Favorite ambient / instrumental music?

A Winged Victory for the Sullen. This album is held together only by gossamer strings of piano, violin, and harp with an occasional bassoon and French horn. Not to be listened to if you’re going to have any conversation or be doing anything to take your attention away from this quiet, soothing, healing album.

The Sinking of the Titanic. Side A: Where beauty and sadness intersect, where memory presses the hand of tragedy, where pain and pleasure mingle until the two are indistinguishable, and tears are the wine of blessedness. I guess it’s funny how pacific the depths of the Atlantic can be. Side B: Poignant that a homeless man sings about Jesus never failing him. I guess it makes sense, since Our Blessed Lord was homeless, too. The music Bryars sets this weakly- yet beautifully-sung phrase to is like teeth back in the old geezer’s gums, like flesh back on his withered bones. Just a note: it looks like the Spotify tracklist is backwards.

Many of the recommendations here are great (glad to see a Zoe Keating mention) and I'll have to add a few of these I hadn't heard of to my work playlist. I'd add a few albums to the mix:

• Aphex Twin: Selected Ambient Works Volume II - Ambient electronica, very quiet/mellow
• Nine Inch Nails: Ghosts I-IV, V, and VI - Very different from other NIN albums, similar to Aphex Twin's ambient albums. I think V is my favorite of these.
• Snarky Puppy: We Like It Here - Wonderful live jazz. Manages to fit in virtuoso instrumental performances without being super wanky about it.
• Godspeed You! Black Emperor: Any album, but I think F# A# ∞ is my favorite. Postrock.
• Orbital: The Box pt 1 & 2 on In Sides are my favorites. Electronica.

I love to listen to Ludovico Einaudi! Everything he does is magnificent!

I also love instrumental music! It's so great to work and generally relax to.

Here are some of my favourties:

Abzu by Austin Wintory

This is a soundtrack from a great indie game, which sets you exploring this underwater world, and the soundtrack captures the feeling excellently.

Balsams by Chuck Johnson

Very ethereal I would say, but a fantasic album and very relaxing.

Loveless Shadows by City Girl

This is a bit more lo-fi, so I don't quite know if this is the sort of thing you will be looking for - but I think it's excellent!

Man of Steel Sketchbook by Hans Zimmer

Unsure if you're interested in movie soundtracks, but this is one of my absolute favourite pieces of music! It starts out very slowly and builds up to this crescendo, using all the main msuical motifs from the soundtrack.

The Universe Smiles Upon You by Khruangbin

These are quite a famous band, so you may have heard of them - a bit more upbeat and fast compared to Balsams, but equally as good - perfect for summer days, in my opinion.

Stellaris by Andreas Waldetoft

Another game soundtrack, but this one takes place in space - there's a couple 'war' songs in there, which aren't that peaceful obviously haha, but some truly great songs are in there - my personal favourite is Faster Than Light.

Interstellar by Hans Zimmer

I'm almost certain you will have heard of this one, but if not: it's one of my all time favourite films, and the soundtrack is my favourite of all time! Stay is increedible and quite moving I would say, but Murph is my absolute favourite.

I'm going to stop myself there before I get carried away, but let me know what you think, or if you like any of them :)

Two bands I have been massively into lately are Russian Circles and Nordic Giants. I had Blood Year by the former and Symbiosis by the latter playing on a loop when I was writing my Masters dissertation last year. Highly recommended soundscapey goodness.

Another album I was looping was Heilung's Lifa. This isn't strictly instrumental, but most of the lyrics aren't in English, and those that are are so stylised that it's hard to necessarily call it singing!

Perhaps not what you're looking for, but I've been listening to Ensembles by Chapelier Fou for quite awhile.

Also:

A Winged Victory for the Sullen.

Julia Kent

Zoe Keating

All contemporary, with the last two being cellists and composers.

*Zoe Keating - Optimist

Julia Kent - Tourbillon

You can’t go wrong with Stars of the Lid. Any album is great, each with a different mood.

For something more energetic, I’ve really come to enjoy I Am Robot and Proud and Shuta Hasunuma.

Also, there are technically words but unless you speak Icelandic they won’t distract you - one of my favorites of all time is Loksins Erum Við Engin by Múm. You just need to make sure it’s the Icelandic version and not the English (Finally We Are No One).

