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Comment by gonzalohm | Hacker News Reader

Do you have any recommendations?

Sleep by Max Richter is great (and very long)

Sunset Mission by Bohren & Der Club of Gore is very very sleepy Jazz (they have released more albums, but this one is my favorite by a wide margin)

Long Ambients 1 & 2 by Moby - he was kind enough to make them available for download free of charge, too

Under Wires and Search Lights by Marconi Union

In A Silent Way by Miles Davis

Pretty much anything by Sigur Rós. It's not strictly speaking instrumental, but the lyrics are Icelandic, which I don't speak, so it's close enough

Cocteau Twins recorded many very ambient-ish albums. Not instrumental, but the "lyrics" are mostly glossolalia, so not distracting (at least for me).

Here that is on spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3d3e49rSmge86cU4D4u8mn

No particular order:

Max Richter, John Cage, Tangerine Dreams, Klaus Schulze, Gavin Bryars, Richard Chartier, Asmus Tietchens, Tomaga, Boards of Canada, Stars of the Lid, William Basiniki, Joanna Brouk, Pauline Oliveros ...

I do way too much coding...

> Pauline Oliveros

Yes yes yes! Finally someone who won't make fun of me for listening to Horse Singd from a Cloud.

You should add Laurie Spiegel to your list, something tells me you'd enjoy.

"Deep Listening" by Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster and Panaiotis is also excellent:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U__lpPDTUS4

> Laurie Spiegel

Just listening to "Appalachian Grove I" - Nice, thanks for the tip :thumbsup:

Excellent recs.

If anyone reading this like Bohren & Der Club of Gore, also check out Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble.

And if you vibe with Sigurd Ros, check out Godspeed You! Black Emperor too.

Drone Zone on SomaFM (free internet radio) was how I discovered a lot of that stuff. Although they don't play the old classics as much these days, it's still good and they have a few similar stations there https://somafm.com/player24/station/dronezone

I generally find Deep Space One more appropriate for most of my coding, though I used Drone Zone a lot many years ago.

I've been supporting SomaFM for more than 20 years now, and am so grateful for it. Not just the ambient stuff, but Secret Agent and several others too.

Loscil - First Narrows album is great and was used in the game Osmos.

Ulrich Schnauss - Far Away Trains Passing by Album, particularly the songs "passing by" and "knuddelmous"

Kromattic "song "porcelain"

Peardiver - song "hangout"

lechiffrebeats - song Moonlight Garden

Lori Travel - song "apple lamp"

King of Woolworths - Song "Theydon"

Aisake - song "autumn Leaves"

Christopher Willits - song "wide"

Northscape - song "approaching the trig point"

Kiasmos - song "blurred"

Celer - song "Diphenhydramine"

Tony Anderson - song "Ariana"

East Forest - Album "Music for Mushrooms: A soundtrack for the Psychedelic Practitioner"

If you're on Apple Music, look for the shared playlist Lo-Fi Chill: https://music.apple.com/ca/playlist/lo-fi-chill/pl.1d5ead185...

For me - Aes Dana (Season 5 is still my favorite) and Carbon Based Lifeforms (Hydroponic Garden, World of Sleepers, Interloper).

Actually, check out the whole Ultimae catalogue: https://bandcamp.com/ultimae

Carbon Based Lifeforms are amazing.

Their album World of Sleepers is my favourite from them.

Sadly they peaked pre 2010 and then slowly became average.. Was huge fan on the days and saw them live once and DJ set another time..

I guess I agree (used to be a massive 90's EBM collector together with my ex, though I kind of got out of the loop of EBM end of 00's / start of 10's). Seeing a Woob album from 1994 recommended a few comments below <3 for CBL, I do like the track ~42 degrees.

How we used to find music: go to the record store every week to listen to whatever you couldn't afford, look at P2P networks at people who like similar music as you, and browse their collections. Eventually, use Discogs to search. Or simply talk with other people (at parties, on the internet) who also like the same music.

How we can find music nowadays: Spotify (and such). I mean, seriously. Their suggestions can open you up to a plethora of new artists. If you then look at the top 10, chances are you'll like some of their work. I found a lot of music this way, for all kind of genres. As Valve's Gabe used to say: piracy is a service problem. Though I am not sure Spotify is so good for the artists, given they earn pennies via that.

..and it is still nowhere to getting and downloading and listening 24/7 to every new release (or, well... trying to), using SMB to the NAS (which automatically gets the releases from a scene FTP) and Winamp locally to add some .m3u files.

I recommend Stair (2:22:22) by datassette for focus and ambient background. The artist recorded the sound of downtown Chicago overnight from his hotel and then processed and mixed this together with processed sounds from MS-DOS strategy game soundtracks from the 80s. Brilliant.

https://datassette.bandcamp.com/track/stair-2-22-22

Datassette has a site with mixes, from himself and others, all "intended for listening while ${task} to focus the brain and inspire the mind."

