo guitar of John Fahey to the environmental techno of Biosphere; from the minimal avant-pop of The Penguin Cafe Orchestra to the chilled-out Celtic ambience of Enya and her clones.

A history of ambient sound - take a short trip through the ambient universe.

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Further Essential releases & key artists with reviews of some of the best albums in the world of ambient, downtempo and chillout spanning the 1960s to the present day.
And of course an Audio Page, where you can listen 24/7 ambient music.

This and more you will find at the Ambient Music Guide - A Guide To Essential Ambient & Downtempo Albums by Mike Watson (aka Mike G)
Category: Music & Voices




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