I have always loved The Word As Power by Lustmord as a particularly icy slice of crushing cinematic ambient.

This Patch of Sky - The Winter Day Declining
Post-rock instrumental, pretty calming

World’s end girlfriend - 100 years of choke / 百年の窒息
Paints a vivid picture of the world coming to an end, but not before accepting a melancholic fate

YĪN YĪN - One Inch Punch
Psychedelic rock inspired by retro Southeast Asian music

Kokoroko - Kokoroko (2019-EP)
Not sure how to describe it. Jazzy afternoon tea time?

These are all different, but I hope you check these out!

There are so few genres that I have trouble appreciating... ambient is one of them. The best ambient track I've ever heard is Reflector by Bing & Ruth. It's as if they turned a sunrise into music. Their albums are pretty damn good too.

I guess I haven't got the patience - music that moves so slowly rarely holds my attention, I drift off to other things and forget it's even playing. I tend to tap out at instrumentals like Shuan by Nightnoise. I do go in for ambient drum and bass, though. My favorite album in that genre is The Seduction of Claude Debussy by Art of Noise.

Post rock is another fine genre for instrumentals. The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place by Explosions In The Sky is a stone cold masterpiece, and so is Young Mountain by This Will Destroy You.

When it comes to long-form instrumental masterpieces, though, no artist alive or dead compares to Mike Oldfield. If I put him at the #1 spot on a top ten list, I have to leave spots #2 and #3 empty just to drive home how good he is. He's better than Zappa, he's better than Dylan, he's better than The Beatles, and he's better than dusty old Mozart if you like long form instrumentals. My username comes from one of his albums. I know every single note on every single album he's made from memory, and I can't say that about any other artist. His albums just never get old.

Most of Mike's fans would tell you that Ommadawn is his masterwork but I think it's more about what mood you're in. I dig Hergest Ridge and Songs of Distant Earth just as much, and Amarok is utter insanity. Tubular Bells II and Incantations are the most chilled out of the bunch.

When you listen to Mike, it's all him. He can play dozens of instruments, and he writes it all and plays it all himself, with occasional guests from time to time. His albums are borederline unperformable as live sets - just look what it took to get Tubular Bells II off the ground.

Edit: I'm so glad this topic made me search for any recent Oldfield live takes. Someone has done the impossible - a mere four weeks ago - and performed a live oldfield album in a way that does it justice. I am floored.

I'm a big ambient fan, so I'll throw out some recommendations that deserve to be mentioned but others haven't covered (can very much second A Winged Victory for the Sullen and Stars of the Lid, though).

25,000 Kittens - 25,000 Kittens: Short EP of around 20 minutes, themed around the artist mourning their pet cats, sad and comforting.

Dino Spiluttini - Ceremony; Christmas Drones for the Sad and Lonesome; All I Want Is to Be a Happy Man: Dense, thick, synth-heavy ambient albums that walk a fine line between unnerving and comforting.

Áine O'Dwyer - Music for Church Cleaners: Not strictly ambient, but close enough. Improvised church organ music with a lot of background noise seeping in at times.

Claire M. Singer - Solas: Mostly organ-focused, classical-adjecent drone with some folky melodies. Sometimes has the ambient version of the kind of buildups you'd expect from post-rock.

Crown of Cerberus - Her Everlasting Strength: Synths and vocal manipulation, slightly creepy but beautiful.

Foresteppe - Maeta: A lot of tape manipulation and field recordings, quirky, a bit uncomfortable but in a pleasant way.

I actually have plenty more to recommend is anyone is interested, but this should be a good start.

My favorites are:

• Burial - Burial and Burial - Untrue; peak of the whole future garage/dubstep kinda stuff imo, wonderful, larger than life atmosphere, strong songwriting and beautiful sound design. If Untrue is a large, black and white dystopian city at night, then the debut is more like leaving said city by car and driving on the highways outside, with nothing but the night sky and distant lights of houses as scenery.

• Anything Akira Yamaoka ever made for the first four Silent Hill soundtracks (obviously ignoring the vocal tracks here though). I think he and Burial are the only masterminds when it comes to that melancholic, nocturnal ambient sound. In my eyes their sound is also really adjacent, although Yamaoka often enters way more disturbing, horrifying areas in his music which is obvious since it's... Silent Hill.

