Alles so schön still hier

In "Alles so schön still hier – 100 Ambient Alben, die man gehört haben sollte" (Everything so beautifully quiet here – 100 ambient albums you should have heard), the author sheds light on one of the most exciting genres in contemporary electronic music. Defined in the mid-1970s by Brian Eno as "sound wallpaper," ambient music has been expanded over the past decades to include numerous exciting subgenres. This basic ambient library is the first of its kind in German and showcases the multifaceted genre over a period from 1975 to 2020 using individually selected representative works. To mark the 45th anniversary of ambient music, a chronological approach was deliberately chosen, as each decade also reveals a specific cultural context that might otherwise be lost. The book not only highlights essential genre classics by Brian Eno, Cluster, and Jon Hassell, but also includes albums that had long been lost and only gained the recognition they deserve in recent years thanks to the excavation work of small music labels or random YouTube algorithms. Ambient experienced an impressive renaissance in the early 1990s with KLF, who, with their peculiar reduction in the legendary chill-out rooms, created an alternative to the dance-crazy techno crowd of the time. The fact that ambient music is not purely a male domain is proven by the style-defining works reviewed here by Éliane Radigue, Pauline Oliveros, and new artists such as Kali Malone and Sarah Davachi. The book invites readers to unplug from an increasingly fast-paced world and immerse themselves in new musical realms. To encourage further acoustic discoveries, each record review is followed by recommendations for further listening, and a comprehensive bibliography is accompanied by a list of the best ambient labels.

Nils Wortmann, born in Germany in the fall of 1977, was introduced to music at an early age by friends who were equally enthusiastic about music, by collecting vinyl records, and by the Robert Johnson club. He studied Romance languages and business administration in Giessen. Since 2000, he has been completely devoted to the ambient genre and diligently invests in his personal ambient record collection. He works as a learning and development expert at a bank and lives with his family near Frankfurt am Main.

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