Best New Ambient (February 2026)

These records will take you places

Welcome to zensounds, the newsletter on ambient background music designed to elevate workplace performance. In today’s fast-paced white-collar environment, focus is the new currency and balance is a strategic advantage. We curate soundscapes that empower deep work, spark collaboration, and create a culture of calm productivity. By aligning music with workflow, we help teams unlock flow states, enhance cognitive clarity, and drive sustainable high performance.

Just kidding, of course. That empty LLM LinkedIn lingo sounds unbelievably laughable at this point, doesn’t it?

Truth is, I listen to many hours of ambient music every single day – not as a “productivity tool” that makes the creation of BS bingo slides feel slightly less dreadful, but as a comforting aural blanket to keep me sane. Believe it or not, this music truly nourishes my soul.

And yet, I can’t pretend to be listening actively all the time. The ambient artist Ray Robinson has written a brilliant essay on the deep ambiguity that is intrinsic to the very concept of ambient music. It’s called Digital Sleep, and I suggest you read it in full.

It’s been a cold and nasty winter here in Berlin. I’ve spent most of the last few weeks working on a book proposal. In my head, that is. My life’s radius has become extremely small – when I’m not at my laptop, I walk the dog, or I might go on a coffee date with a friend who just came back from three weeks in Sri Lanka. At night, I’m watching The X-Files on DVD and reading Haruki Murakami novels.

It’s getting warmer now, and Mark Hollis’ voice creeps into my head:

Come gentle spring, come at winter's end
Gone is the pallor from a promise that's nature's gift
Waiting for the colour of spring

(Talk Talk, “April 5th”)

Here are my favorite ambient albums released in February.

Ambient Album(s) Of The Month

Constellation Tatsu has been one of my favorite ambient tape labels for some years. They’re usually dropping two or three cassettes on the same day, selling them individually and as a season-themed tape pack. I’ve fallen in love with two albums from their newest Winter 2026 batch.

#1: Personal System 個人システム – Transcoastal Night Drive (Constellation Tatsu, 2025)

Behind the project Personal System 個人システム is Felipe Bortoloti, a Brazilian electronic music producer and DJ. According to the liner notes, Transcoastal Night Drive is “an album about motion, atmosphere, and memory, less a narrative than a feeling, inviting listeners to settle into the drive and let the night pass by.”

This rather short record feels like a well-curated radio program leading us from dusk till dawn. It’s a collection of seven blissful chillout tunes made with that typical 1980s sound palette – half an hour of digital drums, keyboards, saxophones and electric bass to lead you safely through the night. Musical comfort food for people who grew up on new age tapes and Mike Post themes.

#2: 微風ゾーン Bifuu_ZONE – The West (Constellation Tatsu, 2025)

微風ゾーン Bifuu_ZONE is an alternative alias of Tsudio Studio, a Japanese composer of electronic music and indie pop. His new album The West was inspired by certain architectural structures west of Osaka. (One song is named after Suma Rikyu Park, a city forest in Kobe.) “This perspective is deeply informed by a Japanese sensibility toward impermanence”, the press text explains, “an acceptance of loss and change not as absence, but as a gentle continuation.”

The synthetic but colourful sonic palette feels reminiscent of 1980s Japanese ambient and environmental music. Digital synthesizers and MIDI instruments are complemented by the human sounds of a breathy saxophone – that juxtaposition creates a dreamy, mysterious atmosphere, perfectly capturing the ambiguity of liminal spaces.

---

Elori Saxl / Henry Solomon – Seeing Is Forgetting (True Panther)

I’ve interviewed composer/producer Elori Saxl on occasion of her last recording Drifts and Surfaces. Now she’s gotten back together with saxophonist Henry Solomon (who contributed to Drifts) for a stunning slab of improvised gorp jazz.

The core of the material sees Solomon – who regularly plays with pop acts such as Miley Cyrus, Haim or Paramore – on baritone sax and bass clarinet, while Saxl is heard on a Roland Juno 106, the classic 1980s polyphonic hybrid synthesizer. Recorded over a few nights in Los Angeles, Seeing Is Forgetting combines experimental improv and minimalism with a wistful pop sensibility.

In a personal email to me, Elori shared these reflections:

“Making this record has been pivotal for me. (…) Henry and I made this album by improvising with no conversation beforehand, and the result is some of my favorite music I’ve ever made. Having that experience completely changed my understanding of where ideas come from and what my role in the whole thing is, and it completely broke me open in the best way possible.

Since then, it’s felt like the ideas faucet has been on full blast, and I can’t get them out fast enough. Working on this music felt like medicine for me, and I hope some of that essence might seep through. I love all my musical children, but every so often things come out that feel extra special and have something beyond any effort or control of mine. For me, this one has that.”

Shane Parish – Autechre Guitar (Palilalia)

Shane Parish is a Georgia-based guitarist who’s a member of the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet. Transcribing the iconic Mancunian IDM duo’s music for acoustic guitar, he chose the bulk of material from their first two albums Incunabula (1993) and Amber (1994). These sounded much more melodic and accessible than most of Autechre’s later work, and more conventionally beautiful as well.