• Probably most stuff by Bohren & der Club of Gore. I think they're part of the same group in terms of atmosphere as Burial and Yamaoka, except I do think that Burial and Yamaoka are quite a notch above them. Still, very good stuff. What I do prefer about Bohren over the rest though is that Bohren takes a way more slow and quiet approach than them.

• Kenji Kawai's 1995 Ghost in the Shell soundtrack. If Untrue is the sound of a dystopian city by night, then this OST is like what you'd get if you went like at least 1000 years into the future, and then realized that the city was actually Tokyo all along. The music just has this really particular mix of spiritual and sci-fi vibes (which is probably what the movie was going for as well, though I'm not entirely sure as I found it rather confusing, lol) that's highly intriguing, it's like religious hymns for a world where everyone is interconnected through some sort of Sword Art Online esque brain link into a digital world.

There's probably more too, but I can't think of anything else atm. Sadly I never really got into most "proper" standalone ambient and adjacent stuff like Tim Hecker, Stars of the Lid, William Basinski, etc, I think I prefer my ambient and atmospheric music more... song-like? I guess? That's typically more present in soundtracks, melodies and stuff I mean.

I can't recommend the YouTube channel "The Dungeon Synth Archives" enough. You really do feel like you're wandering the environments of old video games, listening to it.
https://youtube.com/@TheDungeonSynthArchives

Have you ever heard of Tycho? His album Dive has been my #1 get-shit-done album for the last 12 years, although my favorite song is Dictaphone's Lament off Past is Prologue (another great album).

I love Jazz, so I could recommend a lot of different bands, but I'll stick with two:

Joy on Fire - a Jazz/Punk band that I don't even remember how I heard about but is really really awesome.

Casiopea - Japanese Jazz fusion band that got big in the 80's and afaik is still active today.

I saw that someone else had mentioned Aine O'Dwyer. I'd throw in my two cents and recommend more organ goodness, though more in the drone-y direction:

• Kali Malone - The Sacrificial Code
• Sarah Davachi - In Concert & In Residence

Some other flavors of ambient:

• Drone, tape loops:
  • Éliane Radigue - L'île re-sonante
  • William Basinski - The Disintegration Loops III
• Warm drone:
  • Nicholas Szczepanik - Please Stop Loving Me
  • Belong - October Language
• Ambient techno:
  • Gas - Pop
  • Jan Jelinek - Loop-finding-jazz-records
  • Voices from the Lake - S/T
• Guitar loops:
  • Fripp & Eno - Evening Star
  • Yseulde - I'm Happy. Anyway, I'm Not Dying.
• New Age-y:
  • Hiroshi Yoshimura - Green
• Modern classical, jazz, electronic:
  • Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & The London Symphony Orchestra - Promises
• (OG ambient?):
  • Brian Eno - Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks

There's also Music for programming if that's more of what you're looking for.

P.S. I realize as I'm writing this that a lot of these recommendations are very Western-centric. Does anyone have recommendations for ambient music outside of the Anglosphere?

I've seen others that I would recommend, but my number one that I think is overlooked or missed would be Rachel's - systems/layers as well as one of the albums that helped start the genre: Brian Eno - Music for airports I.

Beyond that I would recommend stuff like Sigur Ros (not completely ambient), Apparat (the same), Eluvium, and Max Richter (closer to Rachel's material).

Most of the music that I listen to is instrumental, so I have a bunch of recommendations...

If you know of Kurzgesagt, each of their videos has its own background music; the full version of each song is available from Epic Mountain Music. They have a distinct genre, but there's a lot of variety in there songs; there are also recurring themes between the songs for related topics. (Though it'd take a bit of work to categorize them by theme -- they have something like >17hrs of music by now.)

My personal favorites are Immune System 2, Ants, and Egoistic Altruism -- they're long, but they're really good. (Which is a general theme with Epic Mountain Music.)

I also have to second @OnceAndFuture's recommendation of the Stellaris soundtrack; there are lots of good video game soundtracks in the space of ambient/instrumental music.

