Ambient house, ambient techno and early IDM

[Brundle-Fly]

[Better Midlands]

You and purlieu are the only other people I've heard of who even know of this obscure gem.

I saw Mark (and Tom) quite often around this period after my best friend phoned up the contact number on an earlier Evolution release to tell them how good it was.

I was slightly disappointed when 76.14 (which is excellent) came out because (IMO) it wasn't as good as  ACOSS.

[purlieu]

Yeah, Short Stories is a classic, not as well remembered as 76 14 but it has its fans. Mark and Tom are planning out a box set of the Reload stuff in a similar vein to the GC one from the other year, hopefully that'll be out sooner rather than later.

Bobby Bird aka Higher Intelligence Agency has uploaded a huge archive of Oscillate recordings. Oscillate was a regular gig/club night he put on in Birmingham in the early-to-mid '90s, and it turns out many of the shows were recorded to DAT. These are now on the Oscillate website, including performances from Autechre, Orbital, Sun Electric, Biosphere, HIA, Freeform, Locust, Plaid, A Positive Life, Spacetime Continuum, mu-ziq and a ton of others. That's my week's music sorted.

[Munique]

This has fired up a lot of dormant memories. Thank you, purlieu. In addition to a lot of the recommendations up-thread, I had a lot of time for Beaumont Hannant's Texturology. I had/have this on vinyl with an embossed cover that felt like a relief map of Afghanistan. My avenues were a bit hit and miss: for every Bandulu and Seefeel there was a Banco de Gaia, Drum Club, etc. Although I never went down an Eat Static rabbit hole.

Very formative for me, as a penny-pinching sixth former, was the Trance Europe Express series. I had a fair number from that series and they acted as a gateway into lots of sub genres. Any love here?

The recent "Virtual Dreams: Ambient Explorations In The House & Techno Age, 1993-1997" compilation is getting a lot of play from me. I heartily recommend this. Lots of standouts, in particular Dave Moufang's mesmeric 'Sergio Leone's Wet Dream'.

[Munique]

This is that Dave Moufang track.

[shoulders]

Nice, very spaced out background synth. With the video accompaniment that's basically vaporwave.

[Munique]

With the video accompaniment that's basically vaporwave.

Ha, I was half-expecting Conner O'Malley to pop up.

[greencalx]

I have a Trance Europe Express CD. I think it came with a big fat book, and introduced me to a bunch of artists. In my head it came with an issue of Select but I think I must have bought it as a standalone item.

[purlieu]

In addition to a lot of the recommendations up-thread, I had a lot of time for Beaumont Hannant's Texturology.

Which one? There's a standard CD/LP, and also a completely different vinyl-only release, both with the same name. I've only heard the former, and yes, it's tremendous.

My avenues were a bit hit and miss: for every Bandulu and Seefeel there was a Banco de Gaia, Drum Club, etc.

Oh, yes, I've heard so much shit music from this period, you wouldn't believe it. Banco de Gaia are a great example. I have a certain fondness for stuff that verges on worldbeat (there's certainly a fair amount of sampling in FSOL, Syzygy, The Orb, etc., but Enigma's second album is as close to a 'guilty pleasure' as I get - naff, but excellently done), so I had a certain amount of high hopes for Banco de Gaia, but every time I've tried them I've come away cringing.

I have a Trance Europe Express CD. I think it came with a big fat book, and introduced me to a bunch of artists. In my head it came with an issue of Select but I think I must have bought it as a standalone item.

They were released by the same people who did the Volume series of compilations. Basically a CD and magazine in a 12x13cm box. I have a lengthy list of '90s compilations that I want to pick up one day, and the TEEX releases are very much on there.

[steveh]

Oh, yes, I've heard so much shit music from this period, you wouldn't believe it. Banco de Gaia are a great example. I have a certain fondness for stuff that verges on worldbeat (there's certainly a fair amount of sampling in FSOL, Syzygy, The Orb, etc., but Enigma's second album is as close to a 'guilty pleasure' as I get - naff, but excellently done), so I had a certain amount of high hopes for Banco de Gaia, but every time I've tried them I've come away cringing.

Was digging out CDs for an 90s ambient mix last year and the stuff with heavy sampling of non-Western music has aged really badly as well as seeming rather insensitive now. As a small fragment in a much larger piece of music like with FSOL I think it's okay but there was a lot of what wasn't much more than sticking a downtempo drumbeat and a drone on top, particularly at the crusty side of the scene.

Was never that taken by the Drum Club albums but saw them live once and they were okay and Lol Hammond's solo albums since I've liked. There was also their club night of the same name at the Soundshaft which straddled the techno / early progressive house line with regulars like Weatherall, David Holmes and Fabi Paras.

[Munique]

Which one? There's a standard CD/LP, and also a completely different vinyl-only release, both with the same name. I've only heard the former, and yes, it's tremendous.

