Selected Ambient Works, a Thread

C-poots wrote:Avec posting about ambient shit and having the Avec Laudenum avatar (I think it was) was one of the reasons I signed up for the old SOMB.

Aw that’s awesome cpoots. I loved posting about ambient shit with people even though it’s kind of a difficult medium to narrate with words, I think we had a great thread going. I just tried looking to see if the thread was on google to no success, cuz I’m curious what stuff I’ve forgotten over the years.

I feel worlds away from the old avec but there’s still a lot of the same in different aspects (I like more uplifting ambient lately, bordering on new age, source can be generic off of YouTube as long as it gets me to the place I intend to go in my mind).

The only other music site I visit is hipinion and I see they tend to favor a lot of limited release cassette stuff, a bit of it has been good as I’ve sampled it along the way but the market is so saturated it’s hard to find the cream of all those projects that rise to the top. Especially when the album is just posted with no explanation like a tombstone or poster says “sick new album.” I’ve largely given up on downloading music nowadays, it’s just gotten exhausting in my old age when I just want to meditate or deep listen to smooth tones, may as well put Music for Airports on for the hundredth time instead of wasting my time downloading a sub par NY Art students version of such album, limited to 75 copies lol

I have a bunch of music I’ve started but not completed in the drone/ambient vein. Maybe some day I’ll post it up. I prefer the immediacy and connection of being in a band, which I’m in now too.

coyote wrote:may as well put Music for Airports on for the hundredth time instead of wasting my time downloading a sub par NY Art students version of such album, limited to 75 copies lol

this sums up life pretty well

That private elevators sounds good jj thanks for the rec

holy fuck this is immense!!



Kyle Bobby Dunn - Kyle Bobby Dunn and the Infinite Sadness

I've always preferred listening to ambient and ambient-ish works on CD. Like, as opposed to listening on vinyl or to digital files. Is this just me?

Is it the ritual of putting in a CD that gets you? I don't really understand it but maybe this is a thing I just don't know about.

I think that surface noise detracts from a lot of quieter ambient records and that either low bitrates (which can obviously be taken care of) or the stinky speakers/headphones I've always used with my computers and other devices (which can be but has never been taken care of, at least by me) have made for consistently underwhelming experiences. So I really appreciate the clean sound of CDs, here.

coyote wrote:That private elevators sounds good jj thanks for the rec

shit's great

I really love this album.



Essential deep listening for late nights and early mornings.

zappo wrote:I think that surface noise detracts from a lot of quieter ambient records and that either low bitrates (which can obviously be taken care of) or the stinky speakers/headphones I've always used with my computers and other devices (which can be but has never been taken care of, at least by me) have made for consistently underwhelming experiences.  So I really appreciate the clean sound of CDs, here.

Both my CD player and my crappy turntable are quieter than my computer. The hard disk is quiet but I can definitely still hear it spinning along with the fan inside my PC. The comparative silence when it's turned off is significant, to say the least.

chrondog wrote:holy fuck this is immense!!



Kyle Bobby Dunn - Kyle Bobby Dunn and the Infinite Sadness

https://kylebobbydunn.bandcamp.com/album/infinite-sadness

this is one expensive album

damn Kyle, those are some pricey MP3s.

i listened to some of his previous works as well and found them good, but didn't grab me like Infinite Sadness, which just perfectly synthesizes all the elements of tonal ambient that i like.

as a Bandcamp commenter said, "Kyle’s music to me is like a blend of traditional ‘Eno’-type of ambient and classical music related melodies, like Stars of The Lid, A Winged Victory For The Sullen and even a little Hammock maybe."

it's must listen if you like SoTL.

