It’s also easy to see why some of the output of Simon Jeffes’ Penguin Cafe Orchestra has long been popular for chill-out purposes, as witnessed on “Wildlife,” from 1987’s Signs Of Life, which was later compiled on all manner of ambient collections.Īmbient really returned to popularity as the rave scene called for rooms in which the addled could reflect and recover. In the 80s, the age of lengthy, prog-friendly album tracks waned, but the cause was taken up by some of the burgeoning electronic scene’s frontrunners, including Art Of Noise, whose hardy perennial from 1984, “Moments In Love,” topped 10 minutes in its most blissed-out version.
Virgin signed Germany’s Tangerine Dream around the same time: the group had issued some excellent but challenging material in the years beforehand, but created one of the ultimate ambient albums in 1974’s timeless Phaedra (which boasts a formidable 18-minute title track) before repeating the success with other albums such as Rubycon. Its main theme’s use as the theme for horror film The Exorcist maybe leaves it with rather scarier connotations than originally intended, but also remains one of the best ambient music recordings of all time, and makes the case for Mike Oldfield providing a precursor to the later development known as “dark ambient.” Greek composer Vangelis was also at work on minimal soundtrack work for Polydor, and tracks such as “La Mort Du Loup,” from L’Apocalypse Des Animaux, clearly prefigure much of the best ambient music of the decades ahead.
An obvious place to start is Mike Oldfield’s absolutely magical 1973 album Tubular Bells. The Virgin label was home to a huge number of records influential on the formation of the ambient genre during the 70s. Listen to the best ambient music on Spotify. Without a doubt, ambient is back! Settle yourself in for a long, relaxing journey through some of the best ambient music in history. We have thankfully now left behind an extended period when ambient music seemed to have gone out of fashion, being seen as some sort of embarrassing mistake of the recent past.
0 kommentar(er)
