Sean McCann - Music for Private Ensemble
A lively and characterful ambient album with a classical palette. Drum rolls, clouds of strings, interlocking bells and glockenspiels, smears of trilling flutes and pulsing oboes.
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - Love is a Stream (2010)
A glorious explosion of droning sound, roars of shoegaze guitars spitting fragments of molten rock and sparks of light.
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Kate NV - для FOR (2018)
One of the most playful, delightful ambient albums you’re ever likely to hear. Elliptical synthesiser melodies ride on top of Reichean xylophones and modular squelches of bass; fragments of voice dance lopsidedly.
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Nuno Canavarro - Plux Quba (1988)
A spiritualforebearer of the Kate NV album above, it’s crazy to think that this ambient album was released in 1988 -- its chirping, reversing, unspooling tape manipulations sound surreal and futuristic to this day. Flecked among the glitching chaos are moments of sublime dreamy beauty.
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Kali Malone - The Sacrificial Code (2019)
A somber, contemplative drone album centred around Kali Malone’s hypnotic organ playing. Bach in a crisis.
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Hiroshi Yoshimura - Music for Nine Postcards (1982)
A softly shimmering ambient album from the classic era of ambient music. Intimate synthesiser and Fender Rhodes music suffused with peaceful melancholy.
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Laurel Halo - Raw Silk Uncut Wood (2018)
Smoky electroacoustic music bookended by two sublime longer compositions. The organ on the first track and the strings on the final track sound utterly immaculate.
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Windy & Carl - Drawing of Sound (1996)
Minimal yet lush rushes of reverbed guitar and hushed vocals. The quintessential ambient shoegaze album, most similar on this list to the Jefre Cantu-Ledesma album.
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Sarah Davachi - Let Night Come On Bells End the Day (2018)
Subtly massive drone music lent a slightly psychedelic timbre through Davachi’s creative use of the Mellotron. Patient and oceanic.
Gigi Masin - Wind (1986)
Pulsating ambient synth compositions that glide and twirl gracefully. Sounds stuck in its 80s time, in a pleasing, evocative way.
Article artwork by Bridget McCormick
