Ambient (1978): Brian Eno named the genre in 1978 with Music for Airports: music meant to be as easy to ignore as to listen to, an environment rather than an event. Ambient…
Dark Ambient (1990): Dark ambient is ambient music that chooses the night: low drones, crypt-like resonances, industrial textures slowed down to near stillness. Lustmord set the…
Isolationism (1993): Isolationism is a British label from 1994, forged around a Virgin compilation: hostile ambient music drawn from the margins of metal, industrial and dub,…
Dungeon Synth (1995): Born in the margins of Norwegian black metal in the early 1990s: cheap keyboards conjure the music of crypts and fortresses, deliberately lo-fi, steeped in…
Drone (2001): The sustained note as a complete form: descended from La Monte Young and minimalism, carried forward by the guitars of Stars of the Lid or the amplifiers of…
Lowercase (1993): Lowercase turns extreme discretion into an aesthetic, an approach that took shape around the year 2000: tiny sounds, mostly silence, and listening pushed…
Ambient Dub (1992): Dub dissolved into ambient: endless echoes, submarine bass, pads that breathe at the tempo of the delay. The Orb and Beyond's Ambient Dub series fix the name…
Illbient (1992): Illbient is ambient music filtered through hip hop, born in Brooklyn in the mid 1990s: urban synth pads, slowed down breaks, spectral scratches, and the…
New Age (1980): New age is the wellness music of the 1980s: soft synth pads, harps, ocean recordings and a sonic promise of healing. Commercially it was enormous and…
IDM (1997): IDM, Intelligent Dance Music, got its name from a 1993 mailing list built around the Warp Records catalog, and the label has been contested from day one,…
Braindance (1997): Braindance is the counter name coined by Rephlex, the label run by Aphex Twin and Grant Wilson Claridge, to poke fun at the IDM label: music that makes the…
Glitch (1995): The error promoted to raw material: skipping CDs, stuttering digital buffers, clicks and artifacts composed as music in their own right. Oval opened the way…
