I don’t quite remember when I started listening to ambient music. I do however remember the first ambient record that first caught my attention; it was Brian Eno’s 1978 release Music for Airports, often referred to as the first true “ambient” album that was created to be as ignorable as it was interesting. For me, ambient music is a soundtrack for thinking. The music allows my headphones to function as four walls that keep me focused and in a state of motion.
Sometimes I like to write down my thoughts on a topic while I’m falling asleep. It’s not rare for the pen to fall out of my hands between sentences and it’s always kind of interesting to see in the morning what I wrote down the night before.
Ambient music is like air. It’s like shadows in an empty room. It’s like wind chimes you hear instead of the wind. (Interesting thought: what is the wind?) It’s like ripples in a pond but you missed the part where something fell in the water. It’s like a whale’s song, hauntingly purposeful but impossible to translate. For me it is thinking music. Music that can exist within and without ‘living space.’ It’s like a soundtrack to cathedral dreams.”
I think I wax obscure when I’m asleep.
So, here’s a mix of some of my favorite ambient/drone tunes. This is by no means a survey of particularly important tracks in the genre overall; merely some that I enjoy.