Interesting, I wasn't aware there were multiple versions. For me, it was bought on a whim (probably under the spell by TEE or Muzik magazine) and it was, for me, pre-internet, so not much context was available around the release.

Anyway, it's this version.

[Munique]

They were released by the same people who did the Volume series of compilations. Basically a CD and magazine in a 12x13cm box. I have a lengthy list of '90s compilations that I want to pick up one day, and the TEEX releases are very much on there.

They were essential for me as an eager, nascent but cash-strapped, teen. I have the first 3 on cd and fourth on vinyl.  There was a fifth, which I didn't bother with - diminishing quality returns started kicking in after vol 2, and it started to drift too far into trance territory.  There was also a Trance Atlantic series which was revealing as an insight into some of the US techno pioneers, but suffered from being chocful of other ham-fisted bollocks (Josh Wink, anyone?) I was very partisan (read: ill-informed twat) back then, and took most dance music coming from the States as having invisible, and inverse, quality kitemark.

Back to the TEE volume 1, it had a stellar tracklisting, and it benefitted from having rare mixes and unreleased tracks put out by most of the big-hitters. Found a blogpost on it, if anyone wants a deep dive.

[Munique]

What's less well known stuff to listen to if I like that and Spanners by the Black Dog?

At the risk of sounding well-obvious, I'd go with Black Dog's 'Temple of Transparent Balls'.

I may be working from a near thirty year old memory, but I really enjoyed this back then. I seem to remember there was something strange about its release. It appeared and the disappeared rather quickly. Either it was quickly brushed under the carpet in favour of Spanners; wasn't released on Warp and given short-shrift; lost a band member; etc.

Different barrel of monkeys, but I also enjoyed Amorphous Androgynous' "Tales of Ephidrina".

[Midas]

Found this 5-hour 'contextual mix' from Autechre that was streamed in December:



https://autechre.mixlr.com/recordings/1977679

[atavist]

Spotify Playlist to accompany thread!

So I suppose as far as sub-genres and movements go, this is the era I know most about, what was broadly categorised as 'ambient' between 1990 and 1995. I've tried to pinpoint exactly what it is I like so much about this music, but I can't seem to get further than 'I got into it at a formative age'. Either the third or fourth proper 'album' I bought myself was FSOL's Lifeforms, when I was 12, and it had a huge impact on me, and I suppose I've just gone back to that sound time and time again over the years. I'm not quite the right age to be part of the core fanbase for this music, having gotten into it just as it died off, and at a young age, so it's possible I have some fascination with it as something that's connected to a time past. Since then, it's often been overlooked, with the development of IDM in the second half of the '90s snatching most of the limelight for non-dancefloor '90s material, a lot of people being introduced to Warp artists through their being namedropped by Radiohead at the turn of the century. The worst extremes of the era have also dated pretty badly and, until they come back into fashion again, can act as a bit of a barrier.

In recent years there has been some interest in the era, with a number of articles scattered about online remembering chill-out rooms and the like, and labels like Re:discovery and Music from Memory reissuing some albums on vinyl (which is both logical and bizarre, given the era's focus on CDs), but there doesn't seem to have been much momentum in terms of wider recognition, so it remains a bit of a niche in many ways.

Since developing long Covid, I've been listening to a lot of stuff like this. Right up until then I was in the middle of an indie period, but such music is categorised alongside 'people' and 'real life' in my head, and having to put my life on hold and spend my time stuck indoors means this stuff has really lost its appeal at the minute, so getting lost in the soundscapes of early '90s ambient has been a nice way to escape the tedium of the same four walls. Anyway, this has given me the idea to write a bit post about it here and hopefully get some discussion going, maybe find some music I've missed, and hopefully introduce some people to some music they might not know.

The era is best defined by labels, rather than artists, each of which tended to have a particular slant on the music and art, although there was a lot of cross-pollination, especially when it came to remixes and compilations; labels often reissued albums from others to give them international distribution unavailable to most of these largely DIY projects. That said, there are a few key artists who weren't really tied to any of these labels too.

At the start of 1990, ambient was something which had been defined by Eno in the late '70s; music inspired by him and the various Germans making electronic music at the same time continued to be put out, but mostly became tied to new age by the late '80s, especially with the arrival of FM synthesis and its somewhat crude presets. At the same time, the post-industrial scene was gradually moving towards quieter music and took on a 'tribal' approach, with 'ethnic' sounding percussion added to synth ambience and drone. Needless to say, none of this music was on the horizons of most music fans. And then one album changed that.

