Nobody knows for sure when exactly or why it happened, but decades-old, rather obscure albums by early Japanese ambient musicians – such as Hiroshi Yoshimura or Midori Takada – found a new audience in the 2010s, due to streaming algorithms.
These records originated in a style called Kankyō Ongaku, which is often translated as “environmental music”. In the words of producer and record store owner Satoshi Ashikawa, that music from the 1980s was “meant to drift like smoke and become part of the environment surrounding the listener’s activity.”
While algorithms resurfaced these long-forgotten Japanese new age records to exhausted Zoomers, artists from the wide field of electronic music were starting to breathe new life into the genre too.
A landmark of the new ambient underground, Kansas-based producer Brian Leeds released “For Those of You Who Have Never (And Also Those Who Have)” in 2016 under his moniker Huerco S. Marking a stylistic shift from Leeds’ earlier house- and techno-adjacent work, these sample-free compositions resembled wind chimes – static, ever-looping sound sculptures that floated aimlessly. Instead of a clear structure or a building narrative, they seemed to start and stop in mid-air.
This gorgeous music made some listeners feel like they were catching a soothing glimpse into eternity, enabling them to escape from the stress and the confusion of a painful reality shaped by instability and insecurity. Mind you, it was just a few years after the world had been hit by a heavy economic crisis. In other words, it struck a nerve.
In 2017, an often-quoted article in the UK paper The Guardian called ambient “the sound of the summer” and Leeds’ album “ambient for the flat white generation.” Which, in retrospect, seems wrong and unfair – Leeds’ music wasn’t designed as aural wallpaper; in fact, the producer became one of the ambient boom’s most vocal critics, soon going on record referring to it as “non-intrusive capitalist productivity music.”
The type of background music Leeds was openly dismissing would spike in consumption during the pandemic, when people were confined to their home offices. Suddenly, all functional lean-back music was considered “ambient”: Lo-fi beats, dub techno, Balearic house, synth soundscapes for Yoga and meditation classes, Tibetan gongs, Spanish guitar instrumentals, piano covers of pop hits, you name it.
Essentially now all music could be considered ambient. In the post-pandemic age of streaming and wi-fi, wireless headphones and bluetooth speakers, huge parts of the audience mostly resorted to background listening, soundtracking their daily lives with music.
In her book “Mood Machine”, writer Liz Pelly criticizes that trend and explains in detail what went wrong during the streaming ambient boom. “Today’s functional music front-runners seem to miss something essential about the history of ambient”, she writes and goes on to explain that Eno and other ambient innovators initially designed their music as an actual response to canned easy listening Muzak.
It’s true – in the manifesto to his genre-defining 1978 album “Ambient 1: Music for Airports”, Eno proclaims: “Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities.”
Accusing big tech of “muzak-ing ambient into utilitarian self-help content”, Liz Pelly points out that both the old Muzak and today’s functional music are “intended for mood boosterism”, while actual ambient has always been “meant to induce reflection, and to help foster a relationship between the artist, the listener, and their surroundings. (...) In other words, it wasn’t pure escapism.”
While her statements ring true, it seems impossible to make a clear distinction between the type of generic and, frankly, often quite bland stock music cluttering up streaming playlists, and the type of ambient music that is driven by a deeper artistic ambition. There’s no objective criteria to separate art from what might be considered, in Pelly’s words, just “pure vibe wallpaper”.
The problem might actually have been baked into the concept of ambient music from the very start. Even Brian Eno, the creator of the genre term, quickly grew disillusioned with it.
In the 2024 documentary “Eno”, he recounts that folk legend Joni Mitchell once reached out to him, wanting him to produce a new work of hers – an ambient album. Eno turned her down. Though he regrets this decision today, he just didn’t want to be associated with the genre anymore. In 2016, he said he didn’t know what the term stood for anymore, as it had “swollen to accommodate some quite unexpected bedfellows.”
Needless to say, there is still a lot of great ambient out there – music that deserves our attention even if it doesn’t actively try to capture it.
There’s been a wave of producers since the early 2000s making “lowercase ambient”, an extremely quiet and minimalist subgenre of electroacoustic music composed with field recordings and non-conventional instruments. Look for labels like 12k, run by producer and engineer Taylor Deupree, and Line, run by artist Richard Chartier.
The neoclassical, or rather: post-classical music scene developed in the 2000s was hugely inspired by ambient music, combining its characteristics with the compositional techniques of classic minimalism and other elements drawn from popular music.
Which brings us back to Brian Leeds alias Huerco S. and his landmark album from 2016, which kickstarted a global movement now mostly referred to as ambient/experimental, to distinguish it from the functional music space. Since its foundation in 2017, Leeds’ independent label West Mineral Ltd. has been an important hub for that music. Other innovative labels have appeared on the scene – Motion Ward or 3XL come to mind – that are releasing ambient-adjacent music by a global web of artist-producers with a background in experimental electronic music.
Their largely beatless compositions feature a diverse range of influences, often drawn from genres such as shoegaze, dreampop and trip-hop. Their melancholic, introspective mood and sometimes abrasive dynamics make them unsuitable for co-working spaces and cosy coffee shops. For her diaristic long-form compositions inspired by musique concrète, drone and noise music, the ambient artist and producer Claire Rousay has coined the catchy tag “emo ambient”.
Online coverage dedicated to this new scene can be found not so much within old music media, but on online and newsletter platforms. The L.A.-based ambient composer Cynthia Bernard alias marine eyes is dedicating her Cloud Collecting newsletter and Women of Ambient mixes to her highlighting her peers’ work. Influential journalists like Philip Sherburne or Shawn Reynaldo are covering the music in a steady flow of reviews and interviews. (The author of this essay series too – shameless plug for my zensounds newsletter.)
While some of what’s being sold under the ambient genre tag today might be viewed as artless playlist fodder, provided in bulk by faceless composers to tech corporations, there is definitely a healthy, exciting scene that has emerged over the last decade, widening the music’s scope, expanding its boundaries and exploring its outer fringes.