The name speaks for itself, really. Where does your head go when you hear the word ‘ambient’? It’s not a hard guess, really. If you’re not the type who lands directly on Aphex Twin, you’re most likely thinking about whatever is surrounding you, usually in that background kind of way. It’s a word we throw around to describe the ‘feel’ of a room without trying to sound too pretentious, even if the French-style pronunciation of ambience has become the trendy way to say it lately.
And now, it goes without saying that such a mundane concept has become something of a seminal music form. Without meaning to undermine the term at all, it’s rather fascinating that something never really meant to be noticed has become just as interesting as it is ignorable; a fine reflection from the philosophy of Ambient music pioneer Brian Eno.
To fully understand Ambient as a music style, one must realise there’s an intention that’s much more visceral than factual, making it hard to properly grasp the concept through explanation alone. Without boring you with overly dramatic insights, it’s easier to briefly touch on its instinctive character; the way it was born as an abstract sound that was supposed to shift the entire atmosphere around you, officially made to occupy space without you fully realising it.
As a result of Erik Satie being a victim of a restaurant’s very loud music, he not only prompted the idea of music that merely contributed to an atmosphere, but he coined the term “furniture music” back in the day, insisting its purpose was to blend in. Pressing on the fact that the moment it stood out, it wasn’t doing its job right.
Still, Ambient music’s ancestry stretches further back than the term itself, when a loose collective of electronic experimenters, Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, and Cluster, drifted into a sound later dubbed Kosmische Musik. A form of music which shied away from psychedelic and avant-garde rock of the time, leaning into long, synthesiser passages, cosmic drones, endless repetition and a freedom in experimentation which formed what was essentially the world’s first ambient subgenre. Even though no one thought to name it at the time, it was a synonym to ambient before ambient even became a thing.
Henceforth, what began as this cosmic escapism in Germany eventually took on a different emotional weight once it reached Britain in the 70’s. You can imagine the way post-industrial landscapes felt at the time, the headache of grey cities, hand in hand with an everlasting economic turmoil and industrial strikes. Well, it would be strange if that didn’t plant a certain decline into one’s optimism. Still and all, the affordable synthesisers became an influential tool in response to all that, granting fertile ground for music that would not contribute to one’s evasion, but would soothe it, countering the noise of outside life with something invisibly radical.
“There were synthesisers in the 50’s and 60’s, but they were so expensive that only scientists or academics got to use them. So, nothing very much of interest happened in electronic music. It wasn’t until the equipment was cheap enough for fairly ordinary people to use it that really interesting ideas started happening,” Eno elaborates in an interview with Dave Heffernan, about his transition from Rock to Ambient.
Turning a blind eye to the mainstream that felt all too scratching, Brian Eno was the one to capture this shift better than anyone, pulling Satie’s philosophy into the then-modern age. However, he wanted to offer the listener an ambiguous relationship with the sound, giving them the choice to use it as background or foreground music.
Once Eno got his hands on these synths, tape loops, and studios that allowed sound to behave in unfamiliar ways, we believe the foundation had taken place. In no manner allowing the pressure of pleasing the average ear, he released Music for Airports, an album treating music as air and its consumption as something rather benign.
This sort of music often resides on sustained tones and slow movement, and an experimentation with subtle shifts in soundscapes that evolved without demanding any attention, and slightly alienated the traditional idea of what music was meant to be. At some point or another, the genre undoubtedly came into its own, ultimately garnering more interest than initially imagined. Its sedative and experimental rhythm brought conclusions to music so strangely intriguing that the influence rippled beyond its borders, diving into the worlds of cinema, techno and electronic music.
Musicians have teased these qualities into different territories. Emerged during the same period as Eno on his own accord, Jon Hassell‘s “Fourth World” trumpet also had its fair share, blending ethnic microtones with electronic drift on his Possible Musics piece (a production that encourages active listening in theory, yet somehow triggers a total disconnection from your actual surroundings).
Elsewhere, you can observe figures like Hiroshi Yoshimura and Steve Roach who softened the genre into meditative space ambient: built from gentle synth lines and slow harmonic movement, often carrying an understated optimism, like small sound narratives of hope that hint more towards love.
Although soothing as the sound was, it seems Ambient was never destined to remain comforting. Others, slightly more disturbed, eventually ventured into shadowy corners of the scene to forge the sound of dark ambient – or industrial ambient, according to some. This mystified deconstruction of the idea, best observed in the work of the Cryo Chamber label, has allowed darker thoughts to wander through discordant overtones and ominous, catacomb-inspired atmospheres, often leaning into a cinematic edge, laying groundwork for its close relationship with film sound design.
Producers like Thomas Köner then stretched minimalism into icy isolationist tracks like Permafrost, with their submerged drones evoking another level of darkness in the genre. While Aphex Twin, notably known in the ambient scene for his Selected Ambient Works 85-92, also eventually merged the genre with club culture via ambient techno (and even followed up on the airport theme, creating the commissioned-then-rejected piece Aphex Airlines with the kind of hollow, jarring space energy that represents the feeling of wandering a terminal at 3 am).
Paving the way for true artisans like Burial, who took the idea of ambient and engineered it into the frames of UK garage, in a way that felt mesmerisingly calculated and intentional, settling future garage as another subgenre within the ever-growing mix.
More recently, artists like Roméo Poirier have fractured the very idea of this ambience through granular field recordings and microscopic repetition, turning environmental sound into something bizarre and hypnotic. Here, the style of ambient is no longer smooth or continuous, but fragmented with texture, hovering over the idea of experimental sound collage. As suggests the work of Andrew Pekler. He shifts the meaning of time and realism in pieces such as Khao Sok and Sounds of Phantom Islands by stretching and puzzling up chopped field recordings, eventually making a completely surrealist piece of work.
This constant splintering suggests, or more proves, that ambient music has long moved on from being just a background utility (unless we’re talking about those two-hour YouTube videos quite literally meant for sleeping), and has found itself mirroring our internal states instead. Unavoidably so, during ambient music’s journey, our digital lives have become more overwhelming, and it seems the music has followed suit by moving away from the polite “furniture music” of the past and toward something much more psychological and just as disturbed as we Gen Z’s have become.
When you delve into the endless sea of branch-outs, you’ll find someone like Malibu, a figure in the modern electronic music landscape, who’s translated our screenager’s distress into a kind of emotive, ethereal drift that feels incredibly intimate, which clearly stems from ambient. Or on the flip side, the boundaries are pushed into a much grittier, urbanised register by many artists like Kavari, particularly on her Rumination At The Abattoir piece. You can feel her sound folding together heavy noise and industrial ambient with occasional lurches into club music, which end up feeling quite restless.
It’s admirable how this new generation isn’t afraid to pull the ‘ignorable’ into the light, creating work that is strikingly beautiful and, at times, intentionally jarring. We’re even seeing this play out as a communal ritual with festivals like Berlin Atonal or MUTEK, which have transformed ambient into a shared experience, with a strange irony in it. We’ve come to the point where hundreds of strangers lie together on the concrete floor of some random power station, gathered in the dark to music that was once defined by its ability to go unnoticed. But as we realise time and time again, the world is full of surprises.
Quite obviously, ambient music is elastic (to say the least) and goes far beyond the latter. It is still the ‘furniture’ Satie envisioned, but it’s now furniture for a far more curious (and may I repeat, disturbed) world. It has taught us a new way to interact with sound, to not disparage silence, and to embrace a form of creativity which has, and still is, revolutionising the way music is being created today.