The KLF & The Orb
To anyone who hadn't attended one of Alex Paterson's DJ sets in VIP nightclub rooms in the late '80s, The KLF's Chill Out would be the first they'd hear of this new generation of ambient music. The album was accompanied by a press release declaring the arrival of a new genre - ambient house - written in Drummond and Cauty's usual mix of deadly serious and utterly absurd. The KLF only ever wrote about eight tracks, and almost everything here is basically their big singles stripped down to synth pads and sequences; it's the samples that kind of define it. From Elvis to Fleetwood Mac, radio evangelists to news reports, the collage approach gives the album an almost psychedelic feel, and it takes a fair few listens to fully appreciate what is going on. While nowhere near as fully developed as many later albums, it is nevertheless a classic, and one that would go on to define the direction of ambient house for the next few years. Sadly, the more commercially successful legacy would come from the album's title, and the numerous soulless 'Chillout' compilations released by the majors in the second half of the decade.

Alex Paterson was involved in the creation of the album, although quite how much remains undisclosed (a friend of a friend who knew Paterson in the early '90s claims the whole thing was created by him which, frankly, is bollocks). He also formed The Orb with Jimmy Cauty and created their debut single, 'A Huge Ever-Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld', which took the KLF approach even further, a 20 minute Tangerine Dream-inspired epic layered with samples from NASA to Minnie Riperton. Despite being incredibly popular, Cauty and Paterson split - the latter apparently not wanting to just be seen as part of a KLF side-project - and Cauty took his own material from the debut Orb album sessions and released it as Space. It's a lot starker than Chill Out, and its influence is more negligible, but the astral theme would go on to define at least part of the '90s ambient movement. Meanwhile, Paterson worked with a number of other musicians to create what would be The Orb's debut, The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld, which has become a genuine classic. Closer to actual house music than The KLF's version of ambient house, it features drum machines and breakbeats on most tracks, albeit played much slower than most dance music. Again, the album is coated in samples, giving the impression of one of Paterson's DJ sets as much as a proper album.

One way or another, The Orb became the most popular act of the whole movement, with their second album, U.F.Orb managing to hit the top of the charts, and the 40 minute single 'Blue Room' getting a performance on Top of the Pops. U.F.Orb is a more streamlined album, with more stylistic consistency and better sample incorporation than their debut, leading to a more obviously atmospheric work. Despite five of the tracks featuring four-to-the-floor beats, it feels even less indebted to dance music than Adventures...

Paterson and friends - everyone from Gong's Steve Hillage to German techno head Thomas Fehlmann - went on to release a popular live album, a very experimental mini-album that sold surprisingly well, and their densest and most atmospheric record yet, the unusually earthy Orbus Terrarum, creating a wonderful body of work that stands the test of time. With the departure of Kris Weston, Paterson took The Orb in a less sprawling, ambient direction with 1997's Orblivion and then spent the next two decades trying to work out what the fuck he was doing.

The KLF, having successful invented ambient house, swiftly moved on to invent the hugely successful stadium house, and then retired.


Biosphere
Norwegian Gier Jenssen's Biosphere project released the only other notable album from the period in 1991, his debut Microgravity. Distinctly more techno-oriented than The Orb's approach, Microgravity is a cold, dark record that blends techno's machine language with chilly beatless sections, creating a spacey environment indelibly linked with Norway's arctic temperatures. His second album, Patashnik, features heavier use of breakbeats and voice samples, but retains a similar atmosphere. Although not especially ambient in itself, the single 'Novelty Waves' became one of the most played tracks of the era due to its appearance on a Levis advert in 1994. Undoubtedly an influence on the isolationist approach to ambient that came about later in the decade, Jenssen's slow release rate means only these two records really fall under the purview of this thread, and it's probably his slightly later work released on Touch, starting with 1997's chilly masterpiece Substrata, that has made his reputation, but these albums are nevertheless touchstones of the era, especially given the early release date of the debut.


The Future Sound of London
The second most commercially successful group of the era, and one I'm sure a few people on the board are tired of me talking about. Brian Dougans and Garry Cobain met in Manchester in the mid '80s, and following the success of Dougans's top 20 single 'Stakker Humanoid', moved to London and churned out a steady stream of house, hardcore, techno and breaks 12"s for independent labels. While their debut Accelerator features arguably the most complex production found on dance music of its time, it's not really until 1993 that their music becomes fully associated with ambient. Having hinted at the direction with 1991's 'Papua New Guinea', they then took a year off to create three hour, sample-laden, increasingly ambient radio shows for Kiss FM. The first group of their kind to sign to a major label, their first ambient work was released under the name Amorphous Androgynous, 1993's Tales of Ephidrina which, despite some techno beats being present, is a heavily atmospheric trip of an album, the highlight being the stunning guitar-led 'Mountain Goat'.

Later in 1993 they released the 35 minute single 'Cascade', with gentle breakbeats, flutes, a winding koto melody and some deep atmospheric variations on the b-side. Legal issues kept second single, the Liz Fraser collaboration 'Lifeforms', from being released until the following summer which, in turn, delayed the album of the same name. Nevertheless, Lifeforms did incredibly well for such a weird album, reaching number 6 in the album charts. Almost entirely sample-based, its 90 minute mix of analogue synth gurgles, odd beats, field recordings and film dialogue snippets feel like the logical conclusion of the ambient house collage approach; it's sometimes accused of being too self-indulgent, which I can sort of understand, although as my favourite album of all time I won't really hear a bad word against it.

