Ambient Music Reviews

Ambient music is a style that focuses on sound and space rather than melody and form and below are some ambient music reviews. Even though many people consider ambient music as background music, it is also great to listen to. It is quite static with slow sounds and lots of repetitions. 1978 is the year when Brian Eno released Ambient 1, Music for Airports. It was the time of the huge popularity of disco music and the album was therefore largely ignored. It has become, however, very important over the years. The album was a beautiful manifesto. It is a set of intriguing, timeless soundscapes, artfully packaged. It also marks the birth of ambient music. In his liner notes, Eno places ambient music as an alternative to Muzak. Eno's opinion on Muzak was that it was too lightweight and derivative, and therefore lost all the attention of composers and serious listeners. He created the term "ambient music" to distinguish his music from the background music available at that time. Eno also wanted to create music that would support reflection. His music was therefore beautiful but lacked a center of focus to demand your attention. Eno in his notes writes, "Ambient Music should be fascination but in the same time ignorable, it need to accommodate many levels of listening attention". Eno's Ambient series consists of four works covering a lot of territory. Ambient 1, Music for Airports, Eno's first album, consists of four pieces that are the aural equivalent of a mobile. Sounds seen to drift by the listener in a random collage, but combine to make infinite nice variations. Eno worked together with the composer Harold Budd when composing on Ambient 2, The Plateaux of Mirror. The music is a collection of slow, reflective piano work. Eno experiments with a variety of electronic effects and is therefore able to give his piano an otherworldly sound. In Ambient 3, Day of Radiance, Edo reveals another side of his ambient idea. Day of Radiance was created by Eno and Laaraji and it has two sets of pieces. The first set are dances with hammered-dulcimer upbeat music. Other pieces are slow and reflecting. Ambient 4, On Land is his darkest ambient work. The album is mostly electronic with some treated acoustic sound. Ambient 4, On Land consists of the sounds that are not easy to recognize - you will have a difficulty to know if you are hearing an instrument ,treated recording or maybe an electronic sound. Eno's approach in On Land is just like in Music for Airports, but the outcomes are very different. On Land is a collage of puzzling, sometimes frightening sounds, that give the impression that you are in a strange land. Eno works are the best known pieces of ambient music, there are however other musicians who have explored this area as well. There are plenty of ambient music podcast sites on the net which will let you get free music for your iPod. Today, ambient music is divided into sub-genres such as ambient techno or dark ambient to name a few. Mogwai, UtopiaXO, Max Richter and Aphex Twin are among active ambient artists.