1994: The greatest year for Ambient music? Poll and discussion

'94 was definitely my ambient year.

so many great albums.

Now how did I know you'd be the first one to post to this thread? :)

I'll bet that the winner will be....

This has discussed in the FAX thread, but I think that label's legacy has seriously been hurt by the limited prints, which means most of their classic 1990s releases are quite hard to acquire. Even the Ambient World reissues may cost you around 50 euros in the used record market, and after Namlook's death there hasn't been any new reissues, so some of their stuff remains almost impossible to get today. I guess having every album be a 500 or 1000 copy limited edition may have sounded like a cool idea back in the day, but it has also ensured a lot of great ambient albums remain more obscure than they should be. (The ones that have avoided this fate are mostly the albums that were eventually reissued by other labels, like The Fires of Ork.)

Like, Shades of Orion is pretty much the best space trip ambient record of all time, but after I'd foolishly sold my original copy of it, it took me almost 10 years to locate another one for a decent price.

i'm voting for the most obvious option.

Which is?

Tuomas - most of the FAX albums are available digitally on iTunes but I agree its a shame their physical releases are so limited.

yeah, mark g/dog latin ?

oh hang on .. ilm has such a hard on for anything aphex .. i suspect its all about SAWII ..

an album i have never bought.

and tuomas : totally agree re the problems with the FAX catalogue.

i bought 40+ FAX releases in 94, so have quite a lot of the golden era, but even then there were certain releases that were impossible to track down.

Maya, Patashnik, Lifeforms: too many beats to be ambient in my book (IDM?), went with 76:14

The Oval rec is far too abrasive to be ambient imho

I agree that some of these are probably closer to "ambient trance" or "ambient house", but I don't think having beats necessarily disqualifies anything as ambient, as long as the beats aren't too intrusive. (I probably wouldn't have included Maya, though, as it's quite percussive, but it was included in those earlier polls, so I thought someone might not like leaving it out here.) At this point ambient had moved (because of the influence dance music had on it) quite far from its original conception of "floating background music", so a lot of records had beats, and beatless ambient albums were actually in the minority, I think.

(xpost)

Oval is another one that I included because it was in the earlier poll, I've never actually heard it.

of course it's aphex.

not that i've heard 80% of the rest of these tbf.

I've tried listenin to SAWII so many times and it's just too sparse for me and as a result I find it sooooo boring and unengaging. I was going to vote Woob 1194 but picked 76:14 instead.

of course it's aphex.

Why of course?

Too bad Higher Intelligence Agency's Freefloater album was released in 1995 - I bet he wrote it in 1994 though :-)

http://i.imgur.com/LnKPSJI.jpg

oooh .. just been digging around and found another couple of '94 releases that i loved :

astral engineering : chronoglide
futher : further journeys (richard norris !)

lots of jarre esque sci-fi synths, rolling arpeggios, disconnected vocals, deep drones etc.

Shame FAX isn't on Spotify

My most recent 1994 discovery is Solar Quest's Orgship, which I was completely unfamiliar with before. Some choice deep grooves and oceanic synths on that one...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ad7pzt35a9o

Shame FAX isn't on Spotify

Yeah, though I'm not sure if Spotify-style listening is the best for most FAX releases. When I got Ambiant Otaku, I first listened to it on headphones while commuting to work, and it just sounded weak to me. It was only while lying on a sofa and listening through the whole album a proper stereo that I "got" it. I think the same applies to many FAX albums (and to many other ambient records too, of course).

agree.
this is not earplug @ work kinda music.
neighbours have gone away today for 2 weeks on holiday means that i have a perfect situation to rediscover many of these albums properly.

current list of possibles :

FSOL, global comms, irresistible force, spacetime continuum, atom heart, syzygy, tetsu inoue, jonah sharp/laswell.

i never got IF, only IF2, and the same goes for psychonavigation,

Voted for Woob's 1194 without even looking at the rest of the list. Don't need to.