1994 ended with their third album in 18 months, the pseudo-live ISDN. Instead of touring conventionally, Brian and Garry realised that their kind of music wouldn't work on stage and is much more suited to home listening, preferably alone, so they played live to radio stations via ISDN cables, with accompanying imagery available to view from their website. Genuinely ahead of the game, they basically invented webcast gigs in 1994, and also hold the world record for the first ever internet release, a download version of the 'Lifeforms' single later that year. The ISDN album consists of tracks culled from several of these broadcasts, and while half of the album is like a slightly darker version of Lifeforms, the other half focuses on more heavily beat-based material, incorporating elements of trip-hop and jazz, creating a much more suffocating and difficult soundscape. Initially a limited edition, it would be reissued as a standard album in 1995; the band would then disappear until late '96, with the even more beat-forward Dead Cities. It would then be ten more years before the next FSOL record.


Global Communication / Reload
Tom Middleton was a friend of Richard D. James and his early work as Link and Reload is in a similarly harsh acid vein as Aphex's early singles. As his friend Mark Pritchard became gradually more involved with Reload, the sound began to mellow, eventually moving towards an ambient techno and early IDM sound. The resulting album, A Collection of Short Stories, is one of those cult records that's incredibly well-loved by those in the know, but often totally ignored elsewhere. A mix of harsher techno and gorgeous downtempo ambient pieces, it is accompanied by a book of science fiction tales, one of the few times the era's sci-fi leanings feel truly earned.

Reload has since been eclipsed by their next project, Global Communication. Initially just a name on a couple of remixes and a 1992's wonderful Keongaku EP, it became their defacto alias after reworking an entire Chapterhouse record into a gorgeous five part ambient suite Pentamerous Metamorphosis in 1993. It is 1994's 76 14 that they'll be most remembered for, however, and rightly so: it's one of the most well loved ambient records of the era, and ever. Probably the most richly melodic album of the period, helped in no small part by Middleton's classical training, it alternates between beatless epics and chugging downtempo tracks, including the classic '14 31' and the Tangerine Dream homage '8 07' / '5 23', also released as a single as 'Maiden Voyage'.

After an excellent remix collection, Remotion, Middleton and Pritchard released a couple of Deep House tracks under the GC alias, before moving on to new pastures as Secret Ingredients and Jedi Knights, before forging successful solo careers in the new millennium.


FAX +49-69/450464 / Pete Namlook
The late Pete Namlook's FAX label is a proper curate's egg, an intimidatingly vast catalogue of music arranged by sub-label depending on the artist, artwork given distinct colours depending on the musical style, and classic albums slotted alongside utter shite. Namlook was a jazz guitarist before discovering electronic music, and his love of improvisation stayed with him to the end; many, many albums on the label are single-take improvisations, some recorded without the collaborating artists' knowledge at the time. Many people told him that they should be edited down to shorter tracks to make conventional albums, and frankly these people were usually right - the numerous excellent compilations on the label are much more easily listenable than many of Namlook's solo records - but I respect him for sticking to his guns and standing by his belief that music is what happens in the moment and shouldn't be messed with afterwards.

Of Namlook's own projects, the first two Air albums are superb, a mixture of acoustic instruments, Tangerine Dream-style synth pulses and downtempo beats; they're also composed of several individual tracks, making them far more accessible than the 70 minute improvisations. The first two Silence albums, recorded with Dr. Atmo are other high points, the former being an early entry to the era, released in 1992. Two Biosphere collaborations as The Fires of Ork are noteworthy. His many collaborations with Tetsu Inoue are superb droning space music, with the 2350 Broadway series a particular highlight. Inoue himself provided a number of excellent releases to the label, including a great collaboration with Jonah Sharp as Electro Harmonix; the pair also released a superb early IDM album as Reaganz for another label. And Sharp's classic album as Spacetime Continuum, Sea Biscuit, was initially released on FAX before picking up wider distribution from Astralwerks. A great record of rich melodies and crisp, IDM-esque beats, it's one of the era's highlights.

Namlook is also responsible for bringing Klaus Schulze out of the mire of preset-based new age pap that almost all the 1970s artists were churning out in the '90s, by inviting him to work on the Dark Side of the Moog series and showing him how much better going back to analogue synths would be than pressing that 'Pan Pipe' button again.