Now playing:

Main | Hz

chrondog wrote:damn Kyle, those are some pricey MP3s.

that dude is so intense irl

not surprised his mp3s are at arm and leg status

I also listened to that, last night. Pretty good. Can be had for much cheaper via Discogs and so forth, if anybody's interested in grabbing one for less than a down payment on a home.

jesus jones wrote:here are some great ambient albums from recent times:

https://privateelevators.bandcamp.com/album/la-looks
private elevators - la looks
sounds like simple drones but deceptively complex, pensive, and kind of mysterious.

https://antlrd.bandcamp.com/album/cherubian
ant'lrd - cherubian
full disclosure - colin is one of my best friends. these are great sunbaked ambient vignettes that offer plenty in either a background or close listening environment.

https://pioulard.bandcamp.com/album/lignin-poise
benoit pioulard - lignin poise
pretty much everything tom meluch does is great. he's a friend and we've toured together, so i'm a bit biased, but you can't really go wrong with his discography, especially the ambient records he's made in the past couple years. this is a new one filled with gorgeous, washy guitar drones.

i'll post more soon

gotta give it up for these guys. benoit piolard in particular has some amazing stuff i want to dive into and that private elevators album looks epic.

check out this bill tonight at Portland's Turn Turn Turn:

Mon. 12/11 Impermanent Presents: I Hate Mondays #3 w/ Benoit Pioulard, Felisha Ledesma, Amulets 8pm $5-$10 sliding
Hyper stellar exhibit of space dust, heavy air and oscillations from some serious players in the NW sound scene.

that's a killer bill

Felisha and Benoit Pioulard had great sets. Felisha's got pretty dark at times, it was cool. running synths through noisy boxes. a bunch of her friends seemed to show up to support her and she was mingling before and after her set. the venue is a bar with a small setup in the corner. i had a veggie chili during the Benoit Pioulard set--super beautiful. i left before Amulets went on because i wanted to go to bed. Thomas was outside in a red beanie smoking.

the bartender is also the show booker and mentioned that he worked with Thomas like 12 years ago. i should figure out who he is.

X-post with the non-existent "Great Museum Exhibits" thread: the Soundtracks exhibit at SFMOMA was an ambient lover's wet dream. There were a few great pieces, such as an 'updated' take of Reich's Pendulum Music, a room full of contraptions that would work together in unexpected patterns to resemble something like Fig 5 era Jackie-O-Motherfucker, a walking sound collage that had hints of Fenn O'Berg, an audible magnetic wave headphone experience that sounds not unlike a dynamic Playthroughs or Lisbon, and a non-ambient-but-still-enjoyable room with multiple projectors showcasing different musicians within a mansion in New York State playing a song together, with speakers arranged in ways that would highlight each musician as you moved around the room. Came home and immediately listened to Fenn O'Berg In Stereo.

Chrono obviously, but anyone else who finds their way out west before the end of Jan I highly recommend.

C-poots wrote:Fenn O'Berg

Now, that's a name I've not heard in a long time. A long time.

undo wrote:I love Pop but I don't have anything left to say about it at this point.

Ever since I made this post I've really gotten back into listening to this regularly. Also I got some new headphones a few months ago and they've worked out really well, except they're tight and after an hour or so they actually start to hurt my ears. But I love the open-ear/cloth-on-ear w/o cans (canless)-style design and the simple cloth padding and the modestly-pleasing and balanced sound. They're far from the most painful ones I've tried on but yeah, I'll just say I hope that the process of Breaking Them In starts to wind down sometime soon.

Anyway, there are deep layers of sound in this album that I don't know if I ever even noticed before now, which is weird because this was never an album I Put On To Ignore, you know what I mean?

Do you guys hear and notice that sound at the end of track one? You'll hear it when there's like 23 seconds left in the track. Please tell me this isn't a glitch on my mp3 copy I don't want to go upack the CDs to check for something like this.

oval - ovalprocess

This album changed my way of looking at what could be music but also how music can come about. I think because Jeremy Boyle went to UIC a few years before me the spirit of deconstructing music as a process to create new forms was all over the place. I heard William Basinski for the first time in my Sound Design 1 class for instance. This album using the glitch as it’s center piece was so revolutionary at the time for me. The process is old now so the idea might seem quaint but this album has a deep emotional quality that is timeless.

JJ, rate this lineup for me:

Mon. 1/8 Impermanent Presents I Hate Mondays #4 Talc, James Victor Yeary, Geological Creep