A few of my recommendations for video game soundtracks:

• FTL by Ben Pruty - Ambient electronic/chiptune space music
• Celeste by Lenna Raine - I'm not sure how well this fits the category of "ambient", but it has really good instrumental music.
• Divinity 2: Original Sin - Ambient fantasy music

I'm a bit more limited on non-video game soundtracks, but here's what I've got:

• Wintergatan - I don't know how to categorize this ("folktronica", according to Wikipedia), but it's instrumental music with a large variety of uncommon instruments. (If you've heard of the Marble Machine, it's the same band that made that.)
• The Legend of Korra Book 1 soundtrack - a mix of 1920s and east Asian styles; I wish more of the music from LoK / Avatar was available, but this is the only official soundtrack.
• Nexflix's She-Ra reboot soundtrack - 80s style electronic/orchestral music

Anything by Tipper. Homage Sliders and Dreamsters are great.
His "Sanger by Singer" and "CoSM" ambient/downtempo audio visual mixes are incredible as well.

Some other similiar artists/albums/mixes:
Somatoast - Living Dreaming
Ovoid - Tipper & Friends 2023 Downtempo Mix
Benji Robot - A Full Moon Bicycle Ride Pt. III
MALAKAI - Tipper & Friends '23 Mix
Cualli - Mastodon
Craftal - Lullabytes
Somatoast - Creation is Creation
Supersillyus - Charade
Dillard - Garden Mother
Version Вizar Experiment - On way to the dreams castle
Downtempo Audio/Visual Mixes

I also have to recommend Polo and Pan. Their new "Odyssey" mixtape was magical.

Balmorhea - All Is Wild, All Is Silent - Not entirely instrumental, but the first track The Settler is a fun little jaunt through folksy Americana

Caspian - either You Are The Conductor or Waking Season - Caspian is just so solid and fun to listen to. Gone in Bloom and Bough is an otherworldly track

Maybeshewill - I Was Here For A Moment, Then I Was Gone - Banger. Red Paper Lanterns is a must.

Audrey Fall - Mitau - This Latvian band drops an absolutely amazing debut, and then proceeds to fall off the face of the earth.

Disintegration Loops – William Basinski.

It’s so breathtakingly beautiful to me. Conversely, my wife cannot stand it lol

24 Postcards in Full Colour by Max Richter

Neoclassical

Joanna Brouk - The Space Between (Side A)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAFMtuXKHdY

In general, this Youtube channel is pretty good:
https://www.youtube.com/@soundsofthedawn

If you're into post rock, you probably already know Long Distance Calling, I love their last album: Eraser.

Way more prog and metal, but Animals As Leaders also are instrumental and they are completely insane musically, it's great: e.g. Conflict Cartography

I have been returning to Mogwai's "Music for a forgotten future" for over ten years now. It's tried and tested!
I just love the long fading out.

Same for the "Moderat/Fauve colaboration" Moderat/Fauve collaboration if you need something upbeat. It has marginal spoken word in the beginning, but unless you speak French, it shouldn't distract.

Most of these are more jazz or post-rock than ambient, but I think they have the vibe you're after ...
Svaneborg Kardyb - Over Tage
Misha Panfilov - The Sea Will Outlive Us All
Sitka Sun - All The Way West
The Messthetics - Anthropocosmic Nest (this is Fugazi's rhythm section with an insane guitarist)
Bruce Langhorne - The Hired Hand soundtrack
Pat Irwin & J. Walter Hawkes - Wide Open Sky

Couple of suggestions here that I haven't seen.

1) Soft Pink Truth - Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase

Of my suggestions, it's the closest to ambient (it's not ambient), particularly the early tracks but it's a concept album that should be seen as one piece so listening to one song one do it justice. That said, if you wanted to get a taste of it, I really enjoy the song Grace

2. Earlier Flying Lotus, specifically Cosmogramma and Until the Quiet Comes

Heavy jazz (he's the grand nephew of Alice Coultrane) and hip hop influence with FlyLo. He owns the Brainfeeder label as well so there are a lot of artists in that label in the electronic space there as well as goofy bass-genius and well known weeb, Thundercat. Really love me Yesterday//Corded from Until the Quiet Comes and Galaxy In Janaki from Cosmogramma

3. Floating Points - Elaenia and Promises

Neuoscience PhD turned electronic jazz musician. Promises was a collaboration with both the London Symphony Orchestra and absolutely immense saxaphonist Pharoah Sanders.

Other suggestions : Dntel of The Postal Service fame did the excellent Life is Full of Possibilities. Not quite instrumental as there are a lot of tracks with vocals. Finally, William Basinski's The Disintigration Loops is an iconic avant-garde/drone album that really isn't my thing but I've listened to it a few times as kind of practice to think about what is/isn't music lol.