It's weird though, you have all these artists that are very clearly on wildly divergent trajectories and 1994 was like a group photo that caught them all in a moment where they were all in one place.

It's too bad Hoedh - Hymnus just missed from being from this year by two months. Otherwise it's crazy coincidental how almost every act on this list peaked in that year.

The irony of this list is that the Eno may be the most inessential thing he has ever released, a half-assed CD-ROM (!) soundtrack (with Fripp in there, somewhere).

There's a couple of really good records missing (Rapoon, Beherit and Dead Can Dance), and I guess compilations like Ambient 4: Isolationism don't count but I doubt they'd have influenced the results much.

There must have been a particularly great crop of (don't know enough about drugs to finish this joke)

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Mad3DgnofXQ/UNF3kXRw_AI/AAAAAAAAAPo/bqBD3xld1Tw/s1600/eia3b.jpeg

if only for the aphex track (#19), along with the horrid steve fisk track ("GAWWWWWWWWWWWWD has SPOKEN"). and listening to a cassette copy in a friend's subaru, 5 am, parked in a field outside of a Max Creek concert, somewhere in upstate NY. plastic bong, shitty acid, etc.

and, Autechre Amber (1994)

maybe have a dedicated ambient comp thread and keep this for full albums ?

as per tuomas said earlier, a lot of this list is more ambient trance/house based.

of course, my fave form of the sonic mix used to be ambient dub, but not sure what i have in the archive has stood the test of time too well.

i assume "#19" is "Stone in Focus" off SAW II?

yep

there are david sylvian albums which belong in an ambient poll but not this one surely

awesome thread though, which I stand to learn a lot from.

of course, my fave form of the sonic mix used to be ambient dub, but not sure what i have in the archive has stood the test of time too well.

At least this rather aptly titled album has held pretty well, IMO. It's from 1994 too, but I didn't include it on the list, because it's a bit too beat-heavy.

there are david sylvian albums which belong in an ambient poll but not this one surely

I haven't heard that one either, I was just going through Discogs.com list of ambient albums released in 1994 and noticed it, thought I should include it lest someone complains it's missing.

Yeah, "Damage" is pretty hardcore rocking.

Here are some choice cuts from some of the lesser known albums from the list, if you're unfamiliar with them:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4S1z-gIl03A
Air Liquide - Cassiopeia

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1Ki8CAYcPE
Zenith - Electro Dreams

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLAMeAyiyys
Trancemission (aka Leviathan) - Lost Paradise I

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDfiXM_zwhg
Atom Heart - Slow Motion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3WN7uc9YIM
Electro Harmonix - Floating Sync

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmlLfMC3bsU
Syzygy - Dreams of Flying

dug out the syzygy cd today cos of this thread.
still sounds good.

xpost, Just because this is awesome, ambient or no:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmybBX-Go2s

Amber was 1994? Amber it is then.

if only for the aphex track (#19), along with the horrid steve fisk track ("GAWWWWWWWWWWWWD has SPOKEN"). and listening to a cassette copy in a friend's subaru, 5 am, parked in a field outside of a Max Creek concert, somewhere in upstate NY. plastic bong, shitty acid, etc.

― braunld (Lowell N. Behold'n), Tuesday, August 5, 2014 11:25 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yo FYI that Spectrum song is maybe one of the (if not the) best single thing Sonic Boom ever recorded and I'm near posi it's exclusive to this comp (iirc it's just two songs from Soul Kiss (Glide Divine) mixed together)

76:14 is my pick. I first heard GC on Volume 8. The Volume series was my main connection to electronic music and British Indie at the time.

Another Amber write-in here.

can you name some examples? i'd just like to know what else i should listen to!

