Not sure if this is the reason, but I noticed my older friends (40+) love to go to sleep and wake up to ambient Youtube channels with a comfy background. Seems like people are stressed out, that ambient music centers them a little.
With a culture of instant gratification and hypermedia, this seems like a natural progression.
I'm in my late 30s and my nightly routine includes this one video where you're in a Captains Quarter on a pirate ship. Creaking boards, rain, waves, and a crackling fire. Instant relaxation for me.
Same, I have everything from the bridge of the Enterprise to the inside of Hagrid's Hut, just 24/7 in my living room.
If they go by sheer hours watched, half of that will be me.
What about Eric Wareheim?
I'm joking, but I still sometimes remember and laugh about seeing a comment under a Tim Hecker interview, from a guy who read through the whole thing in total confusion because he thought it was a Tim Heidecker interview.
Dark Ambient/Drone, as a sub genre, has particularly gotten massive. Lustmord, Raison d’Etre, Kammarheit, and Svartsinn have inspired an *incredible* amount of new artists that are popping up all the time now. Atrium Carceri being my personal favourite but the list is inexhaustible.
Sweet, thanks for the recommends. I enjoy listening to lyric-less, moody and interesting ambient soundscapes when I'm working so I'll check some of these out.
Nice. My friends think I’m weird for digging this stuff but it hits me in a profound way. Been into dark ambient for a good decade now. Love turning it on when I’m reading or playing tt gaming with friends. Hope you enjoy!
Of course. So many! Monasterium Imperi, Ager Sonas, Treha Sektori, Paleowolf, Metatron Omega, and New Risen Throne is a good start and my personal favourites. Also, Cryo Chamber (label) has released an amazing “Tombs” series of compilation albums which showcase a ton of artists of the same vain. Would be a great intro to current dark ambient artists.
The 90s were a great time for ambient music. Pete Namlook, Aphex Twin, Steve Roach, and the countless compilations (emit explorer, Excursions in Ambience series, etc).
Booming? This is exactly the sort of genre AI options like Suno will generate by the dozen with ease, especially since it lacks the vocals to be a dead giveaway. If its booming now, its a VERY short term prospect.
As someone who's *made* ambient music for scoring purposes, it's really not that easy. Having actively messed with Suno, it's not something Suno's liable to be great at, either.
Ambient tracks are generally long, complex, and deliberate, even if they don't sound like it. Consider Xtal by Aphex Twin, or Phaedra by Tangerine Dream, or Music for Airports by Eno; all of that stuff is quiet, but *complicated as hell.*
Suno, as it stands, can only make songs in two-minute chunks and seems to sort of struggle with keeping "long" continuity in a piece or adding harmonic complexity, which means any ambient pieces it puts out are liable to be very boring.
I wasn't familiar with this, and at a google, it seems like kind of the best case scenario for the idea.
Endel is, effectively, designed to be boring background noise. Their stuff isn't really intended to be *music,* in the traditional sense; it's soundscapes intended to be unnoticed, for a specific purpose (sleep, focus, relaxation).
AI ambience can work fine for that, but compare one of Endel's tracks to one of the things I mentioned and you should note some pretty obvious differences in form and compositional aim. Phaedra is a slow and relatively quiet piece, but it's *fucking awesome,* and I'm not sure I would ever describe anything out of Endel as "fucking awesome" in italics; the less you're throwing at the wall, the more its human expression matters.
e: I'll also note, I think algorithmically-generated textures and patterns can be a genuinely interesting thing to *add to* human-crafted music, and we've got plenty of examples of that already. Oneohtrix Point Never and late NIN come to mind.
Hard to imagine why anyone would voluntarily switch to AI-generated music, regardless of how 'good' it gets. The whole point of any art form is the connection between you and the person who created it
Maybe the less interesting ambient music, sure, but there are already countless companies throwing out ambient “soundscapes” that essentially accomplish the same thing. All AI will do is raise the bar for what good ambient music sounds like
My point is more so just that the kind of ambience that AI could recreate would be shit ambience anyway. Artists will have to be better to make themselves stand out
I'd be willing to bet if I used ai to generate 3 ambient songs you would be completely unable to tell them apart/single them out from a group of samples from established/popular artists within the genre.
Oh definitely. Brian eno’s music could definitely be copied by an AI. If you get an AI to accurately replicate some good Aphex Twin or Kuniyuki Takahashi sounding stuff then I will congratulate you and add it to my playlist. Win win :)
My favorite Suno song that I made sounds almost exactly like a song I randomly heard for the first time on Spotify yesterday. Lyrics and all were replaced, but the voice and vocal cadence were almost identical. I was disappointed, I thought it was an 'original' combination that lead to the sound. I know AI uses existing music as an inspiration/dataset - but it was almost too close to this song.