Concerning games, Datassette released a brilliantly beautiful arcade shooter called (Utopia Must Fall)[https://store.steampowered.com/app/2849680/Utopia_Must_Fall/], with lots of retro sounds.

music for programming podcast: https://musicforprogramming.net/latest/

some of the artists below are not strictly speaking ambient as in brian eno kind of ambient

jogging house, r beny, biosphere, anthony childs (surgeon doing ambient), abul mogard, alessandro cortini, alva noto (glitchy ambient), benoit piouliard, bing & ruth, bvdub, mu tate, jake muir, ulla, log et3rnal, space afrika, heurco s, donato dozzy - plays bee mask, imaginary softwoods, jo johnson, koen holtkamp, mountains, kyle bobby dunn, oneohtrix point never, neel, pendant, romeo poirier, domenique dumont, …

Not OP but I also often to listen to ambient while programming. A couple recommendations would be "Music for Nine Post Cards" and other works by Hiroshi Yoshimura, and "Music for 18 musicians" and others by Steve Reich.

In fact, the use of loops described in this article reminded me of what Reich called "phases", basically the same concept of emerging/shifting melodic patterns between different samples.

Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works {85-92,Volume II}.

I'll second Max Richter's Sleep. Timeline by Edith Progue might interest you too. The later is my favorite xcalm down" CD even before Max Richter's, when I'm too restless to sleep.

And maybe Glitch (music) might be of interest as a starting point, especially the "Clicks & Cuts Series" which gave me a lot of pointers to interesting niche artists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clicks_%26_Cuts_Series

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_%28music%29

Biosphere - Shenzhou and Cirque, Stars of the Lid - The Tired Sounds of The Stars of the Lid are favorites of mine. I would also include everything by Microstoria which is not ambient but it works to the same end.

Stars of the Lid are sooooo good, yes! Their entire catalog is amazing.

A good place for experimental music is ubu web, in fact Brian Eno is also over there[1].

Edit:

Also if you're a programmer and what to learn a new programming language, then check out SuperCollider[2]. You can use that to create your own ambient sounds. SC has a great library for creating user interfaces along with creating sound.

[1]: https://ubu.com/film/eno_77_interview.html

[2]: https://supercollider.github.io/

There's also Strudel as a programmatic music composing app: https://strudel.cc/

Which, Claude is better than ChatGPT at generating code for.

My personal favourite for online is noisecraft, for example: https://noisecraft.app/1961

now that is fun to watch :)

I have an 'Ambient Radio' channel on https://ambiph.one, my soundscape generator: https://ambiph.one/?m=1-Ambient+Radio-bf100

There are some great less-well-known artists on there - if you tap the album art it'll link you to their Bandcamp if they have one

https://richardhoughten.bandcamp.com/music

https://domeniquedumont.bandcamp.com/

https://marylattimoreharpist.bandcamp.com/

https://archive.org/details/Tipper-CosmAmbientSet

https://williamtyler.bandcamp.com/

None of these artists are strictly ambient though

I have so many suggestions.

But if I had to pick one: Stars of the Lid - The Tired Sounds of Start of the Lid

Woob 1194 by Woob. Immersive, maybe darker than most would like, but deep and very graphical sound.

https://woob.bandcamp.com/album/woob-1194

For a good intro the Sleepbot Environmental Broadcast radio is well worth listening to. Also their write up on how and why they produce the broadcast is really interesting.

A lot of great recs in this thread, but I'll a couple others I didn't see listed yet:

Mort Garson: Mother Earth's Plantasia

Hiroshi Yoshimura: Surround

Satoshi Ashikawa: Still Way (Wave Notation 2)

Shameless plug... Search BirdyMusic.com in Spotify/Apple Music/YouTube Music to hear some ambient music algo generated based on realtime Birdnet detections and weather in my backyard.

Missing here are Gas (Wolfgang Voigt - Pop might be a good first album) and Oval (94diskont is my favorite)

Here's a playlist list of long-form ambient drone stuff I've been curating for a couple years now:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGMYnukvmgiXXFxuTKDvZfw-e...

I listen to it while I work.

The best is the instrumentals on David Bowie's Low IMO.

I know people love Music for Airports but I think it is incredibly boring compared to what Eno did with Bowie.

Beyond that the first few albums by The Orb are top notch.

Balam Acab - See Birds and Wander/Wonder are incredible.

i have a 5hr playlist on spotify called lost in the sea of ambien which happens to have many of the artist recos here. title is a reference to haruomi hosono who said he got lost in the sea of ambient in the 80s after leaving ymo.

If drone with later neoclassical touch then Marsen Jules has delivered very stable and top tier. Brilliant guy.

https://marsenjules.bandcamp.com/

The radio show/podcast Echoes with John DiLeberto is a great way to find new ambient/chill music.

https://echoes.org/

The Dead Texan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zebxXliFtg

Aphex Twin's "Digeridoo" is incredible. It's a 4-song EP so it repeats often, but that's a feature for me.

I've not seen Global Communication mentioned, 76:14 really is masterpiece. (Gamers will recognize a tune featured on GTA IV)

Yeah, everything's interconnected as Tangerine Dream got to work on GTA V soundtrack. There is this note about that track on Wikipedia:

The track "5:23" is included in the 2008 video game Grand Theft Auto IV and appears on the soundtrack album The Music of Grand Theft Auto IV. In the digital release it is listed as "Maiden Voyage". This track is very similar to, but does not credit, the song "Love on a Real Train" by Tangerine Dream from the Risky Business soundtrack. They had remixed the song for a then upcoming Tangerine Dream remix album but had their effort rejected so released it as 5'23 instead.

Hania Rani: Esja.

Hear me out...the sim city soundtracks are excellent

For a more droned style - the works of Abul Mogard