25 tracks that trace the ambient continuum

It's obvious to start with the man who coined the term ambient. In 1975, after being hit by a taxi and forced to stay in a bed, Brian Eno listened to a nearly inaudible harp record gifted by a friend. There was a system with a broken speaker in his hospital room, even the rainfall outside was louder. As the faint sound merged with the weather, it turned into an atmosphere rather than a melody. That moment shaped his idea of music as an environment, eventually giving rise to Ambient 1: Music for Airports.

From 1978 until 1982, the idea evolved into a series of four legendary pieces. Featuring musicians such as Harold Budd and Laraaji, famous for his zither playing.

In the late 70s, Eno spent time in New York City, where he met another artist whose ideas would expand his own world of sound, the American trumpeter and composer Jon Hassell. Their collaboration on Fourth World Vol. 1: Possible Musics, which includes Delta Rain Dream, is one of those rare moments in music history–two very different artistic visions merged into something entirely new. Hassell brought his studies with Stockhausen and Indian master Pandit Pran Nath, blending minimalism and non-Western traditions. Eno contributed his sense for atmosphere, layering and space.

Both artists were deeply curious about sound as geography rather than genre. Music that could feel both ancient and futuristic, human yet unplaceable. In Delta Rain Dream, the result is a slow-moving landscape of shimmering trumpet tones, stretching soft pads and rhythmic fragments that feel like they belong to an imagined world. It’s not a genre but a philosophy of sound that erases boundaries between cultures and eras.

In Paris, a pioneering composer in the dark drone style, Éliane Radigue, began creating her own synthesizer-based pieces in the 1970s. Initially influenced by musique concrète, a movement that used recorded sounds on tape instead of traditional instruments, her work drifted toward the minimalistic sound emerging from New York’s avant-garde.

After early experiments with Buchla and Moog systems, she fell in love with the ARP 2500, the modular instrument she would use exclusively for the next 25 years to forge her signature sound. Her goal was to create slowly evolving layers of sound with synths and magnetic tape, resulting in her masterpiece Trilogie de la Mort, a lush and dark, singular three-hour work produced between 1985 and 1993 and finally released in 1998.

With no computers, no sequencers and no external instruments, it was shaped entirely by Radigue’s deep, meditative patience and total control over sound. As a Buddhist, her work was deeply rooted in spirituality, a way to process the death of her son and explore themes like the six Buddhist states of consciousness.

Hopi is a track with another deeply spiritual story, one of Dutch musician Hanyo van Oosterom becoming Chi. In the early 80s, feeling lost and exhausted from the rock & roll era, he travelled to the Greek island of Patmos in search of silence. Surrounded by nothing but wind, water and the sounds of nature for weeks in the remote Kallikatsou cave, he challenged the silence. His resistance turned into peace and mental clarity. Out of that silence, Hanyo began to perceive the surrounding sounds not as noise but as music.

Back in Rotterdam, those experiences materialised into Hopi, built from raw, improvised sounds that he recreated in his home studio. The piece unfolds around a speech by a Hopi elder, recorded directly from Hanyo’s TV. The Hopi are a Native American tribe whose rituals and worldview resonated deeply with his own experience of transformation.

Together with his longtime friend Jacobus Derwort, he later returned to Patmos to record more pieces. The result, The Original Recordings (1986), marked Chi’s debut and was later reissued by leading ambient label Astral Industries in 2016. In 2024, Minimal Collective visited Hanyo van Oosterom for an in-depth look inside The Chi Factory, tracing the roots of his timeless sound and serving as inspiration for this paragraph.

What Chi experienced in this cave was later referred to as “Deep Listening” by Pauline Oliveros. Together with Stuart Dempster and Panaiotis, the American composer and experimental pioneer recorded an album of the same name inside a massive underground cistern. The album was released in 1989, featuring four tracks, all recorded within this chamber that created a 45-second natural reverb, where sounds could overlap, interact and slowly build into entire musical pieces with a hypnotic depth. One outstanding track called Nike is especially dystopian, beautifully weird, and for that time, pretty radical.

What began as an experiment with space and sound soon turned into a name–first a playful pun on “deep” underground listening and later a full artistic and philosophical practice. “Deep Listening” means listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear–from the sounds of daily life and nature to your own thoughts. It’s an active practice that can be learned. It’s about being fully present and aware of the sonic environment around you.

