The Way My Favorite Ambient/Electronica Albums Make Me Feel (warning: kinda edgy and pretentious)

I guess my music discovery story is a bit backwards because when I started looking for my own music to listen to (instead of only listening to the radio or something, like I did before), which happened in the later half of 2014, I was first interested in the most obscure and experimental stuff I could find - rather than starting with more popular and accessible stuff. And funnily enough, in the following years, I gradually got into more accessible and popular bands. But back to my fascination with experimental music, ambient music was the first genre I really explored. It amazed me that this was a new genre that I'd never heard of before, and that the sounds could be so varied. It could either be something grand you can get lost in, or something subtle that leaves you thinking about its meaning.

Here is a list of my favorite instrumental albums that are genres related to ambient (electronica, noise, some even jazz, etc.), and scenarios I thought of that go with the feel of the music, to exercise my creative writing skills a bit too. I realize that some of these descriptions have turned out a little disturbing, extremely specific, and/or just weird, but I think it's just my nature to do that. (I realized recently that I have a hard time coming up with any story ideas that are not weird or disturbing.) I also realized that I listen to a lot more ambient music than I thought I did, so it turned out really long.

Some of these are more famous but most of them are my obscure favorites, so the other purpose of this post is to shed light on some fantastic records that have sadly gotten very little recognition - so please check out any of these that sound interesting! Most of these are on Spotify so look for them there if you have it, but I've also included relevant links on other websites.

And here's my ambient music playlist if you're interested: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0JbhILQAPDATcUrYQUiop6?si=j8ynGuz4StmTpjlo3MITTA 

Honorable mention: Alog - Unemployed: It doesn't have an overall theme or mood, at least not one that I can put into words, because everything here is so different. Every song is its own painting. It defies genre. It's not quite electronic, but not quite organic. They've invented their own instruments and recorded and mixed things in such extremely unconventional ways that you have no clue how this music was made, which is rare in our day and age when you'd think that all music-making methods have been exhausted. But everything still fits together. It's definitely at least one of my top 20 albums ever, and favorite by Alog (who definitely deserve more fans for how original and crazy they are).

Now for the actual list:

• Phonophani - Genetic Engineering: You're in an old abandoned GMO lab and you're reliving the tragedy of what happened there. Sometimes you don't know what is real or what is virtual.
• Brian Eno - Ambient 4 / On Land: You're lost in a dark forest and surrounded by strange, disturbing, unidentifiable creatures. Their unique sounds make you feel sad and lonely.
• Biosphere - Substrata: You're alone in the arctic sea but there is a ghost of a man saying incomprehensible things to you, and he does not respond to anything you do.
• Phonophani - Animal Imagination: You're being abducted by aliens.
• Biosphere - Autour de la Lune: You're completely isolated in a ship in the middle of space but there are remnants of the people that used to be with you.
• Brian Eno - Ambient 1 / Music For Airports: You are in an airport. Just kidding. You are stuck inside a primitive old Windows computer but there is something strangely comforting and nostalgic about it.
• Svarte Greiner - Knive: It's the middle of the night and you're stuck in your isolated cabin in the middle of the woods trying to fall asleep, but you find yourself walking around instead. Eventually, you fall asleep on a pile of leaves. 
• Jherek Bischoff - Cistern: You're inside a giant empty tank for hours, and you start hearing music in the complete silence, and having hallucinations about various natural landscapes and characters.
• Sonic Youth / Jim O'Rourke - Invito Al Cielo (Syr 3): All you can hear from your house is construction noises, which you feel like you should be annoyed by, but you become enveloped and start hearing melodies in them. 
• Deathprod - Imaginary Songs From Tristan da Cunha: You're visiting the most isolated island in the entire world, and the natives will not talk to you. The sky is very dark and cloudy and it seems it will never let up. They start playing their extremely strange music that is unlike anything else you have heard before, and you're not sure how it makes you feel, but you record it on your vintage tape recorder, picking up other random sounds in the process. You fall asleep for the first time on the island, and have the most vivid and disturbing dream of your entire life. In the dream, demons and bats are flying all around your head, moving inside you, and constantly shrieking and screaming, and rumbling and vibrating when they are not. You wake up from the dream and see that you are actually performing on stage at a late night show in a theater, with bright spotlights in your face that obscure the faces of the audience members. The audience applauds and gives you a standing ovation.
• Osamu Sato - Objectless: You're working your job in a factory for hours upon end and the monotony is driving you insane. Sometimes you envision the happier times in your life and hear subtle pleasant music in the background. But you keep coming back to the monotony, and you have a headache that throbs and pulses like a beat and makes it hard to hear anything or anyone else. 
• Phonophani - Phonophani: You haven't left the house for months, and haven't talked to anyone the whole time. You've started to realize that your hearing has improved greatly after living in silence for a long time. There is no sound small enough for you to not hear. 
• Sonic Youth / Tim Barnes - Koncertas Stan Brakhage Prisiminimui (Syr 6): You're trapped in a dark facility full of horrifying mutated monsters... but sometimes something is oddly thrilling and pleasurable about it.
• Kim Hiorthøy - Hei: It's the time of your childhood again, when things were all fun and simple. 
• Phonophani - Kreken: You're exploring an ancient empty building that you've never been in before, with broken windows that let sunlight pour in everywhere. But everything feels wrong; things are upside-down, it's hard to walk, gravity has almost shifted somehow while you are there. It might be haunted. 
• Alog - Red Shift Swing: You're traveling with a time machine and every time you land in a new era you don't know what's going on. Sometimes there are people, sometimes they play music, sometimes you are alone and it is silent. 
• Alog - Miniatures: Your time machine broke and you don't know what year it is but you're stuck there, and it's rather loud and crowded there. But despite all the noise and disturbances, you're still determined to make music out of something, anything. 
• Alog - Amateur: It's a rainy day and you're bored at your house and you try to make music by scraping random stuff or throwing things at the wall or setting stuff on fire. It sounds good to you but you know everyone else would find it weird. 
• Lee Ranaldo - Ambient Loop For Vancouver: You're at a rest stop in the middle of the American country while on a long road trip. Wind chimes, breeze, and the rustling of the trees. You feel déjà vu every time you come to another rest stop. 
• Body/Head - The Switch: What being scared and cold in a pitch-black room feels like.
• Yellow Swans - Going Places: It is the last thing you hear before you ascend into the afterlife.
• Kim Myhr - All Your Limbs Singing: You're alone in the middle of nowhere in the desert but it's actually quite peaceful.
• Visible Cloaks - Reassemblage: Exploring various natural sceneries in virtual reality. They don't look quite real.
• Kim Myhr - You | Me: You're going out for a run near the lake in a downtown area, early enough in the morning that almost no one is there. There's something beautiful yet disturbing about being isolated in a place where you should not be. 
• Kikiyama - Yume Nikki Soundtrack: It sounds like how the game looks, but in a real dream that you're having instead of a pixelated image on your screen.
• Probably my favorite game ever, with a very unique and atmospheric soundtrack too. I could write for so long about how this game is amazing, but I think that's for its own post. The video I linked to has pictures for each track that show how the songs connect so well with the aesthetic of the game, if you don't want to play the whole thing (but you should). I also recommend the soundtrack of the 3D sequel (but not the game itself, I don't know if it's really worth your money - I paid for it twice to get it on two platforms - one of them didn't even work - and I have deep regrets...) Many Yume Nikki fangames have phenomenal soundtracks as well such as Yume 2kki.
• Facade Soundtrack: You are being held hostage. 
• This game is universally regarded as terrible and ugly but all joking aside, it has an unexpectedly high-quality avant-garde, minimalist, and atmospheric soundtrack that I legitimately recommend. Now why in the world does a game that takes place in an apartment, about a couple trying to fix their broken marriage, have such a creepy soundtrack? It's a hard question to answer, but if it says anything, I think it's that the game developers weren't just fooling around.
• Biosphere / Deathprod - Nordheim Transformed: You're having a dream about something that could never plausibly happen in real life, but it still feels incredibly real.
• Oval - Systemisch: Your parents put in their favorite CD that you've heard so many times already, and you're skeptical that it's going to work at all anymore because they don't bother making sure the CD doesn't get scratched - they just throw it around random places in the car and it got quite ruined over time. But when it starts playing, the songs have been so warped from their original form with the scratches on the CD that it's a completely new creation.
• Sondre Lerche / Kato Adland - The Sleepwalker Soundtrack: The power has been out in your house for days. You hate living in the darkness for so long with your family who hate talking to you, and circling around the same areas of the hallways, the garage, and the nearby lake, but you don't have the motivation to drive somewhere else. You keep having nightmares. You start to think you're being haunted.
• Side note: I watched the actual movie. It was bad.
• Sonic Youth - Silver Sessions For Jason Knuth: You're surrounded by loud machines. Airplanes. TVs that only pick up noise. Air conditioners. Giant fans. Washing machines. 
• Arve Henriksen - Chiaroscuro: Waking up early in the morning in the rainforest.
• Josh - Fear of People: For months, you isolate yourself in your house and close all the blinds, and only go outside at night to drive around aimlessly, sit in the grass and look at the stars, or walk through a graveyard. The TV and random old recordings you have of your friends are all that you've been listening to - not even music - and they have the ability to transport you to another time and place. Sometimes the feelings get so intense that you forget what music and melody sounds like, but sometimes there is a glimpse of hope, and you get a tune stuck in your head.

