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Ranked list

The 10 Best Ambient Albums

Ambient in the working sense rather than the marketing one: music built to be lived in as much as listened to, from Eno's original proposition through the Japanese environmental school, the British chill-out rooms, the FAX and Chain Reaction lineages, ambient techno, and the processed drone that followed. Records with a pulse are admitted where the pulse is weather rather than instruction. Techno, IDM and dub techno are ranked elsewhere and the borders leak. From 1978 to now.

Eno wrote the definition in a sleeve note in 1978 and it has been argued over ever since: music as ignorable as it is interesting. The trouble is that almost nothing on this list is actually ignorable. Substrata is a horror film. Ravedeath is a building falling down slowly. Even Music for Airports, the record that proposed the idea, rewards the attention it claims not to need.

Three histories run through here and for years they barely spoke. One starts with Eno and moves through the American minimalists toward drone and process. One starts in Tokyo around 1982, where a group of composers were writing music for gardens, showrooms and railway stations, and where the phrase environmental music meant something closer to architecture than to relaxation. The third starts in a side room at a rave around 1990, when British DJs needed something for six in the morning and invented a genre by accident.

The Japanese wing was almost unobtainable outside Japan until the reissue programmes of the last decade, which is a fact about distribution rather than about quality, and any list built before about 2017 is missing it. What all three traditions share is patience, and a willingness to let a record be a place rather than a sequence of events.

The ten

  1. Number 1 on The 10 Best Ambient Albums

    Brian Eno — Ambient 1: Music for Airports1979

    № 101 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    Tape loops of different lengths, drifting against each other, written for a terminal and delivered as something closer to grace. It named the category and then set a standard the category has mostly failed to reach.

    Why it is number one

    It was commissioned for an airport terminal, which nobody had asked for and nothing had prepared anyone to want. Eno built it from tape loops of different lengths running against each other, so the phrases drift in and out of alignment and never repeat in the same order. That is the whole method, and it produced something closer to grace than to furniture. Music for Airports did not just invent a category; it set the terms that every record below is still arguing with, including the ones that think they are ignoring it. It tops this list on merit rather than on priority, which is the only reason a 1978 record should ever lead one.

  2. Number 2 on The 10 Best Ambient Albums

    Aphex Twin — Selected Ambient Works 85-921992

    № 1 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    Melody where the tradition expected texture, and a pulse it had not asked for. The hiss is cheap equipment rather than a decision, and thirty years of producers have failed to buy their way to the same warmth.

  3. Number 3 on The 10 Best Ambient Albums

    Biosphere — Substrata1997

    № 41 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    Geir Jenssen records cold and distance and files it as techno. Voices from Twin Peaks, ice underfoot, and an atmosphere so complete it stops being background about four minutes in.

  4. Number 4 on The 10 Best Ambient Albums

    Hiroshi Yoshimura — GREEN1986

    Written for a listener at rest and built from a handful of patient synthesizer figures and birdsong. Yoshimura came out of the Japanese environmental school, where this music was made for gardens and showrooms rather than for records, and it is the gentlest thing on this list without ever being slight.

  5. Number 5 on The 10 Best Ambient Albums

    Tim Hecker — Ravedeath, 19722011

    № 11 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century

    A church organ in Reykjavik, recorded in a day and taken apart for months afterwards. As loud as ambient music gets and still ambient, because the volume is weather rather than aggression.

  6. Number 6 on The 10 Best Ambient Albums

    The KLF — Chill Out1990

    № 9 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    A Gulf Coast road trip that never happened, assembled from pedal steel, sheep, shortwave and Elvis. Drummond and Cauty invented the ambient house album more or less as a prank and produced something genuinely moving.

  7. Number 7 on The 10 Best Ambient Albums

    Midori Takada — Through the Looking Glass1983

    A percussionist alone in a studio with marimba, gongs, ocarina and glass, playing almost everything herself. Minimalism with African and Asian rhythm underneath it, and the most physical record here by a distance.