Suspended Memories is a legendary ethnic/ambient tribal trio often dubbed an “ambient supergroup” and consisted of Steve Roach, Suso Saiz, and Jorge Reyes. All three had already been exploring ritual, tribal, ethnic and ambient soundscapes in their solo work. Coming from different countries and musical traditions (USA, Mexico, Spain), they brought distinctive instruments and ideas, merging them into a collective project.

First Blessing, from their second studio album, perfectly reflects the trio’s range. Roach moves from synthesizers to didgeridoo and even the ocarina. Yes, the one many might know from the video game Zelda. Reyes adds an ancient Mayan trumpet, pre-Hispanic flutes, percussion and drums. Saiz threads in hypnotic, heavily processed guitar melodies.

The composition takes you on a trip: dense drones and pads, topped off with ritual chants and rain sounds. An organic piece of music that soaks you in and makes you forget your surroundings. Music built to escape reality.

From inspirations rooted in rainforest tribes and ancient Mayan instruments in Mexico, we shift to a very different source. We move up north, all the way to Tromsø, a city far above the Arctic Circle, where Geir Jenssen grew up and makes music as Biosphere.

His sound is shaped by long winter nights, freezing temperatures and snow-covered landscapes under the aurora. That’s part of why his 1997 album Substrata feels so expansive yet intimate. It captures the sonic essence of the Arctic: stillness, isolation and the subtle dynamics of a landscape where time seems suspended.

Substrata is widely regarded as an all-time ambient classic. Track 7, Kobresia, features the voice of Karl Nikolajev, a telepathist attempting to “see” which object sits on a table two floors up. The piece moves through a stark contrast of dystopian sound design against beautiful, string-like timbres and fragments of melody, evolving from darkness toward something more light filled.

While much of the 80s ambient world leaned on analog hardware and acoustic instruments, by the late 90s it shifted more and more towards the computer. With Monolake, a shared project of Robert Henke and Gerhard Behles, the co-founders of the now world-famous DAW Ableton Live, you hear two masters of programming digital software at work.

Gobi was produced in 1999 from extremely slowed-down, granulated loops pulled from the 1997 album Hongkong. They sculpted it with custom granular tools: a Reaktor sampler module coded by Behles and Max/MSP patches by Henke, who would go on to deepen this approach in Ableton’s Max for Live environment and release the Granulator in 2011.

Performed live, the original session ran over two hours, but a 36-minute edit appeared in 1999. Henke revisited the tapes for Gobi (The Long Edit 2020) and Astral Industries issued the first vinyl edition in 2021.

Ambient is a genre shaped by geography, local instruments and cultures. You could devote an entire article to one country alone: Japan. It’s deeply rooted because of aesthetics like “ma” (the beauty of silence and space) and “wabi-sabi” (impermanence and simplicity), which naturally align with ambient’s minimalism.

DUOON, a track selected from the album VRIOON, is a collaboration between German producer and musician Alva Noto and Japanese legend Ryuichi Sakamoto, who leaves behind a vast body of work that continues to inspire artists worldwide. It’s a composition built on contrast: noise reminiscent of an old, probably broken fax machine, micro-clicks and glitches meeting the gentle voice of a classical piano. A track that tickles your brain as you listen. It’s best experienced on headphones or a quality sound system.

Next to reverb, there is another technique heavily used in ambient: delay. While reverb is often used to expand space, delay is used to shape time–creating echoes that repeat, drift, and slowly dissolve into the mix. Those tape-style delays (often with feedback and very own character) don’t just fill space, they turn simple sounds into evolving, meditative patterns. The effect shaped entire genres such as dub and dubstep and was later combined with techno, house and also ambient. The crew around the infamous Basic Channel label are considered the true trailblazers of dub techno.

Structure 1 by Moritz von Oswald Trio is a perfect example of how dub and ambient fuse. It’s a dubbed-out, fluid composition built on ever-evolving layers of feedback delays, distant sounds and processed guitar lines that nod to the genre of blues. The trio, consisting of Moritz von Oswald, Max Loderbauer and Sasu Ripatti, worked together with additional guitar by Paul St. Hilaire (aka Tikiman), which deepens the piece’s earthy, emotive undertone.

Gigi Masin is a true Italian underground legend who had been working on music since the 80s. After a flood destroyed his equipment and most of his recordings, he focused more on his family, until Tiller and Tako Reyenga, heads of the Dutch label Music From Memory, discovered his first release Wind and requested some songs. They received over 80 compositions and released a 17-track strong compilation called Talk to the Sea, showcasing archival material spanning over 30 years–resulting in a resurgence of his career, which had been stagnant for too long.