Tuomas are you also into modern stuff, Ultimae etc?

my first temptations were Air Liquide, From Within, Sun Electric

didn't vote as I didn't feel sufficiently well-listened, but none of those 3 got any votes, so I should've just picked one at random I guess

A lot of this stuff probably would be closer to 76:14 and SAW II if they had had anything close to the level of distribution those albums had at the time. Those both had major label backing and were relatively easy to find. Even back in 1994 when I was actively searching for this sort of stuff I missed out on about half of the stuff in this thread. It was simply too hard to find. Hell, I knew the Fax stuff existed and I wanted to hear it, but I could never get my hands on any.

Yeah, the situation with Fax is unfortunate, but I don't think the same applies to all the albums in this poll. At least the Biosphere and Air Liquide records as well as stuff on Recycle or Die and Mille Plateaux were pretty easy to acquire back then, and you can still get used copies of them cheaply on Amazon or Discogs. IIRC Rising High releases were not particularly hard to find either in 1994, though apparently the Syzygy album has since then become a collector's item, you won't get that one easily. The Irresistible Force album appears to be a bit easier to acquire.

Still, a big difference in marketing push.

i like the beatless tracks on 76:14

Orange seemed hard to find at the time even though shops like Fatcat and Sister Ray were stocking most of the Fax stuff.

there was a shop in leeds that clearly had an 'in' with FAX in '94 as they got loads in.
of course, the shop closed down a few years later, but still.
clearly i was very lucky.

Still, a big difference in marketing push.

Yeah, sometimes I kinda suspect the reason Aphex Twin became the biggest name of this scene is that he and Warp succesfully created this weirdo, eccentric rock star persona for him, while most other electronic producers preferred to be faceless and anonymous. (Hell, I still don't know what Tetsu Inoue or Pete Namlook look like.) Even back in 1994, when his grinning face wasn't yet on album covers and videos, they'd already developed this cult of personality for Aphex, with all the peculiar stories of him buying a tank, composing tracks while lucid dreaming, etc.

Not to belittle his music (personally, I don't like most of it, but I can see why some folks do), but I don't feel like there's some inherently unique/superior quality in it that made it more acclaimed than most others in this poll, so yeah, I guess it must be the marketing. Which of course is all part of the business, and it seems FAX wanted to remain much more obscure with their ultra-limited pressings, so I guess everyone got what they wanted.

otm.

otm

Also, being a London-based ambient producer didn't hurt either.

Aside: thanks to thread for alerting me to things I hadn't ever checked out before.

Yeah me too. Ended up buying Atom Heart's "Orange" and am loving it.

missed this but would have gone for lustmord or sawii. probably for the best, as i haven't heard much of this stuff outside the top 4 and big names (fsol, orb, banco de gaia). digging the tetsu inoue tracks linked.

To answer the thread question, the preceding two years were more about this kind of Ambient thing for me, with ambient events, soundsystems and chill-out rooms being a thing in themselves. '94 was heading towards the end of it in that form really. The idea of pure ambient or sparse abstract ambient techno played for its own sake gave way in chill-out rooms to stuff more anchored in 'downtempo' jazzy, hip-hop reference points. More prominent beats anyway, ambient / artcore jungle as well.

Lots of real big and/or great 90s ambient records obviously came well before 1994; Chill Out, Flying High, Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld, Silence, SAW, a ton more no doubt.

Not to belittle his music (personally, I don't like most of it, but I can see why some folks do), but I don't feel like there's some inherently unique/superior quality in it that made it more acclaimed than most others in this poll, so yeah, I guess it must be the marketing. Which of course is all part of the business, and it seems FAX wanted to remain much more obscure with their ultra-limited pressings, so I guess everyone got what they wanted.

― Tuomas, Tuesday, August 19, 2014 6:50 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Agree that the cult of Aphex served as a huge draw towards his music. It's a lot easier for mainstream media to report on someone with a face and personality than an act that chooses anonymity. But I also think this in itself is a huge part of what makes his work unique.

