Pitchfork's 16 Best Ambient Albums of 2020

If bioluminescence could assume a musical form, it might sound like Ana Roxanne’s *Because of a Flower*. On the Los Angeles-based electronic musician’s second album, dream pop and ambient swirl together, glowing as they drift; in “Venus,” the gentle sound of lapping waves even accompanies her spoken-word ruminations on the nature of liquids, keyboards twinkling like a galaxy reflected in the tide. She has a minimalist’s sense of economy: Most of her music is made of little more than synthesizer and her own multi-tracked and harmonized voice. But her influences are vast, taking in medieval European choral music (“A Study in Vastness”), slowcore (“Suite Pour L’invisible”), new age (“- - -”), trip-hop (“Camille”), and even Hindustani singing (“Venus”). And though the mood is often melancholy, it is never despondent; grief and hope exist in equal measure. As she sings in the spare, searching “Suite Pour L’invisible,” “Endless sorrow, endless joy, endless sorrow/I’ll hold your joy/I’ll hold your pain.”

The sublime songs comprising New York-based musician Ana Roxanne's second record, Because Of A Flower, germinated gradually across five years, inspired by interwoven notions of gender identity, beauty, and cruelty. She describes her process as beginning with “a drone element and a mood,” then intuiting melody, syllables, and lyrics incrementally, like sacred shapes materializing from mist. The experience of identifying as intersex informs the album on levels both sonic and thematic, from spoken word texts borrowed from tonal harmony textbooks to cinematic dialogue samples and castrati aria allusions. It's an appropriately interstitial vision of ambient songcraft, a chemistry of wisps and whispers, sanctuary and sorrow, conjured through a fragile balance of voice, bass, space, and texture. Despite a background studying at the prestigious Mills College in Oakland, Roxanne's music rarely feels conceptual, instead radiating an immediate and emotive aura, rooted in the present tense of her personal journey. She speaks of the flower in the title as a body, singular and sunlit, as many petals as thorns, an enigma beholden only to itself. But whether taken as surface or subtext, Because is a transfixing document of a rare artist in the spring of their ascension.

"Just so you know, I'm recording..."

** If your order contains a pre-order record, it will be held and shipped complete when pre-order stock arrives. ** Emily A Sprague’s Hill, Flower, Fog is an illumination of consciousness across six modular meditations. A place, a poem, and a homespun ode to existing in “this cone of time in our universe,” Hill, Flower, Fog channels the here and now and fosters a far-reaching connectedness, or lifeline, from the everyday to the cosmos.

From Geneva Skeen I wrote this album over the past year––a bleak but transformative period of time. This work became an extraverbal expression of my interior experience. With that in mind, I decided not to write about it myself. Instead, I asked my dear friend to reflect on her listening of the record. Poet Aristilde Kirby writes: Flower branches dowsing rod against their doubles in the wind's aimless static. Spindled fog verglas plants, caressed by white rays of absolute eyelash. [A wisp of fresh respiration] ‘The world has no visible order & all I have is the order of my breath,’ says the fifth track on Double Bind. [A ribbon of a scream] It has the incandescent & incantation-like quality of the title of Fushitshusha’s 2014 album: Nothing Changes No One Can Change Anything I Am Ever Changing You Can Only Change Yourself. [Asemic voices from anywhere] What can you count on these days in 2020, outside of the pacing of your breath as we all struggle to cleave to each passing beat pair & repair? [Spirals of a finger on glass] Between two right hands, neither really righter than the other, we have no choice but to hold on to the you one holds dearest to: the beads of just being. [Sinewaves in phase] When I comb my hair to get ready for the day, I realize that the black static it collects was always meant to fall away. [Synthetic graupel in flames] Here, Skeen specializes in ambient music as the pellucid space of an emotional landscape, limned in Timothy Morton’s ethos of dark ecology & Gloria Anzaldua’s idea of nepantla. It is equally phenomenological, psychological, spiritual & visceral. If you ask me, Geneva is a poet who works in sound sculpture. She cures slabs of lived time as if flesh marble & makes of her subconscious an underworld for the listener to locate themselves in. [Bats that clamor as strata of bleeding leather] The through-lines of her past works are clear as a fault crack & in this instance, glimmer like quartz veins. [Tiny harmonic partials prick like an ice pick] Skeen knows that to protect the lit wick, you have to cup the darkness. [Anvil & shelves of overcast guitar drop into a weak bell pulse] She knows that to get past a hard period, like timing a total eclipse’s black sun, you have to account for every degree, every granular shift, of lost movement. [Dread awaits, step by step on the tepid bathroom tile, displaced] Do not let the coldness of existence’s indifference make you forget that inside you is a vast reserve of heat. [Glacial light glaives that cloud perception] Everyday, we literally squeeze water from a stone to wash our face. [The crashing falls look like plumes of sand smoke] The sense impression I got listening to that song, which is a cascading ripple of descriptions I got from other moments on this album was: “The innermost of all voices centers her poise like mist blankets over morning grass. The blood gallops like cut yew flower in traced stampede dialects for thaw-flecked resonance.” [Avalanche reverberations boil time’s marrow & glow with Aaliyah tape drone] Choose yourself. Don’t be scared to live again. Now, I am dusting a concord grape with my being’s clear lymph before I eat it.

