MUSIC

This section of the site is an area to describe the different varients of some ambient music that we sell here. This infomation is available in more detail on the main Wikipedia site, Electronic Music Genres

I havn't put any of the artists into music catergories,simply because I feel music shouldn't be placed into a pigeon hole or genre. The labels will be a better indicator of the style or format you are looking for. Always keep an open mind with this and you'll find much more pleasure in finding something new.

I've added some of the basic genres from the Wikipedia site to help give some guidance to the different music styles here. It's listed as it comes with no preference to genre or artist.

Organic ambient music
Organic ambient music is characterised by integration of electronic, electric, and acoustic musical instruments. Aside from the usual electronic music influences, organic ambient tends to incorporate influences from world music, especially drone instruments and hand percussion. Organic ambient is intended to be more harmonious with nature than with the disco. Some of the artists in this sub-genre include Robert Rich, Steve Roach, Vidna Obmana, Ma Ja Le, James Johnson and Robert Scott Thompson.

Some works by ambient pioneers such as Brian Eno, Laraaji or Popul Vuh who use a combination of traditional instruments (such as piano or hammered dulcimer or hand percussion, though usually processed through tape loops or other devices) and electronic instruments, would be considered organic ambient music in this sense. In the 70s and 80s Klaus Schulze often recorded string ensembles and performances by solo cellists to go along with his extended Moog synthesizer workouts.

Latter-Day Berlin School
Between 1979 and 1984 Tangerine Dream exhausted most of the possibilities of this genre and began to record more accessible, short-form and increasingly New Age-like tracks for albums such as Exit, Le Parc and Underwater Sunlight. Jean-Michel Jarre delivered his ultimate sequencer statement with Magnetic Fields in 1981 and then began to record rock-oriented tracks that would please more fans in a concert setting. As the technology improved and MIDI came into the picture, musicians began to see synthesizers as a means to have the sounds of traditional instruments available at the touch of a button. It became apparent that the Berlin sound had arisen from work-arounds to technological limitations that were rapidly disappearing.
But some newer artists began to deliberately record in the mode of Berlin School from a genuine affection and budding nostalgia for the genre. In 1988, five years after Tangerine Dream left the Virgin label, Wavestar released their acclaimed CD Moonwind. The clean picked-bass and synthesizer trills of "Chase the Evening" distilled the Berlin sound to its essence. Even Tangerine Dream continues to send an occasional nod in that direction, such as the track "Culpa Levis" from Dream Mixes 2: TimeSquare in 1997.
Berlin school music has evolved into many modern interpretations of the original 1970's Berlin School sound. Most modern styles still retain the same 'warm analogue synth sound' and progressive nature that is the basis of the genre. Notable latter day artists of Berlin School that we carry here include Redshift, Radio Massacre International, Arc, Dweller at the Threshold,Ken Martin, Rudy Adrian & Craig Padilla.

Nature inspired ambient music
The music is composed from samples and recordings of naturally occurring sounds. Sometimes these samples can be treated to make them more instrument-like. The samples may be arranged in repetitive ways to form a conventional musical structure or may be random and unfocused. Sometimes the sound is mixed with urban or "found" sounds.

Examples include much of Biosphere's Substrata, Mira Calix's insect music and Chris Watson's Weather Report. Some overlap occurs between organic ambient and nature inspired ambient. One of the first albums in the genre, Wendy Carlos' Sonic Seasonings, combines sampled and synthesized nature sounds with ambient melodies and drones for a particularly relaxing effect. The album Second Nature by Bill Laswell, Tetsu Inoue, and Atom Heart is an ambient album that uses processed nature sounds, with reverb and echo to create a hypnotic environment.

Dark ambient
Dark ambient is a general term for any kind of ambient music with a "dark" or dissonant feel, but often involves extensive use of digital reverb to create vast sonic spaces for frightening, bottom-heavy sounds such as deep drones, gloomy male chorus, echoing thunder, and distant artillery. It has an eerie feel. The Robert Rich/Lustmord collaboration album Stalker epitomizes this sub- genre. Related styles include ambient industrial and isolationist ambient.