Not discounting RDJ's distinct way with melody/harmony discernible throughout his work, SAWII is interesting in that it's a pure ambient album made by a not-strictly-ambient artist. If you place SAWII in the context of the rest of his catalogue it's very much an outlier, surrounded by hard techno EPs and experimental electronica on each side. Even with Vol.1, which isn't really ambient at all, he's never released anything else like it and that's what makes it intriguing and different from other records in the genre. The impression is that this is music that had to be made; that flowed out as some kind of self-necessitated subconscious process as opposed to someone sitting down to write an 'ambient record'.

As such it's about as far away from 'chill out' music as an album's likely to get. It doesn't soothe or relax the mind. You couldn't play it in an airport. I feel very specific connections with each track and to listen to the whole thing through can feel almost exhausting due to the range of emotions I end up suffering through. When I was younger and first discovering Aphex I made up my own track titles to the otherwise untitled tracklisting, which were based largely on narratives I'd imagined when listening.

So maybe on a superficial level it's a puffed-up ambient record among a sea of other, perfectly good ambient records, but I'd argue that context plays a huge part in what makes it unique - and that goes for all his work, from the early techno releases up to and including the drill'n'bass and acid stuff he was making in the late 90s/early aughts which is distinguishable from similar music his peers were making.

I think you're right, by 1995 or 1996 many artists in this poll were already heading into other directions, adding breakbeats or samples or electro sounds and other stuff like this into their music. Air Liquide, Atom Heart, The Irresistible Force, Aphex, Global Communication, I don't think any of them did stuff like this after 1994: they'd either went into "downtempo" or ambient jungle, or moved away from ambient music altogether. Biosphere and Namlook and Inoue kept on doing "pure" ambient, but I don't think they were ever as popular as they were at this point?

But 1994 still feels like a peak year for me (just look at all the awesome albums on the list!), kinda like the "last bloom" of post-house ambient. I was actually thinking, though, that I could a similar polls for 1993, maybe other years too, would people be interested in that?

(x-post)

So maybe on a superficial level it's a puffed-up ambient record among a sea of other, perfectly good ambient records, but I'd argue that context plays a huge part in what makes it unique

I still don't understand how the context of the record makes it unique? Okay, he'd never really released a pure ambient album before, but nevertheless he ended up producing a record that sounds like several other ambient albums of the era. Even if his starting point was different than Tetsu Inoue's or Atom Heart's, the end result is not that different, so I don't really get the uniqueness argument.

Maybe we simply have a different approaches to this, maybe it's because I grew up with electronic music and never cared that much about what the producers behind it are like, but to me the impersonality of the music is actually a part of its allure. A lot of ambient like this feels like someone channeling the sounds of nature, the sounds of ocean, the sounds of the universe, and when you get that feeling, the artist himself becomes insignificant. I don't want to know what the person who created the music looks like, what he ate for breakfast, who he last had sex with... If I'd know that it's take aways some of the mystery, the quirks of the music would then be tied to quirks of his personality, instead of feeling like their part of something bigger than just one person.

Despite their goofy name and punny titles ("Bean Me Up Scotty", "The Inbearable Lightness of Bean", etc) their first two albums are really good

the quality of 90s techno directly correlates with the direness of its titles! how many times do i have to say this!!

A lot of ambient like this feels like someone channeling the sounds of nature, the sounds of ocean, the sounds of the universe, and when you get that feeling, the artist himself becomes insignificant.

But that's the nail on the head just there. Whether it's an appealing gambit or not, SAWII is intrinsically inward-looking and tied up with RDJ's very personal reveries, and that's what makes it unique and different to much other ambient music. Electronic music has a tendency to appeal on a macro scale whereas the idea of exploring the internal thoughts and feelings of the auteur is a rock trope. No matter what your preferences might be, the concept of a beatless, vocal-less album that is nevertheless artist-centric has to count as an anomaly.

I don't see how it matters it's "intrinsically inward-looking and tied up with RDJ's very personal reveries", if the end result still is similar to what other artists were doing at the same time? It's abstract instrumental music, there are no lyrics or guides to tell us the tracks are supposed to signify, so it doesn't really matter to me what the artist was thinking when he was composing them, all that matters is what the music sounds like. And to me it sounds well-made, but not unique in any way.

