Ocean of Sound CD??

CD1-01 King Tubby Dub Fi Gwan (3:56)
CD1-02 Herbie Hancock Rain Dance (8:41)
CD1-03 Aphex Twin Analogue Bubblebath I (4:40)
CD1-04 Jon Hassell Empire III (6:58)
CD1-05 Ujang Suryana Sorban Palid (6:16)
CD1-06 Claude Debussy Prélude à l'Aprés-midi d'un Faune (9:37)
CD1-07 Les Baxter Sunken City (2:47)
CD1-08 My Bloody Valentine Loomer (2:36)
CD1-09 Brian Eno Lizard Point (3:59)
CD1-10 Unknown Artist Shunie Omizutori Buddhist Ceremony (6:45)
CD1-11 Vancouver Soundscape, The The Music Of Horns And Whistles (2:08)
CD1-12 Howler Monkeys Untitled (1:26)
CD1-13 Peter Brötzmann Octet Machine Gun (5:58)
CD1-14 Unknown Artist Yanomami Rain Song (3:03)
CD1-15 Harold Budd Bismillahi 'Rrahmani 'Rrahim (4:48)
CD2-01 Miles Davis Black Satin (5:09)
CD2-02 Terry Riley Extract From Poppy Nogood "All Night Flight" (8:09)
CD2-03 Detty Kurnia Coyor Panon (5:36)
CD2-04 Ornette Coleman Virgin Beauty (3:28)
CD2-05 John Zorn & David Toop Chen Pe´ I Pe´ I (2:57)
CD2-06 Paul Schütze Rivers Of Mercury (6:31)
CD2-07 Velvet Underground, The I Heard Her Call My Name (4:32)
CD2-08 Bearded Seals Untitled (2:41)
CD2-09 Holger Czukay & Rolf Dammers Boat - Woman - Song (5:47)
CD2-10 Beach Boys, The Fall Breaks And Back Into Winter (Woody Woodpecker Symphony) (2:02)
CD2-11 African Head Charge African Chant (3:49)
CD2-12 Sun Ra Cosmo Enticement (2:59)
CD2-13 Music Improvisation Company Untitled 3 (6:24)
CD2-14 Deep Listening Band Seven-Up (2:27)
CD2-15 John Cage In A Landscape (6:26)
CD2-16 Erik Satie Vexations (2:57)
CD2-17 Unknown Artist Suikinkutsu Water Chime (2:55)

Quite fitting that the place that clued me into the book in the first place will be the one that will hook me up with it in some form or fashion...thanks everybody!

What would i do without ILM??? Perish the thought...

http://www.robertchristgau.com/get_album.php?id=770

Is there much interest in these compilations these days?

I like to think so but it can be specialized.

A long time since I've played and so part of me is "I hope these are as good as I remember them" and part of me is "I hope they are worth enough that it'd be good to sell them."

By coincidence I was sorting through some stuff earlier today - I went to IKEA, and bought some DRÖNA inserts so I could tidy up - and whilst doing so I found my complete set of Brief History of Ambient CD compilations. Which are tangentially related to Ocean of Sound, or at least they were all part of Virgin's "ambient" series. I need to stack them up next to my Sonic Boom CD-book thing.

Technically they're all obsolete because the music's up on Youtube. Although the compilations were mixed, and the first one cuts out the boring part of "Thru Metamorphic Rock". I remember they were a breath of fresh air at the time - they were pre-Napster etc, so getting hold of a wide range of different music was difficult. It's also nostalgic to think there was a time when ambient compilations were economically viable. Discogs.com is probably the best bet for getting hold of them nowadays. There are tonnes of ambient CD compilations from the 1990s available cheaply.

On a complete tangent I tried to buy Brian Eno's Ambient 4 recently but the only copies on Amazon are (a) £23 (b) used. And yet Airports and Mirrors are still available new, so did On Land go out of print? Was it too popular, or not popular, or what?

CDs aren't reliably in print anymore, even what you'd think were standards like that one! I spent a lot of time in the 90s listening to those 3 Virgin ambient comps (4 if you count Isolationism which I never took to really)

I listened to the following last month. I don't see how YouTube or Spotify are substitutes for these compilations as the sequencing and liner notes play a big part in their value.

A Brief History Of Ambient Volume 1 - 1994 - the first from Virgin's ambient series and feels oddly sequenced and dated. I'd like to here Isolationism but there is similar type comps on Mille Plateaux I'd put in place of that.
Ocean Of Sound - 1996 - essential to accompany the book in my view but also holds together as sequenced compilation.
Crooning On Venus: Ocean Of Sound 2 - 1996 - great compilation, slightly dated by the inclusion of Earthling and Coldcut is a minor criticism.
Sugar And Poison - 1996 - brilliant compilation which has held up to many plays.
Booming On Pluto: Electro For Droids Ocean Of Sound Volume 3 - 1997 - very good if odd mixing.
Guitars On Mars: Ocean Of Sound Volume 4 - 1997 - probably my second favorite after Sugar and Poison.

and also this; Haunted Weather: Music, Silence And Memory from 2004, which is another accompanying CD comp for the Toop book of the same name. This one isn't on Virgin and make more sense with the book in hand.

I remember the liner notes for the first Brief History keep going on about Sven Vath. I don't know why. The first three also had guest spots from bands that were briefly popular at that moment in time but not before and after, e.g. The Grid, Bassomatic, solo William Orbit.

Isolationism is less off-putting than I remember. Apart from "Aphex Airlines" it's surprisingly tuneful. The sequencing occasionally does the whole loud-then-quiet thing in a way that's simultaneously funny and annoying.

I may have mentioned it but the other two compilations from around then that really stood out were Ohm: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music, which had a cool case and was very diverse, and A Storm of Drones, or Swarm of Drones - I can't remember the exact name - which drew a lot from tape music and modern classical.

I got into these 10-15 years after the event thanks to MP3 blogs/soulseek. Can't recall exactly which blogs I might have got them from - maybe Mutant Sounds? - but Simon Reynolds has some good writing on the book and series.

Heard the OOC comp before I read the book, but it had a big influence on me in my 20s, introducing me to various things and helping me join dots (Kevin Martin's Jazz Satellites was another crucial one for me in that regard). It's a much more interesting idea of "ambient" than what we often get, i.e. it's otherworldly, disorienting, full of tension and strangeness.

Read Flutter Echo recently, which really helps put OOC and the Virgin comps into context, i.e. his love of black musics, his interest in ethnographic recordings and environmental sound and so on. He does talk about them a bit,

On a related note, Toop's Black Minimalism playlist can be seen as an extension of the series. https://www.thewire.co.uk/audio/tracks/wire-playlist-black-minimalism