Every human being should hear Kind of Blue - Miles Davis before they die.

Headhunters - Herbie Hancock is a gold standard for just how important jazz is to pop music

Expectations - Harvey Sutherland is a testament to the supremacy of synthesizers.

Colma - Buckethead will haunt your dreams the right way.

So for the last 10 yrs or so, one of my go to bands is Beats Antique. Not ambient, but mostly imstrumental. I have a hard time categorizing their sound. It's like a mix of middle eastern imfluences, with a bit of carnival, then toss in some reed instruments. My fave album of theirs is Blind Threshold, but Creature Carnival is a live performance with one track featuring John Popper of Blues Traveler. Seriously good musicians.

Hello Meteor is one of my newer go-to listens for productivity, work, or just casual active listening. Lots of material, too. Genre labels are hard, but I might ascribe ambient, chillout, dreamwave, and maybe a little bit of 90s aesthetic. The most recent album, The Lower Path, is a great jumping off point.

More generally, Four Tet is an incredible musician and producer making ambient, IDM, and general electronic. Earlier material could be considered "folktronica", a label which I am not sure about myself, but could be described as an interesting combination of organic-ish sounds put together in a very electronic way. He is probably my favorite artist, period.

i like master boot record https://masterbootrecord.bandcamp.com/album/internet-protocol

One of my favorite genres of music

Red Sparowes - rock-ish, every album has poetry for the song list

Moon Hooch - NYC street musicians made a band that was too popular for the tubes

Ratatat - electronic, not super light listening, but I like to put it on when I need to focus on stuff if I'm not feeling lo-fi stuff.

*edit
sunn o))) - drone black metal blends

Yo !

Little Cloud - And The Tapes Loop On But I Still Miss You. https://ohlittlecloud.bandcamp.com/album/and-the-tapes-loop-on-but-i-still-miss-you

Unsure if this fully classifies as ambient, but RYM says so , lol . My favorite right now is the summer track

Dawn of Midi is great for this. Very rhythmic and seamless between tracks. I find it’s great for getting into the zone.

Any/all albums by Beyond the Ghost are my go-to background ambient music when I'm writing horror fiction. Really atmospheric and moody, gets some creepy and tense vibes going while also keeping to the background really well. I've bought all his stuff through Bandcamp.

I was on some Apple Music acoustic playlist last week and stumbled on this album that I’ve been really enjoying.

Carlo Domeniconi - Sinbad: A Fairy Tale for Solo Guitar

If you listen to Brian Eno, I feel I should list some of his best ambient work

• The Plateau Of Mirror

• Textures

• Small Craft On A Milk Sea

• Apollo

And of course Music For Airports

I would also recommend a Herald Budd album he produced: The Pavillion of Dreams

I am a big fan of Alex Smaleys collaborations, so everything Pausal and Olan Mill; my favorites by each are Cavade Morlem and Along The Mantic Stream

I really like Steve Riech; Music For 18 Musicians is great to zone out with

If you haven't heard them, I strongly recommend Teebs and Yosi Horikawa. My favorites by them are Ardour and Spaces respectively, but I like all their work.

I like Hakobune for peaceful droning ambient music, and Steve Roach can be good for background music while you do something creative.

New History Warfare vol 2 by Colin Stetson

I got into lullatone a few years ago, great ambient music, if you like Eno, this may work for you

https://www.lullatone.com/

When I'm working I can't listen to music with lyrics. Normally I'll listen to video game/movie OSTs, but recently I've been giving Synthwave a go. In really enjoying TimeCop

my recs are a little old.... while jackie o motherfucker does sometimes include vocals, overall it's weird experimental instrumental stuff and I absolutely love it. Your Cells Are in Motion is my favourite track on the linked album.

Also, Women does feature vocals for the most part, but if you like weird experimental music, they were so so so good. Highly recommend!!

I have a massive soft spot for The Thin Red Line OST by Hans Zimmer. I think it is engrossing while remaining dark, and manages to mingle moments of hope with deep hopelessness in a musical form. I love it. Well worth a listen, I reckon.

You already have a lot of recommendations, but I will add the SomaFM web radio which is amazing for this and has different kind of music: https://somafm.com/

I love Javanese gamelan music.

It's a form of percussion orchestra from South East Asia that is comprised of various gongs, and other percussion instruments and is largely improvisational.

