Ambient is atmosphere cast in sound. The genre was founded by artists such as Brian Eno, Harold Budd and Isao Tomita. Today, Biosphere, Tim Hecker and William Basinski are among the best-known interpreters of this original variant. Early on, this genre combined synthesizer sounds and field recordings as well as organic instrumental sounds. The experimental and atmospheric guitar sounds of King Crimson mastermind Robert Fripp, for example, who has been collaborating with Brian Eno on and off since 1972, are considered to be influential in the style. Thanks to inspiration from other musical styles such as techno, dub, psytrance, house, world music, as well as pop, rock industrial and metal, numerous captivating subgenres have emerged. And technical milestones such as granular synthesis and resynthesis have paved the way for stylistic innovations and new soundscapes.
British composer Toby Marks of Banco de Gaia makes clear in an interview how multifaceted the influences of ambient are. For example, his ambient dub has been heavily influenced by musical styles such as psychedelia, prog rock like Pink Floyd, and electric jazz like the albums of the Mahavishnu Orchestra and Miles Davis from the late 1960s. „I was fascinated by the use of sound effects and natural sounds and how they made the music more compelling to me,“ says Marks.
Painting pictures with sound
Typical for ambient are flowing structures and hypnotic sounds. There is always room for experiments with synthesizers, modular systems and of course samples. The atmospheric aspect is often supported by the massive use of reverb and delay. But what is the appeal of ambient and related genres? „For me, it‘s about creating a mood or atmosphere in an impressionistic way, where the listener can lose themselves in worlds of sound,“ says ambient veteran Ian Boddy, explaining his fascination with the genre. „I‘ve always liked to use the phrase ‚painting pictures with sound‘ because that‘s what has always interested me about this style. I‘ve always been fascinated by how seemingly abstract sounds can have a definite emotional meaning and evoke images in the listener‘s mind.“ Toby Marks, aka Banco de Gaia, describes what attracts him to ambient as follows: „The most important thing for me is how the music distorts the sense of time while simultaneously anchoring us in the natural world and taking us beyond our normal life experience.“
Johannes Hedberg and Daniel Segerstad, the two creative heads of Carbon Based Lifeforms, appreciate above all the creative freedom in this style of music: „You can easily mix aspects of different genres, there is no fixed beat frequency, you can be as fast or as slow as you want. And it‘s also about emotional depth.“ Their compatriot Magnus Birgersson of the psybient/ambient project Solar Fields feels similarly: „For me personally, well-made music in this genre is mostly about creative freedom, the freedom to express what you want without any guidelines or rules.“
Musical voyages of discovery
On the following pages we would like to take you on a sound journey: In workshops we show you step by step how classic ambient sound-scapes, drones and ethno chillout are produced. But we also take a detailed look at the creation process of tracks in the style of Suduaya (psybient), Deepbass (deep techno), Align (chill-hop) and DJ Shadow. In our big interview you will find out what inspires Solar Fields, Ian Boddy, Carbon Based Lifeforms and Banco de Gaia and how they conjure up gripping ambient/psybient tracks from these inspirations.
Since field recordings play an important role in many ambient productions to provide an organic atmosphere, we also introduce you to nine websites where you can download multi-faceted field recordings for free. And while we‘re on the subject of recordings, let‘s take a
