Bob Schwartz

Ambient music is characterized by atmospheric, textural soundscapes. Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978) is credited with starting and naming the genre. He described ambient music as being able to “accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one.” Definitions are fuzzy, so adjacent genres—ambient, neoclassical, minimalist, New Age—may seem to blend and merge. Erik Satie called his own works “furniture music”, which doesn’t seem very different than airport music.

Hiroshi Yoshimura (1940 – 2003) is my current favorite. A Japanese artist, musician, composer and sound designer, his first album, Music for Nine Postcards (1982), came just a few years after Brian Eno, and Yoshimura is sometimes called the Brian Eno of Japan.

Below are a couple of tracks, Clouds and Blink, from Music for Nine Postcards.

Even if you are familiar with ambient music, you may not have heard/heard of Yoshimura. If you are not familiar with ambient music, convinced it is just some more of that New Age “stuff”, give it a try. One of my experiences is to walk among the songbirds, one ear on Yoshimura, one ear on the birds. Nice.