Out of those tracks, Still is especially warm and beautiful. An analog polysynth timbre meets a soft trumpet, both washed out with heavy reverb and delay–combined with soft textures, wind chimes and the sound of the ocean. A user on YouTube wrote, “This song reminds me of the safe rooms of Resident Evil,” and it couldn’t be more accurate. Listening to this feels like being safe.

With this track, it’s time to talk microsound. Microsounds are so short in decay, they can’t really be heard on their own. Think of it as looking at sound through a microscope until you see the smallest sound particles–those little clicks, glitches, bursts or grains lasting only a few milliseconds.

A great example is Boundlessly (For M. Heyer), a project between LA-based Pinkcourtesyphone and Cosey Fanni Tutti. Her voice moves like a distant signal, addressing themes of being heard, valued and loved. It’s carried by Pinkcourtesyphone’s microsound palette, consisting of tiny sonic events, rising drones and near-silent textures that reward “Deep Listening."

Cio D’or is another leading figure in electronic music. Her sound comes across particularly well at long festivals and early mornings, when the crowd is ready to dive deep. She is a master reductionist, true to the motto “less is more.” Her productions move between hypnotic minimal techno, dub-techno and cinematic ambient with a percussionist’s touch and finely processed textures. A proper entry point is Off from the two-track release Off and On: micro-shifts, tension and dense drones–ambient meeting the dance floor and vice versa. For a longer arc, her album all in all (2015) expands this minimal palette into slow-burn, immersive structures.

Cio D’or will be one of our guests at our listening session at murmur, happening during ADE 2025.

With Phew’s longform instrumental piece cheers, another addition from Japan makes it onto the list. Phew began her career in 1978 as frontwoman of Osaka punk group Aunt Sally. In the 80s she went solo and worked with Ryuichi Sakamoto and members of DAF and Einstürzende Neubauten.

cheers runs close to half an hour and first appeared on a tour-only CD in 2016. It’s a late-career statement that connects her punk background with experimental electronic music. Raw, unfiltered, dystopian sci-fi soundscapes and heavy bleeps. Somehow, the perfect soundtrack for George Orwell's 1984.

Shy, Special Guest DJ, Caveman LSD and DJ Paradise, Ryan Fall has many names. But here we focus on a release under his alias uon. With superbath, a 24-minute-long, ever-evolving piece of dense drone sounds, the Berlin-based artist explores long-form ambient and the relaxing, healing properties associated with a sound bath.

A sound bath is a guided listening session where you lie down and immerse yourself in continuous tones, often singing bowls, gongs and chimes, with the focus on vibration, resonance and deep relaxation. Released on Barcelona’s anòmia label, superbath is a piece not to be missed.

A self-described “sound designer from aquaspace,” VC-118A aka Multicast Dynamics releases bubbly, texture-rich and ethereal ambient. His productions feel like entering the beautiful yet scary depths of the ocean. Released in 2019 on his fifth album for Denovali Records, the track Oceana stands as a proper example of this inspiration.

All in all, the Finnish-born artist is highly active and serves it all: music for the dance floor via Hypnus, music for deep listening via Astral Industries, field recordings, lessons and sample packs on Patreon and audiovisual projects in different cities. He runs two of his own labels, Language of Colors and DOT Records. With a lot of output across many aliases, Multicast Dynamics is at the forefront of quality electronic music.

Australian Sa Pa draws landscapes with music. A dissonant, futuristic yet nostalgic sound leaning into dub and ambient. In Futurist Meets Cubist, from the album In the Landscape on MANA Records, thick layers of field recordings guide the listener through the composition. Rain pours on metallic surfaces, and footsteps create the illusion of walking through the landscapes yourself. Music that could easily soundtrack entire video games, especially those from the early 2000s that feel so nostalgic to many of us.

As a DJ and promoter, he brings his distinct, shifting textures combined with techno to dance floors. His concept-driven event series, Absurd Lustre, aims to transform “the nightclub and concert space into an immersive, more profound environment.”

More sound from Down Under. YL Hooi is a vocalist with an angel-like voice, anchored in dubbed-out acoustic music and drenched in reverb. Always in Jokes, taken from her self-released untitled album, thrives on processed bass and electric guitar played by collaborator Tarquin Manek and laced with strange FX. YL Hooi is a proper example of an upcoming artist who keeps it DIY and 100% authentic.