FAX was probably the label that outlasted all the others in terms of continuing with the early '90s sound, although it was slowly phased out, with a focus on tech house and dub techno by the '00s. Namlook died horribly young in 2012, leaving behind an incomprehensible legacy like no other. Thankfully, huge swathes of the FAX catalogue have been picked up by other labels, including Namlook's own catalogue, which is now distributed by Silent State Recordings; that said, he was vocal about absolutely hating vinyl and never planning on using it again, so that label's decision to only do vinyl reissues bothers me a little.


Rising High
Caspar Pound's legendary UK dance label was around for a few years before it caught the ambient bug, but when it did, it caught it hard. Mixmaster Morris was one of the earliest names in the ambient house scene, DJing alongside Alex Paterson in the late '80s, and his debut album as The Irresistible Force, Flying High, came out on Rising High in 1992. A fittingly airy affair, its six lengthy synth-and-sample tracks are often considered classics of the era. After this, Rising High sought out more ambient music, first reissuing a number of FAX releases, including the Namlook/Morris collab Dreamfish, before going on to sign new artists. While these occasionally incorporated the dancier elements of the label's single releases, such as those by Air Liquide, they put out some of the finest pure ambient of the era, including three oft-forgotten minor masterpieces. James Bernard's Atmospherics suits its title brilliantly, 70 minutes of beautiful atmospheric synth work with subtle sample usage, creating a new type of space music. Syzygy's Morphic Resonance is the work of two library musicians (Dominic Glynn having created the Doctor Who Trial of a Timelord series theme) who had put out a couple of trance 12"s before, which makes it a particularly remarkable achievement. Incorporating a handful of 'ethnic' samples and field recordings, it's a mixture of pure ambient and vaguely rhythmic material that creates a startling sonic work, and an album comparable with the likes of Lifeforms and 76 14. Neutron 9000's Lady Burning Sky is an album by Dominic Woosey, a man of numerous aliases. The Neutron 9000 name had previously been used for house music, but here Woosey brings six epic synth pieces, five of which are led by utterly stunning melodies. There's a very bizarre piece with spoken word and percussion in the middle that never works for me, but otherwise a flawless record.

The label is also responsible for releasing the first couple of albums by Luke Vibert's Wagon Christ project, the first an uncharacteristically ambient-IDM-leaning work that sounds like nothing else in his catalogue. After 1996, Rising High went back to being a single-oriented label, before Pound died in 2004 at the horrific age of 33.


em:t
An offshoot of Time Recordings, em:t was a strangely idiosyncratic label focused on non-club-related electronic music. Each release had cover art of an exotic animal, and was titled after its catalogue number: 0094 for the first release of 1994, 1194 for the second, and so on. The most stylistically diverse of all the labels from this period, em:t put out everything from trip-hop to world fusion, dark ambient drone and spoken word. The compilations on the label are all worth a listen, but the imprint is best remembered for being the home of Woob's 1194, a world-music sampling sprawl of epic proportions, spawning the 30 minute 'On Earth' and the stunning atmospherics of 'Wuub'. Also of note is 0095 by Mat Jarvis's Gas project (unrelated to the Wolfgang Voigt Gas), which seamlessly blends detroit techno with spacey atmospherics and snippets of experimental sound design, and one of the most uplifting sounding records of the period. International People's Gang's 3395 is a bit cluttered, but the closest the era ever came to pure plunderphonics, and is a lot of fun.

The label lasted until 1997, and was briefly resurrected in the '00s by friends of the original owners. Its slow release rate makes it one of the easiest to explore, although the lack of streaming representation for most of the albums means piracy is the only way to discover them.


Beyond / Waveform
The first real ambient dub label, UK imprint Beyond, and its US counterpart Waveform, are most well known for their Ambient Dub series of compilations, all of which are great examples of the sound. Beyond also has a few noteworthy album in its own right, particularly Another Fine Day's superb Life Beyond Land. The project of occasional Orb collaborator Tom Green, the album blends mellow ambient dub with acoustic instrumentation that lends the music an incredibly rural, almost rustic feel that falls closer to the cover art of Chill Out than any other album of the time; Green has since gone on to further this sound, bringing in acoustic jazz elements. Higher Intelligence Agency, the ambient dub project of Bobby Bird, released its two albums on Beyond, the former, Colourform, sounding like a perfect blend of Orbital and The Orb, and the latter, Freefloater, adopting a darker, more IDM bent with more than a touch of Autechre. Bird would also collaborate with Biosphere, Pete Namlook and Deep Space Network on a series of excellent albums.

Beyond also branched out away from the chillout room scene, releasing albums by tribal ambient artists Tuu and Stillpoint, a rare alias excursion from Paul Schütze, and even a couple of records by Richard H. Kirk's Electronic Eye project, before closing its doors in 1996, after which its US distributor, Waveform, continued in the dub direction, becoming a home for many of the new generation of psydub producers.


