This is may collect user data. Pay no attention at all – the music will heartily, cozily, wrap you up. Sparse and evocative, with occasional punches that reinforce Bridgers’ unpredictability. The effects and filters to which this voice is subject signify the trappings and travails of today’s technological world ~ the distance we now enforce between us for our increasing reliance on machines to communicate, depriving us of face-to-face connection, the nuance of fleeting glance and gesture of hand. All of which is to say, deciding on the best albums of the 20-teens was no easy task. – Sarah Hojsak, Standout Tracks: “Motion Sickness,” “Funeral,” “Scott Street”. SITE NEWS. March 1, 1982 4. Recorded in a two-week burst of inspiration after being denied a visa to tour in the United States, Finnish master Vladislav Delay’s Visa bristles with both anger and the awe of discovery—two things the man himself must have felt with so much free time on his hands following a major disappointment. The Best Ambient Albums of All Time. Everything from hip-hop, ambient and pop, to dubstep, jungle and techno weaved into one another, launching new scenes and trends with albums of forward-thinking sounds. ‘ I Am … This is as ambient as it gets – six lonesome pieces of patient drone that barely develop over run-times that breach ten minutes. It might be a stretch to call the mathy interactions of all these Robert Fripp-like loops “ambient”, but what is at play here is a density of layers that even at their loudest demand nothing: like baroque counterpoint, the voices here flow carelessly towards some unseen beyond, their ecstatic energy not a burst but a soft, slick whisper. He has scored two albums in this list, which is pretty good going as we’ve never actually reviewed any of his releases. Grouper – AIA (2011). The Key covers all local music in Greater Philly and beyond. – AB, Aphex Twin – Selected Ambient Works Volume II A dreamy, bubbling echo of a sadness silent (, ) ebbs into a dread so vital it can only be expressed in the fading away of inner seas (. For Those of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have). Change ), You are commenting using your Facebook account. – J.V. Standout Tracks: “The Joke,” “Party of One,” “Every Time I Hear That Song”, The Drive-By Truckers affiliate had released three solo albums previous to Southeastern, but none were this vulnerable and emotional. Donato Dozzy & Neel’s 2012 album “Voices From The Lake” is a techno-inspired album sure to please those new and aware of ambient music. Cornwall-based Richard D. James has long been both singularly galvanizing and polarizing within electronica. Italy’s Donato Dozzy emerged as ambient music’s loudest new voice... 3. Yet what some might have seen as this crew’s silly wonkery within established electronic music genres was in fact the kind of why-not experimentalism that transformed common work and workers into genius. From the track listing on — song order determined by pie chart, with pictures instead of titles — this is as thorny as ambient gets. And now, without further ado, A Closer Listen presents The Best Ambient Albums of 2010-19! She also helped to carve out a space for female musician-composers at the macho frontier of electronic sound. Our list of the best Black Metal / Ambient albums ever made. Standout Tracks: “Depreston,” “Dead Fox,” “Nobody Really Cares If You Don’t Go To The Party”. Suso Saíz - Nothing Is Objective [Music From Memory] 2. Kathy Carbone (541) 346-5511 Ext. It’s at times orchestral and grand, at others stark and haunting, and almost invariably stunning in its ability to both lull and evoke a sense of eeriness that more rhythmic pop music generally doesn’t accomplish. 327 Yet by A Turn of Breath’s close, entire passages of words have become discernible, completing the soul’s transcendence with the message: we will prevail. Yet even outside of a practical context, Music For Airports is merely such a stunning piece of work that its sounds could soothe the soul under any circumstance. Alex Paterson and Youth had ties to Killing Joke. – J.V. 4. On her sixth album, Carlile channels real-world resignation into musical catharsis that finds the strength to surmount roadblocks both personal and political. Throughout the album, multiplies her skeletal voice into oblivion, reaching a point where the center is lost and every scattered harmony sounds peripherally trapped. (Josh Hughes), Pingback: Best of Decade Lists: Part II – Avant Music News. With shimmering electronic backing and a soaring voice that won’t be denied, Solange Knowles captured complexity, frustrations, and personal power on her third album. Standout Tracks: “Diane Young,” “Unbelievers,” “Ya Hey”. A I A brings the unconscious, present all the way back in music made with furniture, to the fore, all those silences in a world that’s now revealed as fragile as a synapse coming to articulate the most appropriate response: an existential grief intimately laced with the possibility of change. Arriving after a seemingly countless flood of unofficial releases, CD-Rs, cassettes and other assorted material, Emeralds’ Does It Look Like I’m Here? Keith Fullerton Whitman - Playthroughs. Squint really hard and you can even see waves crashing on the shore. Producer Brian Leeds has most notably released music under Huerco S., but two years after his ghostly opus For Those of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have), he re-emerged as Pendant to further splinter the shadowy traces of dying sounds. Ambient music didn’t begin with Tangerine Dream — not exactly, anyway. Standout Tracks: “Alright,” “i,” “King Kunta”, Philadelphia: Home to a rich musical history, a unique musical identity, and one of the nation's most thriving musical communities. Donations from local music fans, like you, are the largest and most reliable source of funding for The Key. Brian Eno - Ambient 4: On Land. Standout Tracks: “I Can Change,” “Dance Yrself Clean,” “Pow Pow”. ‘ Black Skinhead’, 3. Led by the Will Toledo, who falls in with DIY artists like (Sandy) Alex G and Cloud Nothings’ Dylan Baldi, Teens of Denial was ambitious enough to reach outside the devoted cult following Toledo held prior, and pushed the group to critical and popular acclaim. With a single, almost wordless voice dominating and mesmerising, plus reel-to-reel tape and the tentative intrusion of synths and acoustic guitar, he seems to give voice to the human spirit itself, in all its inchoate fragility. But every album here is close to at least one writer’s heart. The record falls under hauntology, which deals with nostalgia more than spooks ~ a different form of haunting. She endlessly loops vocals over themselves (and the occasional piano line), but the natural, fundamentally human ebb and flow of the arrangements bypass any concern of monotony. You listen to ambient music for mood, but there’s no reason why that mood can’t range from pure joy to abject terror, and it very frequently does.