  8. Number 8 on The 10 Best Ambient Albums

    Global Communication — 76:141994

    № 10 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    Middleton and Pritchard titling tracks by running time, which tells you the temperament, then writing the warmest music the British ambient techno school produced. 14:31 alone would carry the record.

  9. Number 9 on The 10 Best Ambient Albums

    Gas — Pop2000

    № 10 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century

    Voigt walks into the forest with classical loops and a four-four pulse and does not come back. Strings buried under saturation until they arrive as mist, and a kick that works as a heartbeat rather than an instruction.

  10. Number 10 on The 10 Best Ambient Albums

    Aphex Twin — Selected Ambient Works Volume II1994

    № 15 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    Untitled, wordless and genuinely unsettling, and far closer to the tradition's centre than its predecessor. James removed the beats, the names and most of the comfort, and made the record people reach for when they want ambient music to be strange rather than beautiful.

Eleven to twenty

Ranked, and held to the same rules as the ten.

  1. Number 11 on The 10 Best Ambient Albums

    The Orb — The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld1991

    № 2 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    Two hours of samples, weather, Minnie Riperton and jokes. The sprawl that dates its peers is exactly why it still works.

  2. Number 12 on The 10 Best Ambient Albums

    Harold Budd & Brian Eno — The Pearl1984

    № 150 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    Budd plays, Eno treats, neither wins. Soft-focus on the surface and rigorously built underneath.

  3. Number 13 on The 10 Best Ambient Albums

    Fennesz — Endless Summer2001

    № 13 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century

    A guitar through a laptop, finding sunlight where everyone else found noise. Belongs to this list and to IDM equally.

  4. Number 14 on The 10 Best Ambient Albums

    Satoshi Ashikawa — Still Way1982

    The Japanese school at its most severe. Piano and vibraphone placed with enormous care and almost nothing else permitted.

  5. Number 15 on The 10 Best Ambient Albums

    Grouper — Ruins2014

    Voice, piano and a field recorder in Portugal, with rain and frogs left in. The most human record in this field.

  6. Number 16 on The 10 Best Ambient Albums

    Biosphere — Microgravity1991

    № 62 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    Before the ice set in. Ambient techno with tunes and a pulse, and the record Jenssen made his name on.

  7. Number 17 on The 10 Best Ambient Albums

    Kali Malone — The Sacrificial Code2019

    Pipe organ tuned in just intonation and left to do its work. Austere to the point of confrontation, and the strongest recent argument for drone.

  8. Number 18 on The 10 Best Ambient Albums

    Manuel Gottsching — E2-E41984

    № 75 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    An hour of guitar and sequencer in a single take, which then accidentally built a bridge to house music.

  9. Number 19 on The 10 Best Ambient Albums

    Woob — Woob 11941994

    № 95 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 20th Century

    Deep ambient that tells stories rather than setting moods. A cult record that earns the cult.

  10. Number 20 on The 10 Best Ambient Albums

    Stars of the Lid — The Ballasted Orchestra1997

    SCOPE FLAG: drone rather than ambient proper, included because the border is a convention and the list is thinner without them.

Near misses

Records considered and not ranked, with the reason each fell short.

How this list was built

Ten from 201 records considered. The field ran from Eno's first ambient LP to last year's releases and took in the Japanese environmental school, ambient techno, the chill-out rooms, FAX, Chain Reaction and the drone wing, because none of those traditions can be left out of the argument without deciding it in advance.

Selected Ambient Works 85-92 also tops the IDM list. It sits second here because Music for Airports invented the category it would otherwise be leading, and priority of that kind is worth something even when merit is close. Stars of the Lid are drone rather than ambient in the strict sense, and they are ranked anyway because the border between the two is a convention nobody has ever agreed on. The Disintegration Loops is a four-volume sequence rather than a single album, so it cannot be ranked here. That is a limit of the format rules rather than a judgment on the work, and it seemed better to say so than to leave the record unmentioned.

Every ambient record on this site, ranked within its own canon rather than against each other, is on the ambient genre page.

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