Silent
A label with origins in the industrial scene, Kim Cascone's Silent was the only one to make the leap from the tribal ambient sound to ambient house. Sensing more than a little similarities in the sensibilities of both movement, Cascone embraced the new sound fully, and although occasional more experimental works were still released, the 1993-1996 output of the label is almost entirely within the chill out world. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given its home in San Fransisco, it's by far the most hippyish of the main ambient labels of the time, with a DIY, almost lo-fi feel to things at times: if the worst excesses of the era are off putting to you, then it's a label to avoid. The music here feels informal, like jams created for people's own parties, with some of the most garish artwork of the time. There are great records to be found, though, if the small scale feel isn't an issue. Trancendental Anarchists' Cluster Zone is a great melange of elements thrown together. Cascone's own albums as Heavenly Music Corporation are all recommended, especially the beautiful Consciousness III, the Ambient Temple of Imagination albums feel like improvisations at an ambient house ritual, and the From Here to Tranquility compilation series is excellent. The Deep Space Network Earth to Infinity project received a belated US reissue here in 1994. Just avoid the John C. Lilly dolphin album at all costs.

Cascone sold the label in 1996, and it was used to release some dance music for a couple of years before being quietly put to bed. He then went on to experiment with pure sound using computers, becoming part of the experimental sound art world for many years, before eventually relaunching Silent as a digital label in 2016. Most of the artists on the label probably work in banks now.


Apollo
The ambient offshoot of the respected Belgian dance label R&S, Apollo was founded purely to release Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works 85-92, a momentous moment in itself. Probably the most IDM-leaning of all the '90s ambient labels, Apollo has probably the most consistently listenable catalogue too. Alongside reissuing albums from FAX, Rising High and Biosphere, the label also released some incredible albums of its own: Robert Leiner's Visions of the Past, with one foot in ambient and the other in techno, sums up the era better than almost any other album; Tournesol's Kokotsu combines ambient house sampling with Warp-like IDM in a seamless manner, and features some of the most haunting melodies of the time; Sun Electric's live album 30.7.94 is, to my mind, the best live electronic album ever released; Subsurfing's Frozen Ants is a top drawer slice of ambient dub from friends of The Orb. Albums by Cabaret Voltaire and Locust also feel remarkably prescient, released in early 1994 and pointing towards the darker, harsher sounds of the coming years at the point when albums like Lifeforms and 76 14 were still being released. While I can't say I love them all, I can confidently say that there's not a single bad album in the label's 1992-1995 run.

After some floundering with new styles in the late '90s - the Thomas Fehlmann records are probably the only really good releases after '96 - the sublabel folded; since it reappeared in 2012, releases have mostly had little to do with ambient.


Instinct Ambient
New York's premier dance label released a couple of ambient-leaning records in 1993: Moby's - frankly rubbish - Ambient, and Hyaline by Human Mesh Dance. The success of these, and the increasing appeal of ambient in general, led to an offshoot label, Instinct Ambient. With Human Mesh Dance's Taylor Deupree in charge of artistic direction, it began issuing a run of solid records, including the debut by Terre Thaemlitz, a second Human Mesh Dance album, the excellent Mindflower, Acrocosm by Omicron, a blend of dark ambient, minimal techno and IDM, and a great collaboration between Omicron and Human Mesh Dance under the name SETI. The music here is a long way from the hedonistic world of ambient house, with these artists all putting out minimal, darkly atmospheric and frequently experimental works, plus the uncharacteristically fun Big Rooms, the US release of Deep Space Network's classic ambient house record.

1995 saw the release of 10 albums as the Instinct Ambient Monthly Series, with matching artwork. These included a superbly bleak SETI album Pharaos, and the darkly 'ethnic' sound of Adham Shaikh's epic Journey to the Sun. The releases generally fitting the isolationist drone/experimental arm of ambient that was emerging at this point, and Deupree's superb artwork makes the releases very collectable. The label hobbled on through to 1997, although, other than a Tetsu Inoue, the later releases are largely forgettable forays into trip-hop and jazzy dub. Deupree got frustrated with the label's move away from ambient and ended up releasing his final Human Mesh Dance, Thesecretnumbertwelve, as the debut release on his 12k label; 12k would become a cornerstone of the minimal/glitch scene in the following years.


Warp Records / Artificial Intelligence
Probably the label that needs the least introduction, Warp was responsible for one of the few 1992 releases that fit this thread: the first Artificial Intelligence compilation. Described as Electronic Listening Music, this compilation features music that's rooted in techno and house, but has a deeper melodic edge that is more suited to home listening, including tracks from Aphex Twin, Autechre, Black Dog, B12, Richie Hawtin, Speedy J and The Orb (although often under different names, for various reasons). This led to a run of albums by all of these artists other than The Orb, all released under the Artificial Intelligence banner. Among these are Autechre's delicately melodic Incunabula which is the finest display of their oft-ignored tunefulness, albeit in a less forward-thinking format than their later work, Richard D. James's eerily atmospheric Polygon Window album Surfing On Sine Waves and B12's gorgeous Detroit-influenced Electro-Soma.

