The 10 Greatest Ambient Tracks Of All Time

Ambient is anything but a singles genre. The album form is made for the beatless drifts that define ambient music, which developed meaningfully in the mid-‘70s from a general zeitgeist for a non-rhythmic sound that could be a non-denominational spiritual music.

It’s no coincidence that most of these tracks are over 10 minutes long: Ambient music suspends the listener outside of time, a difficult feat for music to achieve in the short form. When the listener knows a song will end soon, it becomes a lot harder to get lost in it.

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This list compiles the 10 greatest ambient tracks of all time—according to me, I guess—taking into account their merits as a stand-alone listening experience, and what they tell us about the era they were recorded in.

Miles Davis – “He Loved Him Madly” (1974)

Conservatively, the first ambient track is Brian Eno’s “Discreet Music” from 1975, but take the broader view and there’s a strong argument for Miles Davis’s 32-minute electric masterpiece—or maybe it’s the last track of whatever came before ambient. Cited as an inspiration by Eno himself, “He Loved Him Madly” represents the furthest extreme of Davis’ electric experiments in beatless, structure-agnostic collages with producer Teo Macero.

Brian Eno – “1/1” (1978)

The plaintive piano notes that open Ambient 1: Music for Airports are the first sounds many encountered in connection with ambient music, and the album that gave the genre its name is still widely cited as its greatest. This despite Music for Airports being rather annoying and distracting when played in an actual airport. Mischievous UK crew The Black Dog tried to one-up Eno with an album called Music for Real Airports, and though it’s arguably the more interesting release heard in 2024, “1/1” remains iconic—the first track many think of when they think of ambient music, and likely the first many heard.

Harold Budd – “Bismillahi ‘Rrahman ‘Rrahim” (1978)

Harold Budd’s Pavilion of Dreams is one of the earliest and best ambient albums, and it’s helpful to think of it as an actual pavilion: an attempt at creating architecture through music, akin to Eno’s conception of a music that could be “wallpaper” but far less utilitarian and more decorative. Marion Brown’s saxophone vaults through the air like the arches of a great mosque or cathedral, while harps swell from deep in the mix and bells ring out like pinpricks of light. The presence of Brown, an avant-garde stalwart who played with John Coltrane on Ascension, reinforces ambient music’s link to free jazz’s experiments in timbre and sound design.

Laraaji – “Trance Celestial” (1983)

Though best-known for attracting Brian Eno’s attention while busking in New York, Laraaji was already deep into pursuing his own vision of ambient music, defined by zithers and dulcimers fed through a gauntlet of pedals until transformed into a metallic shimmer. Though his early music was more abrasive and used unconventional tools like chopsticks to coax harsh sounds from his strings, his later music piled on the phaser goop, resulting in some of the purest and most comforting drone imaginable. His music has never sounded more amniotic than on the multi-part “Trance Celestial.”

Steve Roach – “Structures from Silence” (1984)

After recording some of the earliest American music to bear the influence of Germany’s Berlin School kosmische bands, Roach discovered the Oberheim synthesizer and began a formidable mid-‘80s run with Structures from Silence. The main attraction on that 1984 release is the half-hour title track, on which Roach opens vast chasms with his left hand as the melody crescendos so gradually as to practically evade notice. This is about as good as pure ambient synthesizer music gets, and a lot of music he put out between Structures from Silence and 1988’s Dreamtime Return is on or near this level.

Gigi Masin – “Clouds” (1986)

Surely “Clouds” is an odd title for a track whose physicality is its greatest strength. It seems to continually turn itself inside-out, revealing new colors with every throb of the Italian composer Gigi Masin’s synthesizer. After a limited 1986 release, “Clouds” got into the hands of crate-diggers and has been sampled by everyone from Bj?rk to Nujabes to Post Malone. Producers’ plundering of limited-run releases has led to all manner of obscure artists being rediscovered, few as deserving as Masin, who recorded much of his best work in the last decade both solo and with Gaussian Curve.

Hiroshi Yoshimura – “Surround” (1986)

Commissioned as a soundtrack to a line of prefab homes, Hiroshi Yoshimura’s 1986 album Surround is one of the jewels of Japanese kankyō ongaku, or environmental music. The title track is the strongest summation of Yoshimura’s delicate, minimal and deeply evocative sound design. It plays like a chemical reaction, bubbling and effervescing.

Oval – “Do While” (1995)

Ambient got a new lease on life in the ‘90s when experimental electronic artists started integrating pop progressions into their sound. Oval, a group of German pranksters known for scribbling on CDs with markers and recording the results, pioneered this shift on 1994’s Systemisch and the masterpiece 94diskont the following year. “Do While” sprawls across half that album, stripping a pendulous sample of vibraphone down to a shell of itself, pioneering the junction of Wilsonian-Bacharachian sophistication with digital interference that would define much of the best ambient music in the 1990s.

DJ Sprinkles – “Grand Central, Part II (72 Hrs. by Rail From Missouri)” (2008)

DJ Sprinkles’ Midtown 120 Blues is an epic treatise on the erasure of house music’s queer history and a tribute to the undersung and underpaid DJs, queens, and voguers that defined the deep-house scene in 1990s Times Square. At the album’s climax, the kick drum drops away entirely and we’re left unmoored and adrift in one of the most heartbreaking ambient tracks of all time—a visualization of the feelings of confusion and loss experienced by a young, queer runaway arriving in New York City, shot through with the screams of a preacher and a voiceover describing a gay-bashing.

Huerco S. – “A Sea of Love” (2016)

Young Kansas City producer Brian Leeds has been a leading figure in the last 10 years of American ambient music, fostering a community of like-minded artists through his West Mineral label and pioneering a murky style drawn from ‘90s Mille Plateaux-style ambient, but substituting its unease about a computer-driven future with a druggier paranoia: Imagine Vladislav Delay on deliriants. Recorded under his best-known moniker Huerco S., “A Sea of Love” seems to consist primarily of fog, and the sequencer burbling deep in the mix is an anchoring and vaguely threatening presence.

André 3000 – “I Swear, I Really Wanted to Make a ‘Rap’ Album But This Is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me This Time” (2023)

The ragged synth progression and digitized birdsong that opens the longest song ever to chart on the Hot 100 will likely become as iconic to younger ambient fans as “1/1” is to older fans. The one-time Southern rap eccentric André Benjamin turned heads when he announced his solo album would be a collection of “no bars” ambient tracks recorded with members of the L.A. New Age scene orbiting producer Carlos Ni?o. What’s surprising is that New Blue Sun is one of the strongest albums from that scene, both challenging and comforting, proud to fly its freak flag but far from a vanity project.

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