Best New Ambient (March 2026)

These records will take you places

As a huge fan of his work, I’ve enjoyed Daniel Lopatin’s increased media appearances over the last few months; he’s been promoting his brilliant Tranquilizer album and his soundtrack for the celebrated Josh Safdie film Marty Supreme.

Reading this Pitchfork feature on “the music that made him”, I could deeply relate to this nerdy boy, a son of Russian immigrants, who grew up in a suburb east of Boston, near the Atlantic ocean, exploring his surroundings on his bike and embarking on a life-long listening journey which started with rinsing his dad’s jazz fusion tapes while playing King’s Quest IV.

Moving into the present, Lopatin mentions that he’s been dwelling in this rabbithole of classic 1990s techno, obsessively playing albums by John Beltran, Carl Craig or Jan Jelinek. Returning to these records as well, what I found particularly striking was how damn jazzy they sound, and how this – at the time – highly experimental music manages to be extremely enjoyable and almost instantly gratifying from today’s vantage point.

Finishing his rearview reflections, Lopatin drops the following little gem of middle-aged wisdom that also resonated very much with me:

“(…) In your 40s, you’re in the weird, middle valley of your life. It’s all anticipation and no revelation. You finally figured out you’re not going to figure it out, and you are just finally, in a way, present. You’re right there watching every moment happen. You’ve given up on certain kinds of dreams, and finding out that’s not necessarily a bad thing.”

Before we move on to the roundup of my favorite ambient albums released in March, I want to point you to some of my recently published writings for other media:

• For Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, I conducted an in-depth interview with the practicing Buddhist and experimental composer David Shea. David spoke to me about growing up on the Downtown avant-garde under John Zorn since the late ‘80s, playing with Derek Bailey’s Company, the deep influence of East Asian philosophy on his works, and the notion of having somehow turned into an ‘ambient’ composer, even though he rejects the category. I recommend checking out his newest album Meditations on Lawrence English’s Room40 label.

• For Everything Jazz, I wrote a piece on pianist and composer Andrew Hill’s 1967 album Compulsion!!!!! on Blue Note, calling it an “Afro-Caribbean fever dream”. This brooding, percussive post-bop masterpiece just received a luxurious Tone Poet reissue, and it’s a showcase for Hill’s creative power at its most daring and avant-garde.

By the way, I am still offering a limited springtime 20% discount for all new yearly subscriptions. If you enjoy these monthly roundups and recommendations, please consider supporting me and my work! I appreciate you.

Green-House, photo: Daniel Dorsa

Ambient Album Of The Month

Green-House – Hinterlands (Ghostly International)

Somewhere along the way, Green-House turned from sound artist Olive Ardizoni’s solo project into an actual duo with her long-time collaborator Michael Flanagan. They’ve changed labels as well, moving from the tape imprint Leaving, an L.A. underground institution, to the slightly bigger but still proudly independent Ghostly label.

Green-House records would usually be filed under new age or ‘eco ambient’, which feels apt due to being heavily inspired by Japanese environmental music. But influences range wider this time, as the press text states, evoking “hypnagogic folk, tropical synth-pop, pan-flute mountain music, jazzy lounge, film scores, library sounds, and other forms of paradise-world-building. The duo simply makes the music they want to hear, earnestly dreaming of idyllic settings.”

Hinterlands consists of wondrous, melodic soundscapes, shaped by joyously bubbling synths, sweet strings and dreamy acoustic guitars. Rather than filing it into an entirely different genre category, I’d just say that it’s an impressive example of relatively song-oriented, intentional ambient music. It’s still the perfect musical backdrop to enhance your own creative practice, but it’s also the opposite of the “all-black frowning aesthetics” (Mari Rubio) prevalent in ‘serious’ experimental music – and I sincerely welcome that type of vibe shift.

Joachim Spieth – Vestige (Affin)
Appleblim – Liminal Tides (quiet details)

Two albums that feel close in spirit to me. Both Affin label head Joachim Spieth and Laurie Osborne alias Appleblim, an early pioneer of dubstep (the actual UK underground movement, not its commercial American persiflage), have dedicated decades to the exploration of deep, dubby forms of electronica.

Vestige and Liminal Tides share an appreciation for sound abstraction and surface noise, similar to some of Vladislav Delay’s works. Stuttering rhythms and sub-bass pulses never resolve into something resembling a linear, functional dub techno track; instead the listener is left with dreamy drifts of chords, textures and delay, evolving in unpredictable patterns of ebb and flow.