It is not at all racketous; quite the opposite. It is almost hypnotic. I can easily imagine myself in a hardwood tropical jungle in a mild warm rain, hearing the drops pattering off the leaves.

If you're looking for something that occasionally jumps out at you and makes you want to punch the foundation of the building you're in, I would recommend By the Throat by Ben Frost. It's a much darker ambient vibe, but it's super moving, and I liken parts to Enter by Russian Circles (which happens to be one of my favorite albums), and others to Ursus Americanus by Author & Punisher.

This, frustratingly poorly named In Nomine from a Naxos CD of Early Elizabethan music.

Not really anything to contribute here per se except to say THANK YOU to all who've put in their reccommendations!! 😍 😍 I've bookmarked this thread and return to it when needing different music to have on in the background for work. Has been awesome having this to come back to search for artists and music I would have never thought to look for!! My go tos have usually been Hanz Zimmer, Austin Wintory and the like so loving the different types here!! 🙏🙏

It may be a bit cliche nowadays, but for me one can never go wrong with the "lofi girl" stream on YouTube.

The new "Synthwave" stream is pretty good too if you need something a little bit more upbeat, yet still mellow overall.

Vidna Obmana - The River of Appearance is one of my favorite ambient albums. It has a serene and tranquil texture that you can get lost in.

When I need to absolutely focus on writing, my top two are Ludovico Einaudi or Two Steps From Hell.

Not ambient so much as instrumental, unsure if these are the sort of thing you're looking for or not.

I listen to instrumental music probably about 6 hours a day (while I work but am not talking to anyone, I can't concentrate on work if there are lyrics).

A couple of favourites from completely different genres of music I enjoy working to.

Talisk - Echo 22 - I LOVE Talisk, and find listening to them can really lift my mood and, at work, help me get into the flow of things.

Heilung - Norupo - OK, this is actually full of singing and voice but more as sounds and not in any language I understand so my brain processes it the same more or less. Completely different to the above, and rather than infusing me with energy it puts my brain into an almost meditative state.

I have a playlist named “Timeout” it a list of tracks that grab me by the seat of my pants and calm me down. Here are a few of my favorites. (I would provide links but I use Deezer as my Music app)

Valdimir’s Blues - Max Richter
Father Kolbe’s Preaching - Orchestre Philharmonique
Instrumental - Rob Dougan
Threnody - Goldmund
Mass (Re-imagined)- Phoria

Instrumental post rock is my favorite. Godspeed You! Black Emperor, This Will Destroy You, Mono, Russian Circles, Cloudkicker (last two are a bit heavier I’d say) are probably my favorites.

Cloudkicker has performed Subsume (and other songs from other albums) live only once and used Intronaut as his backup band in 2014. It’s on YouTube. Awesome show, wish I could have seen it live.

there are already a ton of great recommendations here! many of which i haven't heard yet, so i'll be digging through things for a while :)

here are few things from "lesser known" artists from various other communities that i enjoy:

conor c ellis - dreamless
sparse and beautiful.

glia - ouanem
lively and rhythmic instrumentals somewhat reminiscent of older tortoise.

dan derks - phylum
minimal electronic ambient works described by a bandcamp reviewer as "a warm and noisy hug" and i can totally agree with that.

emily a sprague - mount vision
beautiful synth and piano works recorded over a single weekend back in 2018

Not a specific song, but aersia vip is a curated playlist of video game soundtrack, almost all of which is instrumental since it’s, well, video game music. It’s been around for a while and is a classic goto when I need some background music.

https://www.vipvgm.net/

I have a playlist of lute music I put on the background and pair with tavern background noise. Helps drown everything out while not being too distracting like something with a beat might have (...I'm easily distracted).