No matter what your preferences might be, the concept of a beatless, vocal-less album that is nevertheless artist-centric has to count as an anomaly.

Sure sure, but again, this anomality isn't a sign of any inherent quality. Antony Rother, who's mostly known for producing hard techno and electro tracks, released a couple of beatless ambient albums on FAX. They're anomalous in his oeuvre, but they don't sound particularly original or imaginative, so I don't rate them very high. Again, when it comes to abstract instrumental music like ambient, I don't care what the artist's history or what lead him into doing this, it's the product that matters.

i think you're right in that it's a matter of listener approach. i appreciate that in most cases with electronic music and dance music it's preferable to be detached from the idea of auteurship - i don't care what car the producer drives when I'm dancing in a club at 3am. That said, I think the experience of listening to music at home in the form of an album can (and often should) be about more than simply the music qua music. That's not to say you can't switch off from SAWII and just enjoy it on a merely textural basis - you absolutely can, and I'm sure even RDJ would prefer that in this case we did. Still, SAWII could be seen as both and electronic suite and a 'rock' album, depending on how much of 'RDJ the person' you're willing to let into your listening experience.

Then again, if it were all about the interesting personality of the artist, surely Paul McCartney's ambient techno record (missed this poll by a hair, released 15 november 1993) would've caused more waves.

xpost what i mean to say is that it's all very well saying 'all that matters is what the music sounds like', but is that really the case? maybe in the case of 90% of ambient/electronic music the ends far outweigh the means. but if you were to apply this to other styles you'd be hard pushed to uncouple the music itself from the concept and backstory surrounding it. if all Western music is made up of 12 tones arranged in different ways you could say that all music is level-pegged and that the outcome is similar no matter what, but of course this isn't true and you'd have to think about things in a highly clinical way if you were to discount absolutely everything other than those 12 tones. blah blah rambling here....

SAW II had a bit of a mixed / sometimes baffled reception at the time didn't it? The sense that it was a bit of a fuckoff / prank similar to the way Metal Machine Machine was received. Not entirely without reason perhaps.

yes indeed. it was seen as 'the first beatless record' which of course isn't true at all, but it did capture the imagination of a cross-genre zeitgeist which might not have been so familiar with the idea of ambient music, (or electronic music at all for that matter).

maybe in the case of 90% of ambient/electronic music the ends far outweigh the means. but if you were to apply this to other styles you'd be hard pushed to uncouple the music itself from the concept and backstory surrounding it.

I don't disagree, but we are talking about electronic music here, and about a specific genre that's almost always instrumental. If a music has vocals and lyrics, then the personality of the performer is almost impossible to put outside the equation, but that's not the case here.

i'm saying that in many ways, this is the case with SAWII, and this is why it's unique within the genre. yes, if it were released by anyone else then maybe it would have been overlooked. however, it wasn't. but all this discussion is leading to, for me, is that i should be checking out and comparing more of the albums in this poll as a matter of urgnecy.

I don't really see how "the story behind the music" is important if the music itself doesn't convey that story in any way. Just listening to SAWII, I have no way of telling whether it was the result of some deep introspection and soul-searching, or whether Aphex just casually toyed with his synths for a few days. I feel knowing the story limits the potential interpretations and meaning I as listener can attach to instrumental music, so I prefer not to care about it.

(xpost)

yeah, you're not forced to by any means and that's the beauty of it. it's utterly down to how much you allow yourself to want to. it's not like i'm thinking about RDJ's breakfast options when I hear SAWII, but I still think about it as a highly introspective collection, a personal outpouring in a similar way to, say, John Lennon's solo outings on Plastic Ono Band. it is a rock album really.

Aside from whether or not you like it there isn't really anything particularly unprecedented about that record is there, so what makes it interesting? Presumably an element of context or happenstance. The context I have for it allows me to picture a lonely synth bloke in a bank vault in Elephant & Castle making some of those tracks.