Moving away from the American surf pop manipulations of his debut 'Lady's Mantle', Jake journeys through a nocturnal city-scape meandering the dimly lit streets via club back rooms and decadent boudoirs; his ode to the endless night and those who take residence under it's cloak. A psychedelic map of ASMR rattles, drones and tones melting in-and-out of the night with the heaving intensity of an open window on a busy city street, lubricating familiar rumbles with sensual tones, mirroring the blurry high of a low-light encounter. Boomkat: 'The hum of your veiled voice’ was written by Muir in the wake of his transition from a life in Los Angeles to a new start in Berlin. It sees him transpose field recordings of his former home city into a hazier sort of mid-ground that subtly diffracts the difference with Berlin in summer, refining the shimmering production tekkers of his West Coast surf-pop tribute ‘Lady’s Mantle’ (2018) with a nuanced, lower case emotive tactility intended to arouse heady states of atmospheric tension between nostalgic sehnsucht and romantic promise.  Muir readily acknowledges influence from the more washed out, elusive textures, timbres, and spatial awareness of artists such as Philip Jeck, Richard Chartier, and Marina Rosenfeld, as opposed to the usual touchstones of AFX or Eno. But more implicitly he references a sense of queered ambience shared with Chartier’s Pinkcourtesyphone, and as such his music is seduced by the allure of “gay bathhouses and spas, club back rooms and decadent boudoirs” in a way that suffuses the whole record with an, intoxicating, aphrodisiac quality.  Supine and seductive in its illustration of an “endless night”, the devil lies in the album’s evocative intricacies, using a signature light touch and Akira Rabelais’ Argeïphontes Lyre software to ruffle locked grooves and dusty jazz loops into ASMR-triggering texturhythms and dematerialised, hea(r)tsick blurs between the ear-stroking ephemera of ‘fleeting touches’ and the way his music appears to waltz out of an open window over Berlin at night in ‘the dimness of the sealed eye’, and land on the pillow next to you ‘like sweet thoughts in a dream’.

Inspired by open spaces (and the objects that interrupt them), META DOOR L is the latest auditory excursion from Perila. Expansive in scope, it extracts beauty from the organic and inorganic alike, tapping into the wonder of the outdoors as it revels in the unique properties of metal—both as a material and a sound source. Building on her work for labels like Sferic, Motion Ward, and Boomkat Editions, META DOOR L is rooted in field recordings extracted from the wilderness outside Tbilisi, where a series of hiking expeditions led Perila to chance encounters with metal tubes, large rocks, and the ruins of an old house. In the months that followed, these recordings were patiently processed, degraded and transformed, their misshapen remains welded together by hazy ambient atmospheres and textured soundscapes. From there, the St. Petersburg-raised, Berlin-based artist pushed herself into new creative territory, searching for the innate (and decidedly non-linear) rhythms lurking within her dense sonic stratigraphy. META DOOR L is the hypnotic end result, an immersive listen whose lush tones and guttural rumbles coalesce into something utterly transportive. ** Australians please note that your borders remain closed. I will send products as soon as restrictions are lifted.