He also picked two tracks from Tri Repetae (1995), which is when the group found their definitive sound – which wouldn’t lend itself very well to a translation to acoustic guitar, due to its roots in industrial music and musique concrète. Add one song from LP5 (1998), and you have the tracklist. As a fan, I’d generally say LP5 is when Autechre’s oeuvre started to get really interesting, but for the purpose of this endeavour, the selection absolutely makes sense.

Autechre Guitar features some common early favorites like “Bike” and “Clipper”, but also some lesser-known gems like “Eutow” and “Yulquen”. Parish has done an exceptional job in the melodic transcriptions, which is reflected in the surprising amount of media coverage this rather obscure concept album is generating. At this point, I’m just going to chime into the general praise.

Deadbeat – Kansai Botanicals (quiet details)

I’m already at the danger of being accused of playing favorites with the quiet details label, so I’m going to keep this brief and to the point this time: If you’re into highly textural, deep and dubby ambient music in the wider Chain Reaction → 12k → 3XL lineage, this one’s definitely for you.

Scott Monteith, the Canadian producer behind the moniker Deadbeat, is experimental electronic music royalty with a decades-deep catalog. Here he talks about a trip to the hinterlands outside of Kyoto that inspired this album:

“The autumn colors were in full bloom, and the incredible serenity and beauty of the place were beyond words. Perhaps the most breathtaking of all was visiting the former studio of Yusai Okuda, which is where a great many of the photos I’ve included in the folder for potential cover ideas were taken.

In addition to his gorgeous silk dying works, the entire place uses water in various still pools to reflect the forest around it, creating some truly Lysergic scenes. The garden behind the house is filled with a collection of ceramic sculptures of diverse sizes, which you are invited to pour water into. The water then filters through several small openings and drips into the resonant ceramic body, producing a mind-blowingly complex range of rhythms and tonalities.

Needless to say, we spent a good long time recording and documenting these little wonders, and those recordings, along with ones made walking in the forest adjacent, served as the initial source material and inspiration for this work. If it manages to effectively convey even a portion of the spirit of that wonderful place, which so enriched our souls, I couldn’t be happier.”

Isabel Pine – Fables (kranky)

Having previously released just a few EPs and singles on her own Bandcamp, this is composer Isabel Pine’s first widely distributed album for the long-standing experimental label kranky.

Pine is a classically trained violist who’s deeply inspired by the natural wilderness of her British Columbia surroundings. Recorded in autumn of 2024, the 15 relatively short pieces that make up Fables were written in a tiny remote cabin and that’s exactly what they sound like – quiet, unhurried and unabashedly beautiful, they’re creating a healthy distance to the daily noise of digital life.

Fables is fully constructed from string sounds – cello, viola, violin, double bass – and environmental field recordings. In the press blurb, the composer states that “the rustling of the leaves or a raven’s beating wings were as integral to the music as whatever I played.”

Shō – Radio Silence (Language Instinct)

Berlin-based producer Florian Sankt started out making experimental techno, but in recent years his interests shifted more towards ambient and compositional techniques inspired by musique concrète.

For his newest album, he’s searched radio waves at nightly hours to find strange glitches, warped voices, static noise, morse codes and other interesting sounds. Meticulously sculpting and shaping those recordings, he chose to weave them into a tapestry of acoustic piano, modular synths, drones and tape loops.

Radio Silence is a quietly menacing body of work, channeling grief and sadness – a dark collection of fuzzy transmissions from the beyond. With its muted, reverb-drenched piano chords and eerie, otherworldly noises from the ether, it feels like a meditation on the broken state of the world, scoring the nightly solitude as a temporary state of retreat and relief.

Velv.93 – Maidstone (Stroom)

Anonymous Stockholm-based producer Velv.93 makes a left turn from deep techno towards more contemplative ambient sounds on his debut album for Belgian tastemaker label Stroom.

Maidstone is a fascinating album that gradually exposes new layers the more actively you listen. Its icy synths and decaying loops feel like a mix of early Biosphere and Basinski. I’m also hearing some classic ambient techno and IDM references, that cold and dark SAWII atmosphere with a hint of noisy lo-fi experimentalism in the vein of producers like Lukid and 1991. The second half of the album dives even deeper into Tim Hecker-style isolationist vibes, without ever becoming too abrasive.

Stroom stays on a winning streak, constantly putting out highly idiosyncratic music, setting trends instead of reacting to momentary fads.

Clariloops – The Quiet Below (Whitelabrecs) [releases on Feb 28]

From the other end of the ambient spectrum comes Ruby Easter Mae, a clarinetist based in Melbourne whose music sits comfortably between neoclassical and ambient electronica. On her newest collection for Whitelabrecs, she uses effect pedals and synthesizers in addition to her basic instrument.

The pieces stem from short improvised sessions inbetween parenting duties, exploring themes like presence and impermanence. I don’t even have too much to say about this, just that I feel a lot of warmth and love in this music, and that I’ve found myself playing this beautiful, unassuming album over and over on quiet mornings recently.

Digital Sleep