Birth: 1974 Bloom: 1991

You can find ambient in slow-paced melodies, which don`t have a distinct tempo or rhythmic pattern and usually typified by repeating the same phrases or chord progressions like it was in classic opuses «Music for Airports» by Brian Eno or Steve Roach`s «Structures from Silence». But mostly ambient is known as massive or light soundscapes and monotonous drones, which often accompanied by improvisations on some instruments (guitar, piano or sitar as in collaboration Brian Eno with Harold Budd or Vidna Obmana with Jeff Pearce), ethnic percussion (in Steve Roach`s albums «Origins» and «Artifacts»), beat (earliest Aphex Twin, The Orb) or natural noises of cities, woods, streaming water, etc.

Brian Eno is said to be the founder of the style, but he was only the first who formed style`s conception and named it. Moreover, ambient was even before Eno, for example, in psychedelic rock from the late 70s as formless guitar improvisations, in electroacoustic music, avant-garde and the `50s-60s minimalism, it was even in various ethnic traditions — singing bowls, Australian didgeridoo, etc.

Generally, ambient doesn`t have any common interpretation, because this term combines music by different musicians, never mind if it is space-, ethno- or tribal-ambient (Klaus Schulze, Steve Roach, Robert Reich, Vidna Obmana, Biosphere, Jonn Serrie, Michael Stearns, Pete Namlook, Alio Die, Klaus Wiese, Mathias Grassow, Carbon Based Lifeforms, Between Interwal and others) or it is a fusion of ambient and industrial (Lustmord, Bad Sector, Coph Nia, Coil and others), or it is experimental forms including lowercase (Asmus Tietchens, Oval) and hybrids of various beat music – techno, house, dub (early Bioshere, Aphex Twin, Autechre, The Orb and others).

Also read: Downtempo, Experimental, Lounge, Ambient House, Lowercase, Ambient Breaks

Deriative styles: Ambient Dub, Berlin School, Chillout, Dark Ambient, Illbient, New Age, Psybient

I like Ambient

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