Women in Music Word Vomit

So I had an assignment for school to pick two topics and just do a "word vomit" about them by writing as much as I possibly can about it (as preparation for an essay), and one of my topics was women in music since I have a LOT to say about that. And after I wrote this, I thought "Hey, I could put this on my inactive music blog that no one reads!"

Unfortunately, I ended up writing about my other topic for my actual essay, which is "How Much I Hate The Bachelor".

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Music is pretty much the main thing I think about these days. I spend all my free time listening to music (which is a big reason why I never really get into TV shows and movies, because I’m using up all my time for music). So bonding with people over music is really important and exciting for me. However, I almost always feel like I have to “promote” the genius of female singers to my friends. I know a few people who only listen to one, two, or zero female artists. (I know this one funny meme reaction picture I saw that could apply to this that’s just an interviewer guy going up to people on the street saying “For one dollar, name a woman” - I saw it on a reply of one post of a person naming all the best actors but they were inexplicably all male.) When I tell them that my music taste these days is mostly women (I actually used this website made by Spotify that tells you the gender of artists you listen to, and it said I listen to 91% women, while most other people commenting on the website said they had 99% men or something like that), they usually respond saying that they’re not sure why they don’t listen to a lot of women.

I think this might have to do with how they’re disparaged by the industry and always get the short end of the stick. Their art is not taken as seriously and their innovations are thought of as immature, but when men do similar things and stretch boundaries, they get praised for it. One comparison I’ve seen someone make is Kate Bush and David Bowie. Both were extremely innovative in the new things that they did with their music. But while David Bowie is a worldwide famous icon, Kate Bush is not much more than a “cult artist”, meaning very few are familiar with her work (especially beyond her hit songs), especially outside of her home of the UK. And it probably has to do with how Kate Bush is a woman and how her high-pitched voice (in earlier recordings) and dramatic vocal experimentation (in later recordings) is not taken seriously at all. I guess Bjork, another one of my favorites, is also included here. She is one of the most innovative and experimental singers to ever make it big, but people (especially Americans) only seem to know her for her “infamous” swan dress, which is not even the wackiest thing she has worn and was not even that bad! I think her refusal to make the kind of music that people expect women to make, and the femininity of her fashion are two big reasons why she mostly gets disregarded these days.

