The History of Modern Ambient Music: Part 1 – 1973-1993

Hello friends!  My second video is now up on The Innerspace Connection’s Youtube channel – this is the first of a 2-part series showcasing milestone recordings of modern ambient music.

Here are the highlights of albums recorded between 1973 and 1993, presented in the order of their release.

Or click here for the HD version.

Truckloads of New Music

About two years ago, I picked up nearly one hundred albums worth of dj sets and live material from a few of my favorite artists over the course of the fall.  During the next few years, I cooled my downloading jets and took some time to absorb the material.  Then about a week ago when I had grown tired of the same old thing, I began to investigate the music I had missed.

Around 2007 I was primarily listening to ambient, dream pop, slowcore/sadcore and indie folk music.  After four years, I was worried that each of these genres had nearly disappeared.  It seemed that they had been replaced by innumerable post rock bands and a hundred groups that sound like Arcade Fire.  (Sorry people, I just can’t get into mindie pop.)

Still, I knew that ambient music could not be dead – in 2010 The Black Dog had released the highly acclaimed Music For Real Airports.  It was a contemporary answer to Brian Eno’s genre defining 1978 masterpiece, Music For Airports.  The Black Dog’s album was built from over 200 hours of field recordings, and it was my favorite LP of 2010.  353 copies were pressed, and I got #16.

Low’s Drums and Guns LP from 2007 sustained my faith that slowcore was alive and well but it wasn’t until I visited the Chairkicker website last night that I was struck with the incredible news that April 12th is the release date for Low’s new album, titled C’Mon.  It was recorded in the same church as 2002’s Trust album, so I’m expecting great things.

The 39 second album trailer for C’Mon

Also in 2010, Robert Plant covered two of my favorite Low tracks on his Band of Joy LP.  Both were well-crafted performances and do great justice to the originals.  They’re worth looking up.

I compiled a list of the top 120 artists I was interested in but hadn’t fully explored.  Goldmund, Hammock, Hannu, Helios, Mum and Mus were all in my top 10.  (If you enjoy any of these artists please drop me a line!)  I will listen to each of them in the coming weeks.

I then spent the next 7 days pouring over music blogs to find out what else I missed during this transitional period.  Thanks to the wonder of metadata I found twenty new artists to explore and learned of a micro-genre I had missed in my previous travels.

The first gem I found was a Swedish band called Air France.  They haven’t released a proper album but they have two beefy EPs of catchy chillout tunes that quickly caught my attention.

Here’s a track from their No Way Down EP titled, “Collapsing at your Doorstep.”

Insound laughably described their music as “beach foam pop.”  I found a beautifully sarcastic reply to this statement from the Neogaf forums…

“Let this be a lesson to you, inventing empty terms to describe simple musical styles makes you sound stupid, or ever worse, like a British music journalist.”

Air France appears to be too innocent and not nearly self-conscious enough to fall into the subgenre category I hinted at above – chillwave aka glo-fi.

Chillwave is nothing new, it was the so-called talk of the blogosphere in 2009.  The term was originally coined by Carles of Hipster Runoff and was used interchangably with the term glo-fi or even hypnagogic pop.  Poster bands would include Toro Y Moi, Million Young, Blackbird Blackbird, Memoryhouse, Weird Tapes, Neon Indian, Washed Out, Small Black and Delorean.

If you’ve ever listened to Panda Bear’s Person Pitch or Ariel Pink then you’ve heard the beginnings of the socially shunned sub-genre.

Toro Y Moi – Still Sound

To oversimplify the formula – record ambient psychedelic loops with some needlessly heavy effects and 80s synths, channel it all through a handheld tape recorder and stick a picture of a seagull flying on your album cover.  Perform at SXSW and you’re all set.

As cheesy as it sounds I still like what I’ve found so far.  There’s no shortage of bands offering their EPs for free or next-to-free and Soundcloud is loaded with chillwave mixes.  Even better is the latest incarnation of chillwave – blisscore.  Tanlines, Lemonade and Delorean are great examples.

But who knows… depending on how amazing this new Low album is, I may just tune out for another couple of years.

If you’re feeling particularly bitter and cynical about the whole concept, head over to flavorwire.com and read “How to Start a Chillwave band.”

Generative Music in the palm of your hand

In the 1950s, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop used tape loops to create bizarre sounds for special effects.

In 1964, Terry Riley composed “In C,” the penultimate minimalist composition.  Many would agree that John Cage trumped it a year later with “4’33.”

Steve Reich’s “It’s Gonna Rain” and “Come Out” from 1965 were early experiments with tape loops phase shifting to create a new sound that evolved throughout the piece.

Brian Eno later coined the term “generative music” and has employed it in one way or another in each album he’s released from Discreet Music in 1975 onward.

Three years after Discreet Music, Eno produced Music For Airports, the first self-declared ambient album.  It will forever be my favorite ambient recording.  The album was so compelling that it has been covered in its entirety by Bang on a Can and in 2010, The Black Dog recorded a reinterpretation called Music for Real Airports built from 200 hours of field recording.

If you’re unfamiliar with ‘Airports,’ you can listen to it in my previous post, Elvis on the Radio, Steel Guitar in my Soul.

Since the early 50s technology has transported generative music from engineer’s studios and art installation spaces into our homes and our mobile devices.

In 2008 Brian Eno developed Bloom, a generative music app for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Since then, he developed two similar apps – Trope and Air.

These are unquestionably the greatest apps ever created in the history of mankind.

To quote Eno: “Air is like ‘Music For Airports’ made endless – which is how I always wanted it to be.”

Being that iPods are my personal kryptonite I’ll have to wait for the eventual (read: ‘inevitable’) release of these apps for Android.

Check out Bloom in action.