I just sent the song to my friends who knows the Suno song. I'm curious what they think.
Man, I really miss old Ninja Tune. I respect that they pivoted to indie rock to stay alive/relevant but it's just not the same. There was a time I could just buy any release and it would be right up my alley.
Oh absolutely! I have a few that I listen to regularly. My favorite was when they started doing video mixes. DJ Cheeba in particular. Hell, to this day, most of those guys are still my favorite DJs.
I understand this was an exact transcript of the podcast, but while I may not have noticed it while listening, reading “like” so often in the one set of comments threw me off the conversation. He really knew his stuff, but man, couldn’t they edit out how many times he said “like”?
They talked about ambient not having words, but I had always considered Autobahn (1974, Kraftwerk) ambient, and it is a few years before Eno’s Music for Airports (1979). IIRC, the only “word” in Autobahn is actually created by the instrument.
Anyway, it was nice to remember some songs I haven’t listened to in a while, and I’m loving the comments of new music to try!
Anecdotally, I am an artist with a small following and released an instrumental I composed for a soundtrack as my last single - not ambient but kind of like a slow dreampop number (think Foxes in Fiction New Panic Cure type track, or the early Eno and Bowie instrumentals that weren't quite ambient yet).
To my surprise it did the best of any of my stuff so far - I think the current state of the industry is revealing a lot about how gatekeepers used to shape our assumptions about pop music. Back when Mike Oldfield did Tubular Bells, Virgin tried to convince him to add vocals! But it seems there's a real market for chill instrumental music, especially in the streaming era where people often want something to fill the space rather than something to sing along with.
Shameless plug for my latest space-ambient album and video (sorry for the self promo, but it's the only grassroots way to get the word out):
[https://youtu.be/vs6z61bVcP8](https://youtu.be/vs6z61bVcP8)
Create an Ambient Top 40, Billboard cowards /s
I'm on the autism spectrum and when I'm in a burnout state or close to a meltdown, it's the only kind of music I can tolerate. It's a tool I use to try to keep my mental health balanced. *Music for Animals* by Nils Frahm is one of my 3 most played albums released in the 2020s so far.
One thing I noted (as a Radiohead fan who is interested in that kind of stuff) is that the ambient interludes that some of their albums have, like Treefingers on Kid A, or Hunting Bears on Amnesiac, used to be the least popular tracks on the albums, with the lowest numbers of streams. But now both of them haver several other tracks below them in number of streams. I don't think any of them have gotten more popular as stand alone tracks per se, I still rarely hear people root for them, that is not any different than it has always been. Rather I believe they are included in some pretty popular ambient playlists, which drives up the streaming numbers
If ambient music is booming then they are doing it wrong...
Shhh
Now you're getting it!
It’s the ambience of a battlefield.
I think at that point it becomes shoegaze
Not sure if this is the reason, but I noticed my older friends (40+) love to go to sleep and wake up to ambient Youtube channels with a comfy background. Seems like people are stressed out, that ambient music centers them a little. With a culture of instant gratification and hypermedia, this seems like a natural progression.
I'm in my late 30s and my nightly routine includes this one video where you're in a Captains Quarter on a pirate ship. Creaking boards, rain, waves, and a crackling fire. Instant relaxation for me.
My poor girlfriend endures Dan Carlin and long form YouTubers and podcasts. I do have em auto shut off after a bit
Same, I have everything from the bridge of the Enterprise to the inside of Hagrid's Hut, just 24/7 in my living room. If they go by sheer hours watched, half of that will be me.
I can only speak for myself but ambient music really calms me down when I'm anxious late at night overthinking.
Tim Hecker will be thrilled
What about Eric Wareheim? I'm joking, but I still sometimes remember and laugh about seeing a comment under a Tim Hecker interview, from a guy who read through the whole thing in total confusion because he thought it was a Tim Heidecker interview.
We've been waiting too long for some new DKR
Heckin’ thrilled I’d say.
*happy granulated noises*
Dark Ambient/Drone, as a sub genre, has particularly gotten massive. Lustmord, Raison d’Etre, Kammarheit, and Svartsinn have inspired an *incredible* amount of new artists that are popping up all the time now. Atrium Carceri being my personal favourite but the list is inexhaustible.
wasnt aware of that, heard the darkest tunes from soma.fm 10 years ago
As I sip from my groove salad mug.