And now you can sit down. The follow up to Pinkcourtesyphone’s previous collection of negative mood music ‘Indelicate Slices’ has arrived and it is even more of a sonic banquet than its predecessor.‘Leaving Everything To Be Desired’ is a sumptuous serenade revealing with candor the essence of the many careful adjectives used for situational descriptions. Pinkcourtesyphone swerves range out of another interior from sparkling dream-soft shimmers of strings, creamy arrangements, drifting drones, to dissected cha chas. Sometimes charmingly flamboyant, sometimes darkly wistful, sometimes deadeningly soothing, sometimes abrasively tender, but always engaging and ultimately engulfing of us. This recording of temporal extravagances is meant to enhance with all the pillowy richness of high fidelity to bring you every fascinating hue and shade of sound. It’s soft focus aesthetics lull the mind’s ear into a state of woozy intoxication, comfortably unsteady underfoot. This could be the album you felt you have been entitled to, designed to be kept nearby. And so… recline… its night, late late night… without sleep the dreamtime has come and gone leaving us with perhaps an uncomfortable predictability suddenly we can no longer deny the shock of each moment 

~~~~ [ Descripción en Español}: www.ballroommarfa.org/archive/kite-symphony-four-variations-sinfonia-cometa-cuatro-variaciones/ ] ~~~ Ballroom Marfa is proud to present 'Kite Symphony, Four Variations' by Roberto Carlos Lange (widely known by his stage moniker, Helado Negro), based on graphic scores created in collaboration with visual artist Kristi Sword. Guided by Sword’s dynamic and rhythmic graphic notations–visual representations of music through symbols outside the world of traditional music notation–these four music compositions freely explore the lightness of ephemeral moments in the elements, encouraging the listener to meditate on their immediate surroundings. Lange joined forces with electro-acoustic composer Rob Mazurek, and violist Jeanann Dara, on these pieces using a variety of collaborative sound-making techniques. The new compositions were recorded at Marfa Recording Company while Lange and Sword were in residence in Marfa working on 'Kite Symphony,' a new, non-linear, and impressionistic film, live score, and body of sculptural work that explores the landscape of Chihuahuan Desert through wind, sound, and light. The artists took the opportunity to delve deeper into their collaborative practice and expand their vision of 'Kite Symphony' through this collection of music. Lange describes the 'Four Variations' as a collection of impressionistic sound pieces and invites the listener to open their ears to the sky, the sound of cacti, and the feeling of the wind on their skin. Twenty-five percent of proceeds will benefit Texas RioGrande Legal Aid [ www.trla.org ], a nonprofit law firm that provides free legal services to low-income residents in southwest Texas.

The latest unearthed gem from Kayn's home-studio archive is a meditative, textural study dated 2003, yet in some ways redolent of the work of certain experimentally inclined rock musicians of the 1970s. Across its two-hour duration, 'A Pan-Air Music' locates the ethereal space between drone and rythmic antiphony, and charts a gripping journey through it.

hybtwibt? _______________________ because you never asked me. how it feels mixtape including off cuff new work / cuts / edits & extractions from our same titled NTS Transmission (30.05.20) ~ written / recorded early - late hours, 31.05.20 - 03.06.20 ~ all revenue will be donated to: Black Lives Matter Global Network National Bailout (NBO) The Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust NAACP Project NIA Black Minds Matter The Black Curriculum make it mean something love, SA ~ have you been through what i've been through? ~ #blacklivesmatter Photo Imagery by Tibyan Sanoh

Drew Daniel’s solo alias The Soft Pink Truth was originally fueled by a distinctly madcap energy. Without the elaborate conceptual frameworks of his duo Matmos, Baltimore-based Daniel was free to let his imagination run wild. His 2003 debut, *Do You Party?*, braided politics with pleasure in gonzo glitch techno; with *Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Soft Pink Truth?* and then *Why Do the Heathen Rage?*, he turned his idiosyncratic IDM to covers of punk rock and black metal. But *Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase?* steps away from those audacious hijinks. Composed with a rich array of electronic and acoustic tones, and suffused in vintage Roland Space Echo, the album strikes a balance between ambient and classical minimalism; created in response to politically motivated feelings of sadness and anger, it is also a meditation on community and interdependency. Guest vocalists Colin Self, Angel Deradoorian, and Jana Hunter make up the album’s choral core; percussionist Sarah Hennies lays down flickering bell-tone rhythms, while John Berndt and Horse Lords’ Andrew Bernstein weave sinewy saxophone into the mix, and Daniel’s partner, M.C. Schmidt, lends spare, contemplative piano melodies. The result is a nine-part suite as affecting as it is ambitious, where devotional vocal harmonies spill into softly pulsing house rhythms, and shimmering abstractions alternate with songs as gentle as lullabies.

