The 10 greatest ambient albums of all time
Soundscapes, dreamscapes and meditative listens from the masters of the art
Ambient music has, in its own quiet way, had a huge impact on contemporary culture. It graces soundtracks, fills Spotify playlists and all the time somehow defies the expectations many have of music. It’s been the bleary-eyed post-rave soundtrack for uncountable party goers as they coast from a hedonistic night into the following day. Ambient music has spawned numerous cult artists and performed many purposes.
Brian Eno, the musician most synonymous with the genre came up with his famous conception of it following an unpleasant accident. He lay in bed recovering as a friend visited him. They put on some harp music and then left with the record on quietly. Too weakened to get up and increase the volume, he listened to it through the rain and background sounds of the street. An idea started to bloom in his mind for a type of music “as ignorable as it is interesting”, that could provide a “tint” to a room.
In essence it would be the ultimate mood music – sound that would create atmosphere and space to think. Countless artists have developed and redefined what ambient music is. This list features 10 of the very greatest.
10. Hiroshi Yoshimura – Green
Japan has over the years produced an extraordinary array of experimental music, from the noisy and abrasive through to a wealth of ambient albums. Hiroshi Yoshimura, who passed away in 2003, created some of the most landmark examples of Japanese new age music.
Often considered to be his finest work, “Green” is a deeply meditative album that combines natural sounds with synth-work over eight compositions that evolve gently to provide truly meditative and soothing atmospheres.
9. William Basinski – Melancholia
When avant-garde tape-smith William Basinski is discussed, it is often his multi-part epic “The Disintegration Loops” that is seen as his defining work. It has a now almost fabled back story, digitising his archive of old tape loops with the physical tape literally disintegrating over time as it passed through the machine, allowing the melodies to gradually die away in their own time.
But outside this storied work, Basinski has many other notable albums. Chiefly among them is Melancholia, an achingly sad record that is built around cycling piano loops and effects that is as haunting as it is engaging. Essential stuff.
8. Tangerine Dream – Phaedra
The German music scene became a hotbed of forward-looking experimentalism in the 1960s and 70s. Cosmic rock and increasingly synth based electronic music abounded.
A band who straddled the sounds coming out of Germany at the time was Tangerine Dream. With Phaedra, they explored more clearly ambient territory. Released in 1974, the album was created primarily using a modular Moog synthesiser, sequencers and a Mellotron.
Featuring three substantive tracks and an outro piece, the album manages to both sound like something of its era and like it’s just been beamed down from space. The record went on to influence a legion of electronic producers and dance acts with its use of synthetic textures.
7. Stars of the Lid – And Their Refinement of The Decline
With “And Their Refinement of the Decline”, Stars of the Lid – a duo consisting of Adam Wiltzie and Brian Mcbride would make their final sonic statement together. It’s a mammoth two-hour double album of slow, atmospheric droning music inflected with modern classical.
Both musicians would go on to create numerous records in other guises, with Wiltzie founding another duo called A Winged Victory for the Sullen. McBride would sadly die in 2024 aged 53. This record will remain as a great musical achievement in a career that featured many of them, and the finest example of the minimal but hard-hitting sound he forged together with Wiltzie as Stars of the Lid.
6. Aphex Twin – Ambient Works Volume II
A mercurial trickster, sonic innovator and reclusive genius – Aphex Twin has had a huge impact on electronic music. Far from existing primarily in the ambient space, he has of course delivered everything from pummelling and glitchy beats to prepared piano pieces in the John Cage mould, and even an EP made with acoustic instruments played by robots.
High up on his list of most celebrated albums however are his two volumes of ambient works. The first volume, while incredible, isn’t strictly speaking an ambient record, being that it is beat driven, albeit with washes of floating ambient sound over the top. With “Ambient Works Volume Two”, the artist known to his mum as Richard D James served up a double set of textural ambient pieces that work as everything from music to work to (our soundtrack while writing this article) to a post club mood to chill to.
5. Tim Hecker – Ravedeath, 1972
Canadian Tim Hecker makes often dark, sometimes tortured and always engaging music that grabs you by the throat and holds you there. While deeply atmospheric in tone, his work often falls far outside the original Eno conception of ambient music. He is one of the true innovators, who has pushed the field into new spaces.
With his 2011 opus “Ravedeath, 1972”, Hecker crafted a beguiling set of tracks that is often considered his finest work to date. Much of the album was recorded in a church in Reykjavík, making extensive use of the establishment’s pipe organ. Recorded by fellow experimentalist Ben Frost, the album has a haunted quality and combines the pipe organ with piano, snatches of guitar, synthetic tones, static and white noise to dizzying effect.
4. Fennesz – Venice
Austrian electronic producer and guitarist Christian Fennesz has been putting out records for nearly three decades at this point. His solo releases often come years apart, but he has collaborated with everyone from the late great Ryuichi Sakomoto to Jim O’Rourke.
With his 2004 album “Venice,” Fennesz struck pure gold. His soundscapes are both highly engaging and hang in the atmosphere. They’re warm and intriguing and his use of guitar, particularly the acoustic that opens the album lends surprising dimensions to the compositions. In places the electronic elements are almost glitchy, an aesthetic not regularly associated with the ambient field, but he brings his own singular spin and set of influences on this classic release.
3. Steve Roach – Structures from Silence
With the 1984 release of “Structures from Silence”, California native Steve Roach created a truly landmark record of the ambient genre. Comprised of three long form pieces that gently evolve over their extended run times, the album has endured – gaining new fans along the way.
Its sound is timeless and in many ways embodies the relaxing or meditative quality many instantly think of when considering the ambient field. While a million miles from an Eno clone, it does have many of the quintessential features of the genre, whereas many of the records on this list have to one degree or another broken away from them.
2. Biosphere – Substrata
If ever an album sounded like the place it was created, it was “Substrata”, the third full length effort by Norwegian artist Geir Jenssen aka Biosphere. He lives in the city of Tromsø within the artic circle. His music is built from icy synth phrases, field recordings and samples that can’t help but conjure up images of snow-capped mountains, glaciers and fjords.
Jenssen has over the course of his lengthy career amassed a formidable discography, but with 1997’s “Substrata” he created what is often considered his magnum opus. It is perfectly composed and embellished by the use of multiple samples from David Lynch and Mark Frost’s classic 90s TV series Twin peaks.
1.Brian Eno – Ambient 1: Music for Airports
With “Ambient 1: Music for Airports”, Eno created the ground zero moment for modern ambient music. Not his first foray into the sound, as he had already produced the classic “Discreet Music”. But with “Ambient 1” Eno cemented his sonic thesis across four tracks that remain essentially static.
Created by playing tape loops of different lengths together, giving the illusion of change through the musical phrases intersecting in different ways across the run time of the pieces – the music perfectly exemplifies Eno’s concept. It spawned a million copies and inspired others to pick up the baton, developing the potential of what ambient music could be.
- Want more great listens? Check out the 10 greatest jazz albums of all time