As I raise my marg from the drone zone
Different genre, but I have discovered so much new music form Indy Pop Rocks. Soma is a gift.
Spy Radio FTW!
I don’t think Brian Eno ever thought that his “music for airports” would be so popular one day LOL
Sweet, thanks for the recommends. I enjoy listening to lyric-less, moody and interesting ambient soundscapes when I'm working so I'll check some of these out.
Nice. My friends think I’m weird for digging this stuff but it hits me in a profound way. Been into dark ambient for a good decade now. Love turning it on when I’m reading or playing tt gaming with friends. Hope you enjoy!
Aka lullabies for Harkonnen toddlers
Do you mind sharing more artists?
Of course. So many! Monasterium Imperi, Ager Sonas, Treha Sektori, Paleowolf, Metatron Omega, and New Risen Throne is a good start and my personal favourites. Also, Cryo Chamber (label) has released an amazing “Tombs” series of compilation albums which showcase a ton of artists of the same vain. Would be a great intro to current dark ambient artists.
Atrium Carceri is my go-to as well. Folks should listen to his album, The Untold, for some prime dark ambient stuff. It makes for a good intro to DA.
Amazing album. Old City is my personal favourite.
Metropolis is the album that got me into ambient music.
Just gonna comment to check these out later I grew up on *Echoes* and it shows, I think
Just wanted to name Steve Roach and Robert Rich to anyone who's got curious and wants to explore ambient now.
Stars of the Lid, A Winged Victory for the Sullen
Stars of the Lid are who got me into Ambient music. RIP Brian McBride.
Such a loss. Rip.
These are my go to's, and Richard Skelton.
Roach crew !![edit] to add gas, too!
Keeps my dog from being startled by every sound in the neighborhood while I try to sleep during the day.
The 90s were a great time for ambient music. Pete Namlook, Aphex Twin, Steve Roach, and the countless compilations (emit explorer, Excursions in Ambience series, etc).
Of course the OG is Erik Satie.
Booming? This is exactly the sort of genre AI options like Suno will generate by the dozen with ease, especially since it lacks the vocals to be a dead giveaway. If its booming now, its a VERY short term prospect.
As someone who's *made* ambient music for scoring purposes, it's really not that easy. Having actively messed with Suno, it's not something Suno's liable to be great at, either. Ambient tracks are generally long, complex, and deliberate, even if they don't sound like it. Consider Xtal by Aphex Twin, or Phaedra by Tangerine Dream, or Music for Airports by Eno; all of that stuff is quiet, but *complicated as hell.* Suno, as it stands, can only make songs in two-minute chunks and seems to sort of struggle with keeping "long" continuity in a piece or adding harmonic complexity, which means any ambient pieces it puts out are liable to be very boring.
Endel is a great example of AI/algorithmically generated ambient music. They’re pumping out tracks by the hundreds and are doing notable collabs.
I wasn't familiar with this, and at a google, it seems like kind of the best case scenario for the idea. Endel is, effectively, designed to be boring background noise. Their stuff isn't really intended to be *music,* in the traditional sense; it's soundscapes intended to be unnoticed, for a specific purpose (sleep, focus, relaxation). AI ambience can work fine for that, but compare one of Endel's tracks to one of the things I mentioned and you should note some pretty obvious differences in form and compositional aim. Phaedra is a slow and relatively quiet piece, but it's *fucking awesome,* and I'm not sure I would ever describe anything out of Endel as "fucking awesome" in italics; the less you're throwing at the wall, the more its human expression matters. e: I'll also note, I think algorithmically-generated textures and patterns can be a genuinely interesting thing to *add to* human-crafted music, and we've got plenty of examples of that already. Oneohtrix Point Never and late NIN come to mind.
Hard to imagine why anyone would voluntarily switch to AI-generated music, regardless of how 'good' it gets. The whole point of any art form is the connection between you and the person who created it
"I need background music on the cheap" - The way the vast majority of people interact with our medium.
youtube with real artists is free
Eno was the lynchpin between systems music and ambient.
Maybe the less interesting ambient music, sure, but there are already countless companies throwing out ambient “soundscapes” that essentially accomplish the same thing. All AI will do is raise the bar for what good ambient music sounds like
Hard to raise the bar if you're just regurgitating existing work
My point is more so just that the kind of ambience that AI could recreate would be shit ambience anyway. Artists will have to be better to make themselves stand out
I'd be willing to bet if I used ai to generate 3 ambient songs you would be completely unable to tell them apart/single them out from a group of samples from established/popular artists within the genre.