Space music
Space music, also spelled spacemusic, includes music from the Ambient genre as well as a broad range of other genres with certain characteristics in common to create the experience of contemplative spaciousness. Space music ranges from simple to complex sonic textures sometimes lacking conventional melodic, rhythmic, or vocal components, generally evoking a sense of "continuum of spatial imagery and emotion", beneficial introspection, deep listening and sensations of floating, cruising or flying.
Space music is used by individuals for both background enhancement and foreground listening, often with headphones, to stimulate relaxation, contemplation, inspiration and generally peaceful expansive moods and soundscapes. Space music is also a component of many film soundtracks, commonly used in planetariums, and used as a relaxation aid and for meditation.
Hearts of Space is a well-known radio show and affiliated record label, specializing in Space Music since 1984, having released over 150 albums devoted to the music style. Notable artists who have brought elements of Ambient music to Space music include Michael Hedges, Michael Stearns, Constance Demby, Jean Michel Jarre, Robert Rich, Steve Roach, Numina, Dweller at the Threshold, Jonn Serrie, Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream (as well as the group's founder Edgar Froese).

Drone music
Drone music, also known as drone-based music, drone ambient or ambient drone, dronescape or dronology, and sometimes simply as drone, is a musical style that emphasizes the use of sustained sounds, notes, or tones-clusters called drones. It is typically characterized by lengthy audio programs with relatively slight harmonic variations throughout each piece compared to other music.Examples would be some works by Oophoi & Netherworld.

Chill out music
Chill out Music (sometimes known also as chillout or simply chill), emerged in the early and mid-1990s as a catch-all term for various styles of relatively mellow, slow-tempo music made by contemporary producers in the electronic music scene. The genres associated with chill-out are mostly Ambient, Trip-hop, Nu jazz, Ambient House, Ambient Trance, New Age and other sub-genres of Downtempo - a major branch of electronic music. Sometimes the Easy Listening sub-genre Lounge is considered to belong to the chill-out collection as well.
The term "Chill out music", as well as the genre itself, originated in chill rooms that were set up by DJs off to the edge of club dance floors to give patrons a chance to take a break from the hectic dance vibe and chill out with this style of music. Chill out as a musical genre or descriptive is synonymous with the more recently popularized terms "smooth electronica" and "soft techno" and is a loose genre of music blurring into several other very distinct styles of electronic and lo-fi music.Much of the music on IntentCity and the Just Music labels feature a wide variety of this style of music. Honeyroot,Jon Hopkins,Magna Canta & Waterbone are just some of the select range carried here.

Ambient noise
Ambient noise is a subgenre involving the construction of "noisescapes", that is, soundscapes created out of walls of extreme noise. Closely related to noise music and power electronics, this anti-music may not strike the uninitiated listener as being very close to ambient music. To those more familiar with noise, these works have a distinct ambient quality that distinguishes them from the harsh noise of Merzbow or Whitehouse.The recent double album by Crest 214 would be a prime example of distorted low-frequency/high-volume sonics which are evocative of the cthonic sounds of a subway tunnel, an underground boiler-room in a factory, or the afterburner of a jet engine.

Ambient industrial music
A "typical" ambient industrial work might consist of evolving dissonant harmonies of metallic drones and resonances, extreme low frequency rumbles and machine noises, perhaps supplemented by gongs, percussive rhythms, bullroarers, distorted voices and/or anything else the artist might care to sample (often processed to the point where the original sample is no longer recognizable). Entire works may be based on radio telescope recordings (Arecibo Trans-Plutonian Transmissions), the babbling of newborn babies (Nocturnal Emissions Mouths of Babes), or sounds recorded through contact microphones on telegraph wires (Alan Lamb's Primal Image).