In Europe, she is frequently presented by meakusma, a collective, event series and label deeply rooted in Belgium’s subculture. Meakusma curates boundary-pushing experimental sound and modern avant-garde. YL Hooi’s dub-hazed, voice-led ambience sits right in that pocket.

Sent From My Telephone is an experimental album spanning over 100 tracks and sketches, recorded over three years. It functions less like a traditional album and more like a sprawling sound collage, resisting narrative or musical logic and organized simply in alphabetical order.

Tracks like Floating Signifiers often unfold with raw, spontaneous energy. The voice hovers between poetic narration and musical texture, and the boundaries between composition, improvisation and storytelling blur. The result feels like an extended experiment in voice, memory and sonic layering rather than a conventional song cycle.

Norwegian-Mexican artist Carmen Villain invites ECM artist and Supersilent member, Arve Henriksen, for a collaborative track titled Gestures. Different organic hand-drums, bells and percussion meet Henriksen’s Job Hassle inspired trumpet. An OG ambient composition.

The song reflects the zeitgeist around 2022: a global pandemic that felt strange, cold, isolated and uncertain. With club culture at a standstill, many producers shifted from dance floor oriented work to ambient.

Repulsive Force is a kind of secret project by Oprofessionell, a prominent member of Oslo’s UTE records. Together with Mikkel Rev, Ekkel and other forward-thinking producers, they keep modern, high-quality trance and progressive sound alive. These psy and trance influences show up on the ambient and downtempo side as well–still suitable for dance floor settings, especially outdoor festivals in nature, early-morning hours or chill-out stages.

Everything Can Levitate, from The Levitating Frog I is a conceptual work spanning now over three different parts. The last one was released in October 2025. The title is likely a creative interpretation of the scientific concept of repulsive forces, such as electromagnetic or electrostatic repulsion, that can be used to levitate objects… famously, even frogs.

Woody92, frequently represented by Minimal Collective, founded Omen Wapta in 2021–a young label envisioned as a creative community rather than just an imprint. He works closely with local artists like Loek Frey, known for hypnotic deep-techno cuts with sharp sound design.

With his 2021 EP, with the track Decipher, an outstanding, spacious piece: modern, progressive, packed with polyrhythmic clicks and colliding reverb tails. The haunting details create the illusion of being followed or watched. A track that is for pure listening and perfect for DJs to keep in their repertoire as a tool for layering and shaping atmosphere on the dance floor.

Coming across many beautiful fusions of different genres with ambient, let’s not forget jazz ambient. It’s a contemporary twist on a genre over 100 years old, originally from New Orleans, Louisiana, developed by African Americans.

For the album Jazz Plates, American musician Ulla Straus and Perila (aka Alexandra Zakharenko) came together in Perila’s studio in Berlin to create an intimate, unstructured yet atmospheric record, combining textures, crackles and field recordings with the improvisational and harmonic depth of jazz. After years of transatlantic collaborations, this is the first album they made together in one room.

The fifth track of the album, plumb, was created with Ulla’s beautiful voice, clarinet, classical piano and various nonmusical objects they found in the room, all recorded with a certain lo-fi quality that adds emotion.

White Field by Okgwa sounds like an homage to the trailblazers of ethnic ambient from the 80s and 90s, think Suspended Memories and Chi, rendered in a more electronic, modern way. She’s an upcoming Seoul-based multi-instrumentalist with a deep understanding of how to create a meditative composition with rattling metallic sounds, wind chimes and other textures that feel sci-fi yet remain organic and grounded.

This piece appears on a compilation from Siamese Twins Records, a Bangkok-based label run by Sunju, released digitally and on a toxic-green cassette with a transparent case. The series is framed around exploratory listening across Asian terrains. Ambient meeting geography once again.

Vocalist Tikiman carries on his Basic Channel legacy under his real name, Paul St. Hilaire, on Kynant Records, the label of Richard Akingbehin. The latest release is a collaborative album and pairs St. Hilaire with ten different producers to mark ten years of Kynant, curated as a celebration of the label’s sound.

It flips Rhythm & Sound’s classic w/ the artists template. Instead of rotating vocalists over a fixed production duo, St. Hilaire is the constant voice while the producers rotate. The track What’s This, produced by E.L. Butler, closes this album in a dubwise style. It's a fusion of spoken-word, ambient and deep dub, bridging the groundbreaking work of Basic Channel with the new wave of atmospheric, dub-infused sound.