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Out of all the music that I listen to it’s probably ambient, soundtracks and drone that I listen to most — if anything it’s because I have a habit of listening to this type of music when I put by head down in bed at night, and then various playlists I’ve created guiding me through the subconscious realms of sleep in the hours that follow drifting off into dreamland. Not only that, I find myself listening to this general style of music when reading, or very deep into work where I don’t want music that demands too much of my attention, or rather augments my environment rather than pulling me from it.
There’s a time and a place for this, and I do listen to a lot of other genres on a higher energy field: punk, hardcore, EBM, post-punk… you name it, but with “ambient” music it’s also a genre that I’ve been interested in since I took an interest in music as a kid. Growing up in the vast rainforests of northern Vancouver Island the natural environment was full of strange ambient sounds in nature. I also had an initial interest of ambience used in film soundtracks or even the sound of the motor on my dad’s motorboat — a straight up drone that would run for as long as the boat ride was. Going into my teens and early twenties I discovered new directions with “ambient” with labels like Kranky Records as well as pioneering artists in the genre: Tangerine Dream, Vangelis, Suzanne Ciani, Pauline Ann Strom, Brian Eno, Catherine K, Steve Roach, Robert Rich and more.
This playlist compiled here contains hours of artists old and new, as well as containing some Soft Riot and Ostrofti tracks (most notably the Sudden Vision Zones release from 2021) that seemed to fit the mould.