Though mostly a result of sound synthesis – except for the last track on Liminal Tides, which was generated from a field recording of a foghorn and a seagull’s call –, this music carries an analog, harmonic warmth, creating a sonic environment for the mind to wander and explore and get lost in, enhancing introspection without luring us into some kind of concrete narrative.

Joachim Spieth in his piece on Vestige:

“The music seeks no definitive meaning, and this text makes no such claim. What remains is an invitation: to listen, linger in the spaces between sound and silence, and follow what resonates forward in time.”

Laurel Halo – Midnight Zone (Awe)

This is not a new artist album from the L.A. based composer, but an original soundtrack for a new film work by the visual artist Julian Charrière.

The film follows a camera lens descending into a remote and deep part of the Pacific Ocean called the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone, an area “rich in rare metals and increasingly targeted for deep-sea mining”, as the liner notes state.

“Charrière’s film reveals the deep not as void, but as a luminous biome teeming with fragile life: bioluminescent creatures, swirling schools of fish, and elusive predators. The suspended lens becomes an abyssal campfire, attracting species caught in the tides of uncertainty, their futures hanging in the balance.”

Halo composed her instrumental, droning soundtrack on a Montage 8 synthesizer and Yamaha TransAcoustic piano, layering it with tracks of violin and viola da gamba.

Quite similar to her 2024 dark ambient masterpiece Atlas in technique and effect, there’s a quietly lingering dissonance at the core of these stacks of synths and strings, perfectly scoring this glimpse into a beautiful but endangered landscape.

Ben Seretan & John Thayer – Sunbeam Of No Illusion (AKP)

A deeply reflective project from two musicians based in the Hudson Valley, this series of impromptu keyboard improvisations manipulated with minimal effects was inspired by transcendentalist literature and poetry; the title stems from a letter exchange between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. The blurb also references Hiroshi Yoshimura’s and Harold Budd’s keyboard miniatures, Christian Fennesz’ hazy guitar washes and Angelo Badalamenti’s uncanny but weirdly familiar melodies.

This is springtime music, unhurried and serene. Grainy, noisy recordings of pastoral Rhodes loops evoke nature’s slow awakening in this season; the duo recorded it at Thayer’s creekfront studio, looping these keyboard base layers and sending them through modular rigs, tape echoes or analogue delay pedals, overdubbing just minimal splashes of synthesizers, slide guitar and percussion. There’s really not too much happening here on an objective level, but it’s exactly the absence that conveys a deep sense of intentionality.

cloud collecting + Echoes Blue Music – gentle voices vol. 1 (Echoes Blue Music)

Released a few weeks ago for International Women’s Day, this lovely collection of peaceful, dreamy ambient tunes, co-curated by Cynthia Bernard alias marine eyes and Anita Tatlow, remains on heavy rotation. It includes contributions from women artists such as Drum & Lace, Karen Vogt, Jolanda Moletta and so many other gentle voices emerging from the global ambient underground, providing a starting place for journeys of discovery into their individual discographies.

The musicians were paired together thoughtfully by the curators and asked to create a tune specifically with the compilation’s theme in mind, resulting in a collection of ‘soft power’ music. I’m loving everything about this – the droney wordless vocals, floating synth pads and shimmering textures, but even more so the collaborative spirit of the concept, deliberately shining a light on women and gender-expansive artists in a space still way too dominated by yesteryear’s ideas of (white male) genius.¹

Let me quote from this powerful post by gentle voices contributor IKSRE:

“Women definitely make the best ambient music. Maybe it’s because we know how to connect with other human beings, heart to heart. Or maybe it’s because we understand our inner landscape and our emotions better than most men. Or maybe we just approach things in a different way. Whatever it is, this compilation is unequivocal proof of women working better together, and making truly world-changing music for healing.

To any female ambient producers out there who might be nervous about taking the next step?

Go for it.

There’s a community of kind hearted women, who are ready to champion your work and help lift you up.”

1. The vast majority of submissions I receive still comes from middle-aged white male composers from the U.S. and Western Europe with a background in academic music. Which is of course not bad per se, but it’s a very limited perspective, and so much of that music tends to be quite self-centered and occupied with ideas whose appeal is naturally limited to a certain circle of people with a similar upbringing and intellectual background.