This morning, we went on a Sunday hike through nearby woodland. It was cold and windy, but the sun was out, at least for a few hours.
Now Quinn, our yellow Lab, is blissfully asleep on the couch, we’re cooking potatoes from the garden on the woodstove for lunch, and I’m listening to some calm ambient music on headphones.
Just a few years ago, I couldn’t have imagined moving out of Berlin to live quietly in a remote village in the countryside. No, that lifestyle clearly wasn’t for me – I would more likely turn into that older geezer in a small inner city apartment crammed with books and records, still going out to concerts and bars every night.
Well, Nas already said it back in ‘96: “A thug changes, and love changes, and best friends become strangers.”
The writer Ben Seretan nailed that feeling in this following excerpt from the press bio for John Thayer’s new album Winds Gate (more on that below):
“It’s a running joke among a certain type of NYC art striver that the [Hudson] river serves as a map of your life – the older you get, the further north you move along it, you start taking that train down into the city less and less. You cross a threshold: one day you drive the George Washington Bridge over the Hudson for the last time ever and you won’t even know it.”
Now let’s get into the monthly roundup of my favorite (aka ‘the best’) ambient albums that came out during the last four weeks.
Ambient Album Of The Month
In Transit – In Transit (FELT)
Aerial, the 2008 dubstep album by Dutch producer Dave Huismans on Tectonic, is a stone cold classic in my book. He recorded it under the artist name 2562, and another one of his aliases is/was A Made Up Sound (a Source Direct reference, of course). After not releasing any new music for many years, Huismans returned in the summer of 2025 with two acclaimed EPs of abstracted house under the new ex_libris moniker.
Like many electronic music producers, Huismans loves hiding behind different artist names, so he just launched another one. Dubbed an LP of ‘arresting downtempo vignettes’, his new album as In Transit was originally written over a decade ago, on nothing but an old Korg sampler, and refined slowly over the years.
“Ambient isn’t background but a room you enter”, the producer Aiko Takahashi has said in a
interview recently. This is certainly true of In Transit. I mean, just look at the cover. The album is literally what you’re hearing from behind that scuttle – it sounds dark and murky, and it’s full of beautifully crackling, shimmering textures. Some of these six long-ish tracks do have beats. Well, I wouldn’t actually call them beats, more like rhythmic, percussive elements, quite subdued and non-linear. But I like non-linear, and I’m actually addicted to this record right now.Guentner Spieth – Conversion (Affin)
Electronic music producers Markus Guentner and Joachim Spieth both debuted on the legendary German Kompakt label in the early 2000s. Conversion is their second album as a duo, and here they’re going for a dubbed-out approach to instrumental electronica, somewhere between the more experimental Rhythm & Sound tracks and that post-ambient universe of labels like West Mineral Ltd. and 3XL.
There’s a certain dub techno vibe flowing through the project – the grainy textures, weightless pads and muffled 4/4 grooves nod to classic releases from the genre, evoking an aesthetic lineage while at the same time creating their own distinctive interpretation of that sound. As a neurodivergent person, I have a folder on my hard drive with albums that I use like ‘weighted blankets for the ears’ – Conversion will definitely go in there. Gorgeous record, and one to put on constant repeat as home office ambience for the next weeks.
Blue Lake – The Animal (Tonal Union)
Two years ago, I fell in love with Sun Arcs, the debut of Texas-born, Copenhagen-based multi-instrumentalist Jason Dungan under the alias Blue Lake. That record was quite lauded in experimental circles, and now he’s back with a sophomore album, once again steeped in folk, jazz and Americana, but even more ambitious in its compositional approach.
It wouldn’t be a stretch to file this under ‘ambient country’, though The Animal feels more elaborate than much of what is uploaded to streaming services under that loose umbrella term. Dungan uses a custom-built zither, guitars, organ, percussion, melodica, piano and percussion to weave a dense, acoustic tapestry of sound that’s way more than just Route 66 mood music.
While Sun Arc was mainly a solo effort, his 2024 EP Weft saw the expansion of the Blue Lake project into a small band, involving woodwind and string players, as well as double bass and drums. This sextet has also started to involve its voices as instruments and introduce aspects of traditional songwriting into its recording process. It’s an earthy, communal spirit they’re summoning here – just the perfect listening material for strolling through the woods in the twilight of dusk on these golden autumn days.
