How Did You Discover Ambient?

[Scott Snee]

The first Ambient album I got into was Indigo by Patrick O'hearn. Then came And The Stars Go With You by Jonn Serrie.

https://soundcloud.com/scott-snee

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[gis_sweden]

Interesting thread for a newcomer! Don’t know what Berlin School is or means…
The community have mentioned Budd, Eno, Tangerine Dream, Jarre, Tomita, Tim Blake (New Jerusalem the record I have. Check out the envelope!) and Kitaro. Okay I have listened to them to. Not recently but I have.
As being Swedish I want to add Ralph Lundsten and Björn J : on Lindh! (: + s => strange smily...)
But to my surprise no one has mentioned Yello. At least on their first records they had an ambient piece. Starting with the track “Blue Green” on the debut album Solid Pleasure (1980).

[Mystic]

Lots of New Age music in my teenage years. I was quite into things like the Pure Moods CDs or bands like Enigma what while were not particularly ambient, had many ambient aspects going on behind the beats that always stuck out to me.

[lynn9]

If I remember correctly, it was when I started listening to Nine Inch Nails. They have a track called 'A warm place', and I thought it was really cool, so I went looking for music that sounded similar to that one.

[Cloud Hunter]

I like Nine Inch Nails too. A Warm Place is a strange pool of calm in the middle of an album of violence. I like The Fragile a lot too, great atmospheres, and the tracks on the Still album especially.

[Lunganar]

Hm, difficult question. I discovered ambient 15 years ago I think, but I wasn't ready for it until a year ago. In the mean time I was into al kinds of electronic music.

[Dutch Oven]

I have only recently discovered the world of ambient music, I know a few people have already mentioned Nine Inch Nails, but I found the soundtracks created by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross are what really got me interested in the ambient side of music.

lots of artists mentioned throughout this thread that I have never heard of !!! (bows his head in shame) I have got some homework to do !

[seismic1]

Go and stand in the corner (do they still do that?)

[Dutch Oven]

Haha ! Unfortunately a few too many years have passed since I was last at school to verify that.
But rest assured I shall find a suitable corner at work and stand in it for an hour, contemplating the error of my ways !

[seismic1]

Interesting acoustics in the corner, the ambient twilight zone.

[Dutch Oven]

Found an excellent corner at work thanks, even had some canvas prints on the wall to act as primitive bass traps, lol !
Must record there more often !!!

[Boqurant]

If I remember correctly it was through Eno's "Music for Films" I borrowed in '78 or '79 from our local record library (could be that I discovered Eno through Bowie's "Heroes" and "Low" albums, not sure about that). Anyways: countless evenings with headphones lying in my bed before going to sleep with that and subsequent Eno records...

https://soundcloud.com/boqurant

[Andy]

You guys might not believe me when I say it, but I fell in love with ambient music through my own sonic exploration!

For the first few years of creating music I made mostly trance and stuff of the like, and it slowly evolved into what I do now. Little did I know there was a whole world I was about to stumble upon.

I don't remember distinctly the first "ambient" record or song I listened to, i just remember that it was a slow transition from the other more fast paced electronic music genres.

~andy

[Asemere]

My introduction to ambient music was through Tangerine Dream, Brian Eno and the Popul Vuh soundtrack for the film Aguirre the Wrath of God. I would play Phaedra and then Rubycon endlessly. I went to a TD concert in their Rubycon days and was completely blown away. I listened also to the German bands like Amon Duul II, Popul Vuh, Faust (I heard them in a double bill concert with Gong), Cluster, etc. Vangelis, of course, but I always preferred his more ambient pieces. In the early 90s a friend gave me a cassette copy of Dreamtime Return. I think I wore that tape out before I bought it on CD! Subsequently bought just about everything Steve Roach has produced. I listen to and enjoy many types of music from classical to Zappa to Gentle Giant to jazz to (shock! horror!) the BeeGees, but I always return to ambient. Modern classical composers seem to have descended into avant garde noodling. I think that the baton of serious and thoughtful modern music has been taken up by ambient composers.

[chobby]

For me, my interest in ambient came from a passion for shoegaze and similar genres where atmosphere is crucial