Kiasmos - (self-titled) - downtempo electronic/techno, with some classical influenes

Nils Frahm - Spaces - or any Nils Frahm album really (classical/electronic crossover, mainly piano-driven)

Leon Vynehall - Nothing is Still - this one does have some occasional vocal "effects / ambience" but no lyrics (downtempo House)

Clarice Jensen - Esthesis and The Experience of Repetition as Death - these are probably the most actually ambient of the selections I have here, especially "Repetition". Clarice Jensen is classically trained cellist but both albums are also largely synth-driven

Ben Lukas Boysen - Mirage - downtempo electronic

Philip Glass - Koyaanisqatsi - Glass is one of the defining composers of the Minimalism movement. OST for a fantastic non-narrative 1982 film. I may be in the minority of this one but to listen to it as a piece of music I prefer the 1998 re-recording

Steve Reich - Music for 18 Musicians (here is the original 1978 recording) and Sextet. Reich (along with Glass) is the other defining Minimalism composer. Sextet has been recorded multiple times but I think this recording by Yale Percussion Group is the best which is available only as a YouTube video as far as I know. One of the YT comments describes it as "ambient music on speed" which I think is kind of the perfect description of this piece. Music for 18 is slightly more relaxed in effect but still features Reich's characterisic "pulsing energy"

Thanks for asking this, I'm loving the recommendations in this thread. Here are mine:

• Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks - Brian Eno's finest work IMO. You may already be familiar with it, but I'd also suggest checking out the documentary it was written for, For All Mankind (1989). Criterion did a beautiful release of it.
• The Pearl - One of Brian Eno's collaborations with Harold Budd.
• Music Has the Right to Children - By Boards of Canada, who I ought to explore more myself.
• Blade Runner (soundtrack) - There's also Hans Zimmer's soundtrack for the 2019 sequel, which is fine, but there's no one like Vangelis.
• Uncut Gems (soundtrack) - Composed by Daniel Lopatin, AKA Oneohtrix Point Never. Also check out the film, which is one of my favorites in the past decade.
• Finally, a strong seconding of other commenters' recommendation of Aphex Twin.

Hammock has a great ambient discography

I listen to video game music a lot, so there are too many for me to recommend!

At this very moment I happen to be listening to Valkyrie Profile Arrange Album by Motoi Sakuraba. If you've ever played the game before I strongly recommend listening to this one because these arrangements are fantastic. It turns up the songs "to 11", so to speak.

I've been posting about Hiromi for a while now, and I'm still pretty obsessed. For this discussion I'll recommend Kaleidoscope which is solo piano but reminds me of techno in spots.

Lunar Phase by Heavenly Music Corporation. I found out about this looking into Japan's ST. GIGA satellite radio broadcast that ran until the mid 00s. This album was composed specifically for broadcast on it, and the station followed tidal flow, if I remember correctly, adjusting its programming to synchronize with the moon's cycle, and I believe tidal flow, hence the album name. It's like... standard 90s electronic ambient but it's got a nice sound.

Moby's two Long Ambients albums are great, too. If I'm somewhere I just need to destimulate or go to sleep, I'll put my headphones in and crank up the volume and let it wash over me. One of my best memories is taking the train to visit my dad, an overnight in business class, with this album playing to try to lull me off to sleep with the sound of the train cutting through. I didn't sleep that night (even after two mini Jack Daniels and a melatonin), but it was definitely the most relaxed and content I can remember being in a long time.

Any Dungeon Synth folks on here?
I’ve been getting down on some Malfet recently.

Recently I am listening to long format mixes and one for ambient music that I keep coming back to is low light mixes. They have an archive of a decade+ (?) on their site.

If you enjoy chill solo piano, check out Joep Beving. I love his stuff.

Check-out Flwrs.

Such pretty music he makes.

https://open.spotify.com/artist/2BgzToUhqtHIcFlwBEBKyD?si=XBZXJJsoTwq5Nr_H4H2Eig

One of my favs is a group called Chromelodeon from the US, rock/jam style and they cover the Ninja Gaiden 2 sound track. This is a great thread, reading through all these.

A bit late- Space Funk and Cosmic Jazz Beats with Micaela Grei. One of the more ambient mixes on the channel- or at least instrumental. I'd recommend that channel for interesting, hard to find jazz.

woob - 1194 is ambient electronic / world, and might be my favorite album of all time.

Maybe I missed it as I’m coming in late, but The Disintegration Loops is really something.

Basinski was digitizing some old tape demos he created and realized the tapes were falling apart as he was digitizing them. He decided to let nature run its course while recording. Each loop, you hear old patterns slowly die and new patterns emerge before they themselves are lost to the void. It’s haunting but peaceful, almost like death itself in a way.

It made for excellent ambiance when I was reading House of Leaves.

Leaving hope by Nine Inch Nails.
Buried in the snow by Uematsu Nobuo
Lost at sea by w00ds
Silent life by Kajiura Yuki