Well that's kind of the point of ambient, you can project your own thoughts on it much more than with any other music.

SAWII is one of my favorite albums ever & I don't get people who claim it's generic and not unique or interesting. I listen to lots of generic-ass ambient music and none of it comes close to approaching the shapes & sounds & universes that SAWII offers. I mean yeah, there's that one track that sounds like Discreet Music but other than that...??? If you don't get it, I feel sorry for you.

Crut, maybe you could do a better job than I can in verbalising how and why it differs, musically, from other ambient stuff?

Well all music is unique one way or another. I wouldn't call it 'generic' but personally I can't be bothered with a lot of it. I don't think that means I don't get it, just that they are sustained mood / texture pieces that sustain moods and textures I find more boring or irritating than they are useful or edifying or something. There are a couple of nice ones. I think for me it might work better if quite a few of the tracks were shorter vignettes something like On Land or Zukerzeit. Great if it hits a spot for you though!

I guess it's also the singularity of it, there's only one go-to Aphex Twin ambient record and one Global Communication record, while the likes of Namlook and Rapoon were insanely productive, labels like EM:T, Fax, Mille Plateaux, Recycle Or Die and Apollo were churning out ambient by the boatload and even Biosphere, Lustmord, Oliver Lieb and System 7 have a big catalogue.

You also in 1994 had stuff like Raison d'Etre's "Enthralled by the Wind of Loneliness", Steve Roach's "The Dream Circle," and Vidna Obmana's "Revealed by Composed Nature", or Alio Die's "The Door of Possibilities". The early/mid nineties were really fruitful periods for all these artists, too, those are just their 1994 releases.

Lull's "Cold Summer" is also from 1994 I just noticed. O Yuki Conjugate's "Equator" (their best) is from 94 too.

No matter what your preferences might be, the concept of a beatless, vocal-less album that is nevertheless artist-centric has to count as an anomaly.

Well, within the confines of techno ambient perhaps, but dark ambient/ethno ambient stuff from the same time period did that quite a bit? The ambient stuff on Projekt, Hic Sunt Leones, Staalplaat, Cold Meat Industry, Discordia, etc. Raison d'Etre and Alio Die I can pick out in a second, they're absolutely distinctive, but that may just be because I have listened to them a lot. It may all be down to the sampling and other tech that because available (or affordable) at that point in time? If you want to account for just the massive quantity of stuff that got released then. Also coincided with the peaking of the CD as a format.

Speaking of distinctive sounding 1994 ambient, there's always Moëvöt's Ézléýfbdréhtr Vépréùb Zùérfl Màzàgvàtre Érbbédréà.

The problem here is that SAW II is more in like with "experimental"/dark ambient stuff than ambient techno/chill out... main, robert rich, plus one-off limited quantity cassette releases etc

I mean, it doesn't make sense at all to compare this to Global Com or Spacetime Continuum or floaty nu-age ambient electronica. If you 're comparing it to that kind of stuff, of course it stands out.

1993, A Great Year in Ambient Music: Poll and Discussion

Turns out I accidentally included two 1992 albums into that poll, so I posted a corrected thread:

1993, A Great Year in Ambient Music: Poll and Discussion (with a corrected album list)

Ambient pirate radio transmission 1994.

http://www.mixcloud.com/mixmastermorris/mmm-ambient-set-sweet-fm-1994/

Thanks!

I never did the follow-up poll to the 1993 poll that I was supposed to do, maybe I should get back to it... I was gonna do 1992 next, but maybe 1995 would be better first?

I deeply love a few of these (I believe SAW II has the long-standing distinction of being my most-played album in iTunes) but Pomme Fritz is one of my favorite albums ever.

Was really surprised by the low showing of Pomme Fritz, which is a desert island disk for me too for sure. (And if you love that, you should get into Deepchord, if you're not already. Though it's not as joyous.)