Electronic music: ambient/chill

[Delvo]

I'm in the process of discovering a whole "new" (to me) type of music which I think is my favorite and always has been, even though I didn't know its name(s) until recently. It's often very simple musically, and slow and quiet and relaxed, but feels even more so than most of the soft, relaxing music found in most "normal" genres, working on more of a subconsicous/background level instead of being something you really listen to.

I now realize that this is the direction my tastes were always pointing in, given the pattern among my "favorite" pieces by folks like Enya, Enigma, Nelly Furtado (both the original and the new version of her), and Jem... and on anthologies such as "Pure Moods" and the music used by WebTV when you're not at websites with their own sound files... and scattered among movie soundtracks and a few other genres like light jazz piano music or music played on wood (or bone) flutes such as by Peter Phippen. Even one of the recurring musical themes from the old "He-Man" cartoon show, the one that played whenever the characters found themselves in a new, surreal, otherworldly setting, fits here (but the rest of the show's music doesn't, of course). For a non-musical exmple of the mood I'm going for, consider that the one thing I miss about my last computer is a program it had for randomly generating certain sounds from nature, like bugs chirping and wind, thunder, and rain, which I'd play in the background for whole afternoons while I still had that computer, especially if the weather had been too sunny lately.

But it's always seemed to be a hard musical mood to grasp consistently; most of the rest of the music from each of these categories/performers doesn't quite feel the same. But now I think I've found the nexus toward which my tatses in those various kinds of music have been converging all along, the genre that's consistently like what I've always loved about those random, scattered, separate pieces that didn't seem to have a home genre of their own. The names "ambient" and "chill" not only seem to be genre names but are even the names of individual pieces in WebTV's collection, so they were right in front of my face years ago; I just didn't know yet that they were also the names of the genre(s) that they (and a a bunch of other WebTV music selections) represented.

Anyway, now that I realize that there's a bunch of ambient musicians out there and I want more, the problem is where to begin! So far, I know that I like the person or group named "Baked Beans" and the entire CD "Nu-Urban Elektronika" by "Ambient Rhythms" (which I will soon buy), and that I don't like the person/group "Death Ambiet". DA's problem as I see it is lack of smoothness; changes are sometimes too abrupt, or simultaneous parts don't blend together because one's too much louder than the other or they're not on the same beats so the rhythm is disjointed (or absent). Does this make their music "'ambient' (big umbrella category), but not 'chillout' (smaller subcategory of 'ambient')"? What other names should someone who likes Baked Beans and Nu-Urban Elektronika but not Death Ambient look for? I need some recommendations to narrow this field down a bit, at least at first...

[HardScienceFan]

Steve Hillage's Mirror system
System 7 website

[particularly Cloud 11)
Also Brian Eno of course,particularly the album with Jon Hassell

dammit where's my
head these days
TANGERINE DREAM ,particularly Rubycon,Phaedra,Ricochet,Cyclone
Ashra Temple of course
Cluster

[Stenevor]

Boards of Canada - Music Has a Right to Children, Geogaddi, The Campfire Headphase

Have a look on Youtube theres a few videos available

[dustinzgirl]

I have tried to listen to this kind of music like Enya and Enigma, but it just fills me with this urge to destroy things and create chaos. No, really....I don't find it trance inducing at all, just really fracking irritating.

But I do like evenescence and cell dweller.

[Delvo]

Well, those aren't actual ambient or chill musicians; some of their stuff is just as close as I could get before without knowing what I was really looking for. But since your polarity seems to be reversed, maybe if you heard real ambient/chill music, you'd have some kind of schizophrenic break and wake up in a ditch miles away with a nosebleed and several broken bones...

[gully_foyle]

Originally Posted by Stenevor

Boards of Canada - Music Has a Right to Children, Geogaddi, The Campfire Headphase

Have a look on Youtube theres a few videos available

In particular check out the Dayvan Cowboy filmclip at Boards Of Canada - Dayvan Cowboy Music Video - Taken from Trans Canada Highway EP

I didn't know Joe Kittinger was such a great surfer.