The Soft Pink Truth is Drew Daniel, one half of acclaimed electronic duo Matmos, Shakespearean scholar and a celebrated producer and sound artist. Daniel started the project as an outlet to explore visceral and sublime sounds that fall outside of Matmos’ purview, drawing on his vast knowledge of rave, black metal and crust punk obscurities while subverting and critiquing established genre expectations. On the new album Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase? Daniel takes a bold and surprising new direction, exploring a hypnagogic and ecstatic space somewhere between deep dance music and classical minimalism as a means of psychic healing. Shall We Go On Sinning… began life as an emotional response to the creeping rise of fascism around the globe, creativity as a form of self-care, resulting in an album of music that expressed joy and gratitude. Daniel explains: “The election of Donald Trump made me feel very angry and sad, but I didn’t want to make “angry white guy” music in a purely reactive mode. I felt that I needed to make music through a different process, and to a different emotional outcome, to get past a private feeling of powerlessness by making musical connections with friends and people I admire, to make something that felt socially extended and affirming.” What began with Daniel quickly evolved into a promiscuous and communal undertaking. Vocals provided by the chorus of Colin Self, Angel Deradoorian and Jana Hunter form the foundation of most of the tracks, sometimes left naked and unchanged as with the ethereal opening line (“Shall”) or the sensuous R&B refrains on “We”, at other times shrouded in effects and morphed into new forms. Stately piano melodies written by Daniel’s partner M.C. Schmidt as well as Koye Berry alongside entrancing vibraphone and percussion patterns from Sarah Hennies push tracks toward ecstatic and melodic peaks, while rich saxophone textures played by Andrew Bernstein (Horse Lords) and John Berndt are used to add color and texture throughout. The album’s overall sound was in part shaped by Daniel hosting Mitchell Brown of GASP during Maryland Deathfest. Daniel borrowed Brown’s Roland Space Echo tape unit which he then used extensively throughout to give the album a flickering, ethereal quality. By moving beyond simple plunderphonic sampling and opening up a genuine dialogue with other musicians, Daniel left room in his compositions for moments of genuine surprise, capturing the freeform, communal energy of a DJ set or live improvisation session more than a recording project. Shall We Go On Sinning, a biblical quote from Paul the Apostle, was chosen by Daniel because it describes a question that he was applying both to his creative practice and how one should live in the world. The melodies, jubilance, and meditative nature of album provides a much-needed escape from the contemporary hell-scape. The process of creating Shall We Go On Sinning, in and of itself, is the Soft Pink Truth’s way of championing creativity and community over rage and nihilism.

"'Tumbling Towards a Wall’ is a keening batch of dematerialised atmospheres and lilting rhythms bound to lull listeners into hypnagogic states with its anxiety-sink ambient spongiforms and diary-like and drift-away textures. In eight low-lit and fuzzy parts they feel out smudged textures flecked with iridescent, gauzy melodies and habitual, stream-of-consciousness keys that toe the finest line between enervated and ember-like. It’s a proper, cockle-warming sound that says its piece with measured modesty and a glowing sense of soul that resonates with Dominique Lawalrée and Ryuichi Sakamoto just as much as Ulla’s peers, such as Special Guest DJ and Pendant. The sort of record that may leave users struggling to even get up and flip the sides, such is its soporific pull, ‘Tumbling Towards a Wall’, enacts a sort of slow motion collision with all the sensuality of knackered Ballardian pillow-talk. Each track here teases the senses with a range of frayed, fractured and breezily unresolved structures that exert an ideal ambient sleight-of-hand primed to lead listeners’ thoughts off on their own woozy tangents between the music’s mix of syrupy/brittle rhythm and elusive atmospheric clag. On the A-side the sounds all remains detectably electronic, but for those who manage to keep their lids over half-mast, the B-side blossoms with sampled acoustic textures between a scudding choral cut-up that’s surely worth the entry alone, and in the closing thread of rainy day piano keys that perfuse and wilt in the heart-clutching closing piece. For solitary reflection, Ulla’s first mononymous release is a gorgeous record that mellows and balances any physical or mental space it comes into contact with." - boomkat.com