At my school we have a club called “The F Word” where we talk about feminism. I suggested we talk about women in the music industry so that ended up being the topic for one of our meetings. As a very vocal fan of women musicians, I was really excited about this meeting. We pointed out that most female representation on the top pop music charts were by the same few artists such as Beyonce, Taylor Swift, and Rihanna, while men got represented by a big variety of names. I also played a game with my friend where we put our music libraries on shuffle, and 5 out of 10 songs that played from my phone were by women, to which my friend responded, “How equal”. At that meeting, I also jokingly said that all music made by men was boring, which almost everyone disagreed with me on. But for real, I do not understand how some music that boils down to “Mediocre white guys with guitars who can’t sing” gets so popular. That is another thing, too, how women are held to a much higher standard than men for vocal abilities. I can’t name a single popular woman in music who had rather limited vocal abilities except for maybe Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, but even she’s not that popular. But on the male side of things, you have lots of mediocre singers like Billy Corgan and Bob Dylan who just get a pass on vocals because the songwriting is good.

Sondre Lerche Concert Story

I should post on here more! So here is a story that I already posted on my Tumblr, but it would also fit here, because it's about music. I'm also working on a post (or posts) about new albums I listened to in 2017 and 2018 which has literally been in the works and postponed since January 2017. Maybe I'll work on that soon since I finally have my precious free time.

If anyone's interested, these are the blog posts I made about the other 2 times I saw Sondre in concert... but I'll only let you see it IF you know my tumblr URL, since I've shared the link to this blog with people I know IRL (just put it in before the slash):
/post/131414263203
/post/159897883813

I’ll try to keep this somewhat brief, or at least shorter than my other concert blog posts, since I know it’ll be long no matter what, lol.

Last time I saw Sondre in concert I got him a cactus blossom scented candle, which was a reference to his obsessions with cacti (also my Twitter handle) and scented candles. I wasn’t sure how I would top that this time around. I know his thing right now is burgers, but I didn’t know how to make that into a gift. As a last ditch effort I made a purple and blue bracelet that was shaped like a DNA for him but I wasn’t sure if I’d actually give it to him since he probably gets a lot of bracelets from teenage fans…

I wore the Sondre t-shirt that I bought at the last concert, but I don’t think anyone noticed, because it’s literally white text on a white shirt. I also brought my entire Solo Pleasure vinyl for him to sign. I was just planning to carry it around the whole time (aka, make my dad carry it for me) - kinda difficult because it was raining outside…

The concert was pretty early in the day, it started at 7:00, so my dad and I got to the venue at 6:16 and RIGHT AWAY we saw Sondre walking through the bar outside the concert room. (He was wearing a red t-shirt and black jacket, which was notable because he was wearing something different later.) We waved to him and he recognized us right away from the last concert. He shook both our hands and I was not sure what to say but my dad told him he should come to Chicago more often. I was holding my Solo Pleasure vinyl that I’d wanted him to sign after the show, and he offered to sign it right there. I just said “So cool to see you!” as he walked into another room cause I couldn’t think of anything else.

Then we waited in a “line” of like 5 people outside the concert room for the doors to open at 6:30. For real, nobody else cared enough to get there early. We walked in and were surprised to see chairs. We’d seen another show (Aurora Aksnes) at that place (Schubas) and there weren’t chairs that time. We sat in the very front row because we could. We tucked the vinyl between our chairs so we wouldn’t have to deal with it for the time being - thankfully, we didn’t forget to bring it home after the show.

A nice woman talked to me as we waited for the show and I told her, like, my whole life story. She was like, “You seem kinda young!” and I was like “Yeah, Sondre has been making music since before I was born.”

And then the show started when Sondre ran out from not the backstage but the back of the concert room and jumped onto the stage - very professional! The first song was “Track You Down” which was pretty much the only kinda ‘rare’ song in the set.  

I didn’t take a video of every song like I did last time because I didn’t want to look like an obnoxious freak, but I did film a few good moments. Let me know if you want to see the videos, I don’t feel like uploading them.

The whole show was just like a conversation with the audience because there were literally like less than 40 people in there, and people just casually said things to him between songs and he would reply. 

