Ambient
The 10 Best Ambient
Tracks of All Time
Music designed to reward attention without demanding it. Eno named it in 1978, but the tradition runs from Satie's furniture music to modern drone, and it is the only genre defined by how you are allowed to listen.
- Origin
- England, 1978
- Also known as
- ambient music, drone, environmental music
- Tracks
- 10
- Updated
- 2026-08-28
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Number 1: Brian Eno / An Ending (Ascent)
1983 · Editions EG
Four chords, an enormous amount of room around them, and more emotional weight than most symphonies manage. It has soundtracked moon landings and funerals alike, and earns both.
Also on The Waxonia Desk — A Way In, The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred
Number 2: Aphex Twin / Xtal
1992 · Apollo / R&S
A wordless vocal loop over a soft breakbeat, made by a teenager on home-built equipment. Ambient music discovering it could have a pulse without losing its stillness.
Also on The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred
Number 3: William Basinski / dlp 1.1
2002 · 2062
A tape loop physically disintegrating as it plays, recorded once and never repeatable. The concept would be a gimmick if the decay were not so genuinely devastating to sit through.
Number 4: Stars of the Lid / Requiem for Dying Mothers
2001 · Kranky
Processed guitar and strings moving so slowly that the changes register as weather rather than as music. The high-water mark of American drone.
Number 5: Harold Budd & Brian Eno / Lost in the Humming Air
1984 · Editions EG
Budd's soft-pedal piano fed through Eno's treatments. Two people who understood that the reverb tail matters as much as the note that caused it.
Number 7: Hiroshi Yoshimura / Blink
1986 · Green
Japanese environmental music at its most gently precise — written for a specific building, rediscovered forty years later, and better than almost anything it influenced.
Number 8: The Orb / Little Fluffy Clouds
1990 · Big Life
A Rickie Lee Jones interview, a Steve Reich sample and a house beat. Ambient house arrives fully formed, funny, and far cleverer than its reputation suggests.
Also on The Waxonia Desk — Sounds Like a Single, The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred
Number 9: Aphex Twin / Rhubarb
1994 · Warp
One chord sequence, endlessly cycling, warm as a heat haze. The most covered, sampled and imitated piece of ambient music of the last thirty years, and still untouchable.
Also on Warp
Number 10: Grouper / Heavy Water / I'd Rather Be Sleeping
2008 · Type
A song buried under so much reverb it becomes weather. Liz Harris proved ambient could carry an actual melody without surrendering any of its distance.