Ambient music
[15] Ambient music did not achieve large commercial success, being criticized as everything from "dolled-up new age, ... to boring and irrelevant technical noodling".
[25] Other composers working with tape recorders became members and collaborators including Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley and Steve Reich.
[26] Many records were released in Europe and the United States of America between the mid-1960s and the mid-1990s that established the conventions of the ambient genre in the anglophone popular music market.
[34] In April 1975, Suzanne Ciani gave two performances on her Buchla synthesizer – one at the WBAI Free music store and one at Phil Niblock's loft.
Eno went on to record 1975's Discreet Music with this in mind, suggesting that it be listened to at "comparatively low levels, even to the extent that it frequently falls below the threshold of audibility",[20] referring to Satie's quote about his musique d'ameublement.
[37] Other contemporaneous musicians creating ambient-style music at the time included Jamaican dub musicians such as King Tubby,[2] Japanese electronic music composers such as Isao Tomita[3][4] and Ryuichi Sakamoto as well as the psychoacoustic soundscapes of Irv Teibel's Environments series, and German experimental bands such as Popol Vuh, Cluster, Kraftwerk, Harmonia, Ash Ra Tempel and Tangerine Dream.
And whereas their intention is to "brighten" the environment by adding stimulus to it (thus supposedly alleviating the tedium of routine tasks and leveling out the natural ups and downs of the body rhythms) Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and a space to think.
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.Eno, who describes himself as a "non-musician", termed his experiments "treatments" rather than traditional performances.
The sixteen-bit Macintosh platform with built-in sound and comparable IBM models would find themselves in studios and homes of musicians and record makers.
She performed all parts on the album, with diverse instrumentation including percussion, marimba, gong, reed organ, bells, ocarina, vibraphone, piano and glass Coca-Cola bottles.
[48] Also in 1988, founding member and director of the San Francisco Tape Music Centre, Pauline Oliveros coined the term "deep listening" after she recorded an album inside a huge underground cistern in Washington which has a 45-second reverberation time.
[50][51] British artists such as Aphex Twin (specifically: Selected Ambient Works Volume II, 1994), Global Communication (76:14, 1994), The Future Sound of London (Lifeforms, 1994, ISDN, 1994), the Black Dog (Temple of Transparent Balls, 1993), Autechre (Incunabula, 1993, Amber, 1994), Boards of Canada, and The KLF's Chill Out, (1990), all took a part in popularising and diversifying ambient music where it was used as a calming respite from the intensity of the hardcore and techno popular at that time.
[53] In the early 2000s, DJs in Ibiza's Café Del Mar began creating ambient house mixes that drew on jazz, classical, Hispanic, and New Age sources.
[54] In 2009, a genre called "chillwave" was invented by the satirical blog Hipster Runoff for music that could already be described with existing labels such as dream pop.
[58] From the early 2010s to present, ambient music gained widespread recognition on YouTube, with uploaded pieces, usually ranging from one to eight hours long, getting over millions of hits.
[5] Acclaimed ambient music of this era (according to Pitchfork magazine) include works by Max Richter, Julianna Barwick, Grouper, William Basinski, Oneohtrix Point Never, and the Caretaker.
[69] After several self-released albums, Buchla composer, producer and performer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith was signed to independent record label Western Vinyl in 2015.
[78] Tracks in the ambient house genre typically feature four-on-the-floor beats, synth pads, and vocal samples integrated in an atmospheric style.
[79] A "typical" ambient industrial work (if there is such a thing) might consist of evolving dissonant harmonies of metallic drones and resonances, extreme low frequency rumbles and machine noises, perhaps supplemented by gongs, percussive rhythms, bullroarers, distorted voices or anything else the artist might care to sample (often processed to the point where the original sample is no longer recognizable).
[80] Ambient pop utilizes the musical experimentation of psychedelia and the repetitive traits of minimalism, krautrock and techno as prevalent influences.
Despite being an extension of dream pop, it is distinguished by its adoption of "contemporary electronic idioms, including sampling, although for the most part live instruments continue to define the sound.
[85] The genre continued to stylistically progress in the 2000s with bands including Sweet Trip, Múm, Broadcast, Dntel and his project the Postal Service.
Populated by a wide assortment of personalities—ranging from older industrial and metal experimentalists (Scorn's Mick Harris, Current 93's David Tibet, Nurse with Wound's Steven Stapleton) to electronic boffins (Kim Cascone/PGR, Psychick Warriors Ov Gaia), Japanese noise artists (K.K.
Dark ambient features toned-down or entirely missing beats with unsettling passages of keyboards, eerie samples, and treated guitar effects.
[97] Subliminal messages are also used in new-age music, and the use of instruments along with sounds of animals (like whales, wolves and eagles) and nature (waterfalls, ocean waves, rain) is also popular.
Flautist Dean Evenson was one of the first musicians to combine peaceful music with the sounds of nature, launching a genre that became popular for massage and yoga.
[99][100][101] Space music ranges from simple to complex sonic textures sometimes lacking conventional melodic, rhythmic, or vocal components,[102][103] generally evoking a sense of "continuum of spatial imagery and emotion",[104] beneficial introspection, deep listening[105] and sensations of floating, cruising or flying.
[106][107] Space music is used by individuals for both background enhancement and foreground listening, often with headphones, to stimulate relaxation, contemplation, inspiration and generally peaceful expansive moods[108] and soundscapes.
[109] Examples of films with soundtracks that feature some, or extensive, usage of ambient music include, Forbidden Planet (1956), THX 1138 (1971),[110] Solaris (1972),[111] Blade Runner (1982),[111] The Thing (1982),[110] Dune (1984),[111] Heathers (1988),[111] Akira (1988),[111] Ghost in the Shell (1995),[110] Titanic (1997),[112] Traffic (2000), Donnie Darko (2001), Solaris (2002), The Passion of the Christ (2004),[113] Pride & Prejudice (2005),[111] Moon (2009),[110] The Social Network (2010),[111] Cosmopolis (2012),[110] Her (2013), Enemy (2013), Drive (2011),[114] Interstellar (2014), Gone Girl (2014),[111] The Revenant (2015), Columbus (2017), Mandy (2018),[115] Annihilation (2018), Ad Astra (2019), Chernobyl (2019)[116] and Dune (2021),[117] among many others.
