Picture this: You’re in the Hogwarts library. Rain falls outside, a fire crackles across the room, and somewhere offscreen, quills scribble on parchment. You might look up from time to time to see a book drifting through the air or stepladders moving around on their own. Or maybe, you’ll feel so relaxed, you nod off to sleep. Welcome to the world of so-called ambience videos, a genre of YouTube video that pairs relaxing soundscapes with animated scenery in order to make viewers feel immersed in specific spaces, like a jazz bar in Paris or a swamp populated with trilling wildlife. They are part of a long tradition of audiovisual products and programming designed to make a space feel a little more relaxing, a little nicer. Consider the black-and-white footage of a crackling yule log that the New York television channel WPIX debuted on Christmas Eve 1966 — grandfather to the many digital yule logs available today — or the rise of white noise machines that fill a room with the sound of crashing waves, chirping crickets or falling rain. But recently, this genre of video has attracted new fans who want to be transported beyond the same four walls they’ve been staring at for the better part of a year. […] Ambience videos provide a respite from the “hypermediacy” of the internet, she said — a break from the constant bombardment of ads and emails and the self-inflicted burden of dozens of open browser tabs. (Hypermediacy can be defined as the act of viewing, consuming or interacting with multiple forms of media at once.) Paradoxically, a person has to wade through YouTube’s buffet of suggested videos just to locate an ambience video that will shut out the world.

Far from the gonzo antics and heavy-handed satire of the KLF’s early work, Chill Out is subtle, hypnotic, and mysterious, with nary a shred of smugness or snark. The baaing sheep might once have been purely farcical, but here their purpose is more ambiguous—a subliminally pastoral chorus barely perceptible within the overall mix. From Chill Out’s very opening moments, the listener descends into an unfamiliar swirl of sensations—by turns lulling, lyrical, and deeply unsettling—and doesn’t come up for air until nearly 45 minutes later.

Forget the crystals, the mandalas, the inner sanctum: The much-maligned genre known as new age now appeals to many who once may have identified as punks.

Fantastic collage/ambient label whose releases are mostly free.

A great electronic playlist; a perfect blend of minimal and ambient textures and beats. "At moderate volume the sound is not distracting, but on a good set of headphones the wall of sound will crush every kind of thought around you and keep you disjointed and unfocused enough that you'll feel like drifting out from consciousness."

"One hundred ambient tones is a collection of short ≈40sec ambient audio snippets designed to be listened to in 'random' or 'shuffle' ordering. The transitions between tracks, chosen randomly by your machine on playback, become the focus."

"An outdoor ambient music piece for an infinite number of boomboxes. It’s like a Christmas caroling party except that we don’t sing, but rather carry the music, each of us playing a separate track that is a 'voice' in the piece."

Use a pulsating orb to "make electricity [usage] visible" and get people thinking about their energy use. Good idea!

New Sigur Rós side project. Ambient audio/visual projects. Awesome!!