This sound would be abandoned by the label's always forward-thinking artists, with Autechre's chilly Amber - always one of my favourites, despite this board's seeming dislike of it - a rare example of a 1994 release in a similar vein. That year, Aphex Twin released Selected Ambient Works Vol II, a largely beatless work of ambience that is a world away from the chill out rooms of the time: its paranoid sounds would instead help influence both the isolationist drone scene, as well as future IDM producers. The Artificial Intelligence series's biggest legacy is helping name one of the most misunderstood genres. The Hyperreal IDM online discussion list was so named as a joke: if these compilations were about artificial intelligence, then maybe the music itself had some kind of intelligence; hence Intelligent Dance Music. Of course, the easier reading of this term is that it's music for, and by, 'intelligent' people, and the name has gone on to be loathed by just about everybody ever since.


Recycle or Die
An oft-forgotten little group of records released on a sub-label of Eye Q Records, Recycle or Die's brief time featured a range of interesting releases, including label owner Stevie Be-Zet's epic, melancholic synth work Archaic Modulation, which is one of the most unfairly forgotten albums of the era, and two albums by Baked Beans, a downtempo group whose repetitive, percussive music feels like an ambient house equivalent of Steve Reich's brand of minimalism. The label was also one of few to branch out and release an album by Solitaire, a tribal ambient project featuring Steve Roach, finding shared ground with artists not even tangentially related to club music.


Other stuff
A bit of a sweeping statement, perhaps, but the vast majority of good music from the era was released on those labels. There are a lot of other albums from the time which are amateur crap, cash-in rubbish (especially found from mid-'95 onwards), dance artists with a few slower tracks and so on. There are a few albums I have found that I enjoy, though. The Infinity Project's Mystical Experience is generally the start of the 'psy' movement, and is probably better than any of the albums that followed it. Epic atmospherics, psychedelic synth sequences, spoken samples and dubby beats, it's an excessive example of the style, but the excellent compositions keep it together. Neotropic's 15 Levels of Magnification is a paranoid portrait of London in the mid '90s, dubby trip-hop beats blended with field recording soundscapes and melodic ambient pieces; Riz Maslen was dating Brian Dougans of FSOL at the time, and apparently learned a lot of her production chops from the band. It shows, and some tracks feel reminiscent of FSOL in a way that works really well for me. Glide's Space Age Freakout is a live album by Echo and the Bunnymen's Will Sergeant that is basically a very fun take on the early sample-based ambient house approach. Had it been released shortly after its performance, it would probably have gone down as a minor classic; by the time it came out in 1997, it was hideously dated, and it's only with a lot of hindsight that it can be appreciated properly. Transambient Communication's Praze-An-Beeble is a charmingly lo-fi collection of shoegaze-tinged ambient house that could only ever have come out of experimentation during this era. Mystical Sun's Primordial Atmospheres is surprisingly excellent, given its appalling cover and self-released nature, with a great ear for melody and tasteful incorporation of world music elements. Trans-4M's Sublunar Oracles isn't a classic, but is notable for its release in 1992, when very few other artists were creating this music, especially given its broad stylistic range.


What happened next
While the ambient house and ambient techno scenes took some time to take off, once they reached their peak, the albums came thick and fast. 1993 is probably the most consistently creative year, with 1994 feeling like a turning point. By 1995, while plenty of excellent albums were released, many of the best were looking to new pastures, while there were an increasing number of cash-in records and second-rate albums by comparatively talentless producers.

Remarkably, by 1996, the scene had almost completely died. I can't claim to have listened to every single ambient album of the '90s, but I've only found a tiny handful released in 1996 that in any way resemble the peak of the era. Between the darker, more mechanical approach of Apollo artists like Locust and Biosphere, and then the incorporation of jungle into IDM by Aphex, mu-ziq and Luke Vibert in late '95/early '96, non-dancefloor electronica had found a new direction to move after the ambient scene had become stale. Those who didn't embrace IDM moved into other territories: The Orb's final two albums for Island are informed by big beat and trip-hop more than ambient, before embracing dub techno on the Kompakt label; Global Communication's Jedi Knights material found them working in funky breaks; Biosphere spent a long time working with much more abstract sounds; ambient dub gradually dropped the ambient, the psy scene embracing heavy, bassy beats; Taylor Deupree's 12k provided an American outlet for a scene begun in Europe by the likes of Mille Plateaux and Raster-Noton, working in minimal, glitchy areas that developed into clicks & cuts and, eventually, more acoustic-led ambience; Spacetime Continuum followed Pete Namlook into jazzy house; FSOL were set to make a Chemical Brothers-esque psych rock-tinged big beat album before Garry decided to go full-on hippy and transform it into the psychedelic/prog reinvention of Amorphous Androgynous, going on to work with Noel Gallagher and Paul Weller. FAX was the only label to really survive the decade.

