Is Ambient music a dying genre?
It seems like an awful idea for any new artist today to pursue ambient music as a way of income, let alone any recognition. Ambient has gone as far as it can and anything else post would just be redundant of past ambient artists. Brain Eno, Loscil, Fennesz, SOTL, Hecker, Gas, Basinski, Eluvium, ect. have pushed the pitiful line that could be pushed with a genre that has very little room to further experiment with
pure ambient music died back in the 80's when it got bastardized into new age
it's hard to tell but if there's no good ambient music produced in the next decade or so i will be the first to admit it's a dead genre. last decade of ambient has been great though
Drone is pretty much modern ambient, few years ago there were lots of great bands doing it but doesn't seem quit as big anymore.
how to make good ambient music
>use mainly real instruments
>don't make the recording so dense
>don't make drone
>???
>It seems like an awful idea for any new artist today to pursue ambient music as a way of income, let alone any recognition
Dont think many new ambient artists would be interested in making ambient solely for income or recognition.
if you were an artist, you would realize that there are other reasons to make art...
Sound collage and dark/drone ambient is going on ok. Ambient pop is floating on as well.
Grouper comes to mind.
I hate to consider genres desd, especially ambient where it's more of an ideal than a genre.
i see elements of ambient music being incorporated into almost every genre of current music, so maybe its just dead as its own genre?
I think there's a ton of great ambient coming out still. It's not as solid as Eno, maybe, and there's a bigger emphasis on drone than melodic ambient, but it's out there. I keep a running playlist of new releases I'm interested in to listen to later, and probably a good 10-15 percent of the list is ambient, so I know it's still coming out.
Why do you think ambient is a solved genre? Just because you don't personally have any ideas on how to push it forward doesn't mean it's impossible. I mean even the Visible Cloaks record this year created an ambient sound that was new and fresh to me. I think there's a lot of room in ambient to take melodic ideas and deconstruct them, to take melodic ideas that are more structured than Eno's were and deconstruct them into an ambient space more thoroughly, and that's just my own idea.
Great things still coming out of the genre, and I'm sure great things to come.
Yeah I don't think Eno was like "this 20 minute tape loop is going to be the biggest hit single on the radio and make me millions"
I second Grouper and add Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. He's still coming out with solid material.
I think eno might be going in the right direction with his "generative music" concept. A wider release of reflection would have been nice, more focus on the generative aspect. interested to see where he goes with that, if others follow suit.
besides that I think that people classifying things like aphex twin's saw 85-92 as ambient fucked up the genre, compare that to any of Eno's original ambient series. too many drums and too much techno and house influence. Ambient needs to be sure that it is separated from the cancer known as edm, only then can it shine as a genre.
more real instrumentation is good, more tape loops, less of all the digital synths and midi drums.
And the same applies to almost all genres of music. Making a living out of music is a bit of a stretch at this point. Jazz musicians for example face the same problem.
Ambient isn't dying, it's just not making much sound
jefre is drone though
I think he has albums that could be both/either. Plus, isn't drone heavily related to ambient?
Bastardized into new age? Well, Mike Oldfield, Alice Coltrane, Popol Vuh and Harold Budd, who Eno collaborated with, made new age music. I don't think Eno had anything against that.
yes it is closely related but it's not "true" ambient. drone is alive and well whereas quality ambient albums such as eno's are becoming scarce
Why would ambient be dying because it's not commercially viable? How many ambient albums did you listen to that were released in 2016? Man fuck you idiots are incapable of using the internet.
Yeah, like any genre it's retarded to write the whole thing off because the popular bands are bad.
I think the important point a lot of peoppe miss when they talk about ambient is that it doesn't have to be quiet or minimalist, just have a primary focus on atmosphere and subtlety. By that logic a lot of drone and noise comes under the ambient umbrella which I agree with. Those genres are flourishing at the moment. 'Quiet' ambient is only stagnating because Eno did all the best stuff back in the 70s.
Every time i listen to ambient i feel myself thinking
>just change fucking chords already
Dungeon Synth counts as ambient
is this an exploitable pasta
I don't think the ambient music scene was ever considered "alive"
dark ambient is doing just fine