I then realized that I spend way too much time thinking about Sondre because he was telling all the stories behind his songs and I’m just thinking… I already know these stories. All of them. For example, he said “I’m gonna play a song that is explicitly about masturbation” and I already knew it was going to be “Single Hand Affairs”. Well, I did learn one interesting thing. He said he wrote “No One’s Gonna Come” about the girl he sang with on “Modern Nature” (Lillian Samdal). 

Since he started with playing songs from his first 2 albums, he said he might try out doing a show in a chronological order, but that didn’t work out because he started playing Pleasure songs in the middle of the show. He also said he was trying to start performing all his songs without a guitar pick, but in the middle of “Two Way Monologue” he paused his playing to reach in his pocket and take out a pick and said he would only use a pick for that song. But he actually did play with a pick on other songs, too. Other songs had interruptions because he just forgot the lyrics and had to pause to remember. The best one was in “Violent Game” when he started singing “A subway cries out somewhere there’s / A subway…” and just stopped playing altogether to say to himself something like “A subway? Really?”

I wanted to sing along to all the songs since I know all the lyrics, but nobody else was doing it, so I stopped. Every time I started singing along, the woman who talked to me before the show looked at me weird. Also when he performed “Modern Nature”, people didn’t start singing along until after the first few verses which was weird. 

And then he mentioned something about requesting songs, and people in the audience started shouting song names, so I took the opportunity to yell “Weakest Spot!”, a song that I requested on Twitter and he liked my tweet. (It’s an extremely obscure song from an EP he released ONLY on CD on his 2008 tour.) Since he mentioned requesting songs, I was scared that he was actually gonna play “Weakest Spot”, and I was just thinking, if he plays it, I am gonna film the WHOLE thing. But he didn’t, lol.

For the encore, he took the mic and said “Now I’m gonna do 10 minutes of stand-up”, but that wasn’t true as he started singing “Human Hands” a capella. He went into the audience and sang right in people’s faces… including me, near the end of the song. I just sang along with him. There was one guy that had a totally dramatic reaction when Sondre sang to him but I just tried to keep my cool. And then the nice woman next to me started punching my shoulder and squeezing my knee and I was embarrassed.

Then we started to get in line to greet him. There was this one old guy who asked us if we brought a candle to the last show, because he said he recognized us because he was behind us in line that time. That was cool, but this guy also seemed very judgmental that I was even there, because he asked how I even got in since it was a 21+ show. My dad just explained that it’s okay as long as I have my parent with me, and then he told the story of how I was only 12 when I saw Sondre in concert for the first time back in 2014 and I think both that guy and I cringed. Also, age restrictions at concerts are DUMB.

I asked my dad if I should give Sondre the bracelet I made, and he said no, and I was like yeah, this is dumb. We didn’t buy any merch because my dad said he didn’t want to spend any money, and anyway there were no scented candles or custom t-shirts left, which is all I would’ve bought.

So when I got to Sondre, I started with “Great job at the show!” which was a little awkward. I then read him a message that one of my twitter friends from the UK wanted me to tell him. Then we took a picture. When my dad took it, he handed me the autographed vinyl and told me to pose with it, which I didn’t really want to do but I was like Okay!! Once again Sondre put his firm grip around my shoulder and posed for the picture. TBH, I’m cuter than Sondre in the pic, he is not looking his best here. And then I took a selfie with Sondre and my dad. Another guy offered to take another picture from farther away, but I nervously said no to his offer, and then we left.

I wouldn’t rate our interaction this time around as highly as I would rate the one in the 2017 concert, lol. I was just overall more awkward and didn’t have a lot of interesting things to say. At least our picture is less blurry though, lol. Sondre also liked my social media posts and replied to them with flower emojis, which made me wonder if he did that because I was wearing a flower headband at the concert, but I kinda doubt it.

And then we got on the bus back home and I got motion sickness because I kept looking at my phone, which is basically a bad dizzy feeling that you can’t fix…

But yeah that’s what happened!! Sorry, this was really long, didn’t meet my goal of brevity.