Very few artists went near the ambient-with-beats sound for a long time. Psy label Ultimae produced a few records in the style, particularly those of Carbon Based Lifeforms, whose debut Hydroponic Garden feels like the natural successor to the likes of 76 14 and Atmospherics. While dealing more with digital laptop ambience and synth drone, Dutch label Databloem formed in 2002 and gradually began to include more ambient techno and ambient IDM artists over its first decade, gradually building up a small scene. With the untimely death of Pete Namlook in 2012, FAX's US distributor, Ear/Rational Records, set up a new label to put out music that was intended for release on FAX; this label, Carpe Sonum, has gone on to continue Namlook's legacy, although perhaps unsurprisingly, there has been a slight reversion to what is considered the 'classic' FAX sound of spacey, epic ambient. A small but lively scene has since evolved from artists on Databloem and Carpe Sonum to encompass labels like ...txt, Fantasy Enhancing, Neotantra, Before & After Silence, Virtual, Moatun 7, Intellitronic Bubble, Touched Music and Anodize. A lot of good music is released on these labels, although it has to be said that it's all very nostalgic and retro now. I made a thread a couple of years back covering some of these labels and artists, although special mention must be made to Beta Consciousness's Synaesthesia, which came out last year and is probably the most authentic (and brilliant) in the style that I've heard to date. Listen to that here.

Of the original generation of artists, many have reappeared with Bandcamp. Some have just put old albums up, while others like Mystical Sun and Higher Intelligence Agency seem to be putting new music out again. As everything that goes around comes around again, many artists have noticed an upturn in interest and fortunes recently, with the last decade of Orb music generally being considered their best since the early '90s (questionable), Global Communication briefly reforming, Biosphere reappearing after time away to put out a new album each year on his own label, FSOL making a very gradual reappearance from the shadow of Amorphous Androgynous, initially through archived material and finally a new run of albums since Environments 4. Both Biosphere's and FSOL's recent material contains nods to their classic eras, but is thankfully not especially backwards-looking, with the former focusing on albums based around specific equipment each time, and FSOL's modern albums effortlessly blending Amorphous-tinged instrumental psychedelia with complex IDM. Anyone seeking something that sounds like their classic era should probably look elsewhere. Which is as it should be, I reckon.

I've made a Spotify playlist to accompany the thread, which can be found at the top of the post, and also here. And obviously would love to hear what everyone else has to say!

It's great that so many of the above are still releasing music. Biosphere's latest is beautiful.

And to celebrate the re-release on vinyl of the compilation that helped kickstart 'intelligent dance music' (vom) - 1992's Artificial Intelligence on Warp - those happy go lucky rascals Autechre have dropped a 5 hour 'contextual remix' on mixlr.com, and also here:

[Video Game Fan 2000]

i forgot to bump this thread to big up everyone who recommended the reload record

exactly what i was looking for

[BlodwynPig]

Which one? There's a standard CD/LP, and also a completely different vinyl-only release, both with the same name. I've only heard the former, and yes, it's tremendous.Oh, yes, I've heard so much shit music from this period, you wouldn't believe it. Banco de Gaia are a great example. I have a certain fondness for stuff that verges on worldbeat (there's certainly a fair amount of sampling in FSOL, Syzygy, The Orb, etc., but Enigma's second album is as close to a 'guilty pleasure' as I get - naff, but excellently done), so I had a certain amount of high hopes for Banco de Gaia, but every time I've tried them I've come away cringing.They were released by the same people who did the Volume series of compilations. Basically a CD and magazine in a 12x13cm box. I have a lengthy list of '90s compilations that I want to pick up one day, and the TEEX releases are very much on there.

How dare you! Last Train to Lhasa was immense. You must have been into the more minimal angular stuff.

I tell you what is good - the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa's hypnagogic masterpiece Free-D

[Video Game Fan 2000]

I tell you what is good - the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa's hypnagogic masterpiece Free-D

wait the same as did that shoegaze ep the blogs liked in 2008

[BlodwynPig]

wait the same as did that shoegaze ep the blogs liked in 2008

2 likes, 0 comments, a glimpse at god.

[BlodwynPig]

[BlodwynPig]

wait the same as did that shoegaze ep the blogs liked in 2008

This seems to explain their (temporary) deviation from 'noise/shoegaze'

Shoegaze band from Czech Republic. In 1994, somebody broke into the EOST house and stole all the instruments. After this, Jan P. Muchow bought an old PC and started to create electronic music. Others members left the band.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

the fuck

i was joking, but it actually is? i gotta listen, i love that EP

[dontpaintyourteeth]

I'm going to have to listen to it as well because I liked that EP too

[hermitical]

Found this 5-hour 'contextual mix' from Autechre that was streamed in December:



https://autechre.mixlr.com/recordings/1977679

Tracklist including YouTube links