John Thayer – Winds Gate (Aural Canyon)
I knew of John Thayer because he recorded, mixed and co-produced Ezra Feinberg’s stunning 2024 album Soft Power. He’s a musician and audio engineer living in Catskill, NY, “a punk, just as likely to throw out an anecdote from the DC hardcore scene as he is to quote the Tao Te Ching or Lee Scratch Perry”, as the press blurb says, which definitely makes Thayer seem like someone I’d love to have a cup of tea with at one point.
Sending me this beautiful new solo LP, John writes over email: “It’s an album shaped by time, aging, and my move out of NYC, composed with my modular rig, field recordings, Moog Matriarch, homemade percussion, and upright bass. The Hudson Canyon was a big inspiration – both the geography and the idea of exploring what lies beneath the surface.” Musically, I am hearing influences from classic IDM, the Berlin School, kranky post-rock, and many other things.
The track title “Beginner’s Mind” is very likely a reference to Zen master Shunryū Suzuki’s classic 1970 book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Suzuki urged us to preserve that state of awe and wonder that we might feel when confronted with the vast beauty of certain landscapes or other natural surroundings, and to turn that childlike curiosity into our default state of experiencing the world as adults.
I always thought of Suzuki Roshi’s as one of the most striking instructions on how to actually lead a good life, and Thayer’s music somehow embodies that spirit perfectly – even without trying to manipulate the listener to feel a certain way.
Andrew Tasselmyer – Signal (Quiet Details)
Philadelphia-based artist
has a great Substack newsletter and podcast called , and recently had the brilliant as a guest on it, dropping little gems about her recording process like this one which somehow seems to apply to Signal as well:“What if I did this Harold Budd type of ripoff piano thing, but had the voicemail recording from William Basinski calling me last night? Both of those things together sounds great. I’m gonna put that on a record.”
Tasselmyer made Signal on his daily work commutes over a couple of months, layering synth pads, samples and field recordings on whatever device he had with him – laptop, tablet or phone – and the resulting four long tracks, unsurprisingly, sound like the unsteady ebb and flow of life itself.
Snippets of conversations overheard on a train compartment are layered with swelling sub-bass drones, piano chords float over what sounds like a looped orchestral snippet and white noise textures. Of course I’ve heard similar music before, as these are not revolutionary new ideas – but even as a long-time lover of ambient music, I feel like I could get lost in the detailed depths of Andrew’s thoughtful collages forever.
Christopher Willits – New Moon (Ghostly International)
Composer and guitarist Christopher Willits has been a staple of contemporary ambient since the early to mid-2000s. He’s collaborated closely with Taylor Deupree, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Scott Hansen alias Tycho, and released a number of solo albums on labels like Deupree’s 12k and
’s Ghostly International. New Moon captures Willits at his most lucid and minimalist – “sound as sanctuary, and listening as a practice of presence”, as the press text says.The 11 tracks are relatively short for this kind of music. None of them actually reaches the four-minute mark. They feel almost like improvisational, Vini Reilly-type sketches, with each track zeroing in on a particular sonic or compositional idea. It’s mostly really just Willits’ signature electric guitar drawing gorgeous melody lines over a firm bed of analog synth pads and drones. His last album Gravity was about loss and mourning; this one is about rebirth and renewal – a cycle of beautifully evocative, introspective instrumentals to brighten up your day.
Slow Dancing Society & zakè – Stars & Silence (Zakè Drone/Past Inside The Present)
The Bandcamp blurb for Stars & Silence features a RIYL section that mentions artists from Tangerine Dream to Bark Psychosis, from Angelo Badalamenti to Ulrich Schnauss, from Global Communication to Casino Versus Japan. I love all of these artists, but this double album really sounds like none of them.
This sophomore duo effort by ambient producers Drew Sullivan (Slow Dancing Society) and Zach Frizzell (zakè) consists of two 40-minute-plus suites of tape drones, synth arpeggios, orchestral textures, bass pulses and vintage drum machine beats. These sprawling soundscapes take the listener on a real sonic journey – if you’re into headphone music with a lo-fi IDM vibe, this is for you.
Bonus Beats
Meftah & Thomas Xu – Bells and Thunder (Steady Flight Circle)
I found this through Dave Huismans’ guest recommendation in
’s First Floor newsletter. For the A-side of their 2022 EP Meeting Point, these two underground house producers have improvised a 20-minute beatless, jazzy ambient jam using the sound palette of Detroit beatdown (Rhodes, bells, synth effects), landing somewhere halfway between Theo Parrish and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Which is a pretty damn nice place to land, if you ask me.
Some new territory for me and excellent notes. Plenty of subtlety here and quiet reflection. Thank you
Wow. Thank you. Didn't expect that. I will use Boomkat for other stuff as well now.