Anonymous
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DNA Music
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The Bristol Sound
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| What is Ambient Groove | The 7 best Tracks | What's NEW in Ambient Groove | Where to find it |
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Anonymous Producer DNA Music |
"I apologise if I did not pick all your favourites, but there you go -- life has many big disappointments for all of us. All of these have solid grooves that you really want to hear again, and of course they all have strong ambient influences, and in several cases directly influenced the course of ambient music. I chose these primarily because I still love every single one of them. They have stood the test of time for me, and that puts them in a rare place." |
| David Sylvian: Black Water | Union Jack: Water Drums | Miles Davis: Kind of Blue | Brian Eno: Sombre Reptiles | Talking Heads: Listening Wind | David Bowie: Golden Years | Massive Attack: Unfinished Sympathy |
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More than any other track, Massive Attack's Unfinished Sympathy really put the Bristol Sound on the map, internationally. Very dark, with haunting vocals and a repeating tingly percussive groove, this track is even danceable, but the bass feel and the low strings make it filled with regret. | |
| Check out David Sylvian's Black Water on his Rain Tree Crow album. Sylvian is best known for melancholy ambient work, and Black Water is the perfect expression of his yearning and longing -- a sumptuous anodyne for the homesick expatriate. Sylvian himself has discovered Eastern religion, and much of his music refers to travels and other places -- not the least of which is his band's name, Japan. | Union Jack's Water Drums is one of the most inventive tracks I have ever heard AND thought was wonderful to listen to. It is all too easy for creative ideas to be taken too far to be enjoyable to anyone except the artist and their mother. In Water Drums, running water sounds and animal sounds form a gentle ambience against which a loop of a person swimming forms the rhythm. Non-word vocals in an Eastern key give the piece a rich Indian feel. | |
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Who am I kidding? Miles Davis is one of the best-known jazz artists of all time, and his album "Kind of Blue" is a classic of jazz -- it's not ambient music. That said, the eponymous track, Kind of Blue is a one-in-a-million track which is so gentle yet so groovy that it still has a lot to teach to all us 21st century sophisticates. It is based around a very quiet but persistent call and response riff between an upright bass and the brass. More recently Ronny Jordan has done a fast tempo guitar version which is also quite pleasing, although the Ronny Jordan version is more acid jazz than ambient groove. | |
| Brian Eno is often credited with inventing ambient music, and he is certainly responsible for popularising the term way back in the 70's. Sombre Reptiles from his Another Green World album is a constant but brooding piece, with no vocals and a distant beat. This piece is represents Eno at his best, and the sound could be from no one else but Eno. | |
Listening Wind is a dark and spacious tune of cultural identity and the clandestine fight for freedom in Africa. It comes from the "quiet side" of the Talking Heads' Remain in Light album, the other, better-known, side having reached dance chart super-stardom in the early eighties. A listen may surprise you, as the song is unbelievably contemporary, and could easily have been made in 1999, as opposed to nearly two decades ago. |
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Bowie's Golden Years was a chart classic and received all the pop accolades he could want. That said, Bowie had been using all sorts of ambient sounds at that point in his career, and in Golden Years Carlos Alomar's involuted guitar riff hits just the right speed to get you totally blissed out. As an added bonus, Bowie's singing was at its peak on the Station to Station album. | |
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This page was last updated 21 July 1999