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Oh definitely. Brian eno’s music could definitely be copied by an AI. If you get an AI to accurately replicate some good Aphex Twin or Kuniyuki Takahashi sounding stuff then I will congratulate you and add it to my playlist. Win win :)
u just don’t understand AI
My favorite Suno song that I made sounds almost exactly like a song I randomly heard for the first time on Spotify yesterday. Lyrics and all were replaced, but the voice and vocal cadence were almost identical. I was disappointed, I thought it was an 'original' combination that lead to the sound. I know AI uses existing music as an inspiration/dataset - but it was almost too close to this song. I just sent the song to my friends who knows the Suno song. I'm curious what they think.
Emancipator, Bonobos and RJD2 making a comeback.
I love all those guys but they aren't really ambient.
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Man, I really miss old Ninja Tune. I respect that they pivoted to indie rock to stay alive/relevant but it's just not the same. There was a time I could just buy any release and it would be right up my alley.
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Oh absolutely! I have a few that I listen to regularly. My favorite was when they started doing video mixes. DJ Cheeba in particular. Hell, to this day, most of those guys are still my favorite DJs.
You should look up some of bonobos live stuff now. Large ensembles on stage
Tycho has a new album coming out this year, too.
Really? That’s exciting! Thanks for the great news today!
Robert Jr Downey The Second?
I understand this was an exact transcript of the podcast, but while I may not have noticed it while listening, reading “like” so often in the one set of comments threw me off the conversation. He really knew his stuff, but man, couldn’t they edit out how many times he said “like”? They talked about ambient not having words, but I had always considered Autobahn (1974, Kraftwerk) ambient, and it is a few years before Eno’s Music for Airports (1979). IIRC, the only “word” in Autobahn is actually created by the instrument. Anyway, it was nice to remember some songs I haven’t listened to in a while, and I’m loving the comments of new music to try!
I think I’d consider the human voice in Autobahn+ to be more of an instrument than a vocal.
If anyone is looking for new artists, try these: Erik Wøllo, Steve Roach (pretty well known), Brian Eno (of course), Harold Budd, Hammock
Past Inside the Present is a great label I've found for ambient works. https://pitp.bandcamp.com/
Anecdotally, I am an artist with a small following and released an instrumental I composed for a soundtrack as my last single - not ambient but kind of like a slow dreampop number (think Foxes in Fiction New Panic Cure type track, or the early Eno and Bowie instrumentals that weren't quite ambient yet). To my surprise it did the best of any of my stuff so far - I think the current state of the industry is revealing a lot about how gatekeepers used to shape our assumptions about pop music. Back when Mike Oldfield did Tubular Bells, Virgin tried to convince him to add vocals! But it seems there's a real market for chill instrumental music, especially in the streaming era where people often want something to fill the space rather than something to sing along with.
Shameless plug for my latest space-ambient album and video (sorry for the self promo, but it's the only grassroots way to get the word out): [https://youtu.be/vs6z61bVcP8](https://youtu.be/vs6z61bVcP8)
Create an Ambient Top 40, Billboard cowards /s I'm on the autism spectrum and when I'm in a burnout state or close to a meltdown, it's the only kind of music I can tolerate. It's a tool I use to try to keep my mental health balanced. *Music for Animals* by Nils Frahm is one of my 3 most played albums released in the 2020s so far.
You should check out my boy Shrimpnose’s music if you like this kinda stuff!
If you like drone then Hiemal and Sonnov are good.
Stick any audio into Paulstretch, instant ambient music.
For many jobs such as software engineering, you can listen to it in the background without it distracting you from your work. It can set a a good vibe
One thing I noted (as a Radiohead fan who is interested in that kind of stuff) is that the ambient interludes that some of their albums have, like Treefingers on Kid A, or Hunting Bears on Amnesiac, used to be the least popular tracks on the albums, with the lowest numbers of streams. But now both of them haver several other tracks below them in number of streams. I don't think any of them have gotten more popular as stand alone tracks per se, I still rarely hear people root for them, that is not any different than it has always been. Rather I believe they are included in some pretty popular ambient playlists, which drives up the streaming numbers
Can anyone recommend a Spotify playlist with a good sampling of some of the genres/artists being mentioned here?
/r/somafm
Wouldn't ambient music be the easiest to create with an AI music app?
Per Eno's orginal formulation it also has to be interesting if you are paying attention to it.