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MiloBloom -> RE: Ambient Music (9/26/2008 2:10:25 PM)
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Brian Eno's work is fantastic. Ambient 1: Music for Airports, Ambient 4: On Land, and Discreet Music are my favorites. You might want to check out the work of one of his collaborators, Harold Budd. I particulary like the album Budd did with the band The Cocteau Twins, called The Moon and the Melodies. His tracks sound like rain playing the piano in small pools of water. Although not strictly ambient, The Cocteau Twins album Victorialand has a gorgeous, hushed, etherial quality.
After Eno, I would highly recommend a band called Windy & Carl. I think they refer to their music as "intuitive", but it's very ambient, too. Look for their album Consciousness. I've listened to it nearly every night when I go to bed for the last several years. If you could translate pure, honeyed, sun-filled color into sound, you'd have this album.
Similar to Windy & Carl is a wonderful band called Landing. You can hear some of their work on their myspace page. A lot of their music sounds like listening to a flower slowly blooming in the dark. Circuit, Seasons and Oceanless are all great albums. They travel in circles with similar musicians like Yume Bitsu, and Surface of Eceyon, and White Rainbow, all great drone bands.
Slighty more esoteric, and slightly more straightforward (more bliss than ambient) is a band called The Harmony Rockets who released one album called Paralyzed Mind of the Archangel Void. It's a single, forty-minute improvised live track that kind of sounds like psychedelic ambient music from inside a diving bell. This was actually a side of the band Mercury Rev, if you're familiar with them (similar to the Flaming Lips).
Movietone's album The Sand and the Stars was recorded almost entirely on a beach, with all of the ambient wave sounds mixed in. It's sort of acoustic ambient music. In the same style, you might be able to track down an album called Vague Gropings in the Slip Stream by Palm Fabric Orchestra (a side project of Poi Dog Pondering).
Then there's Mum, an icelandic group whose album Finally We Are No One sounds like sleepy computers whispering and mumbling to each other on a train ride.
Again, pretty much all bliss instead of ambient, but you can't go wrong with My Bloody Valentine's Loveless.
For a good, spacey time, a guy named John Oswald took twenty years worth of live versions of the Grateful Dead's song "Dark Star", ran them through his computer, twisted them, folded them, stretched them, reversed them, and layered them into one long, two-hour track (spread across two CDs) that's just amazing. The album's called Grayfolded.
Back to ambient, I would recommend looking up the composers Terry Riley and Steve Reich. There's also an underground band called Bonecloud whose music sounds like shaped static.
Hope you enjoy some of those!
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