low light mixes

  I listen to as much indie music as I do ambient music. I always keep a list of favorite albums and favorite songs of the year. As I was looking at some of my favorite songs I noticed that several of them were quiet tunes that would be appropriate for an LLM mix. So I grabbed those and a few more favs and came up with "Quiet Indie Songs of 2020." Squirrel Flower was my big discovery this year. I'...

    2020, you unrelenting bastard. Now you've taken Harold Budd from us. An icon in ambient music. There's not much I can say right now except that I love his music. I have about 25 albums by Harold Budd. His music has been with me for more than 40 years. When I heard the news I knew the only tribute I could do was a mix. So here it is an hour-long mix that barely scratches the surface of his outp...

        A perfect mix for the end of 2020 comes to us from Paul Asbury Seaman. All soundtrack cuts, all with varying degrees of melancholy, all forming an ideal coda for 2020.   Here's what Paul says about the mix:   “I’ve been sitting on this playlist for more than three years. Never got around to firming it up for a Low Lights mix. It dawned on me just the other day that the eight movies from wh...

    I'm in the process of making lists of my top 5 instrumental albums for each year from 1970 to the present. Yeah, it's going take a while. So I was digging around in my music hard drive looking for music that would fit those lists and I stumbled upon the track Tulpa Ovi by Robag Wruhme. I immediately loved the feel of tune and knew I needed it in a mix.   The cut has a feeling of motion similar...

    As is well documented in this blog, I am a space nerd. Over the years I have posted a ton of mixes related to the cosmos. Whether it's a stargazing mix or a celebration of the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle or a requiem for a dying space probe, ambient/electronic music is the perfect companion for turning your gaze to the heavens. Over the last couple of months we've been treated to bea...

    Off-kilter, strange, a bit askew, weird, oblique - are all ways to describe this mix. It's a little creepy too which makes for a perfect mix for Spooky Season. To create a Halloween mix it would be easy to grab some dark, dissonant ambient but as I've said before I'm not a dark ambient fan. So I went for the same feel I have used in the past - tunes that are a bit off-center. Tunes that make y...

  photo courtesy of https://unsplash.com/@coleito     I started this mix on a cold, rainy fall day with no theme or plan. The first track I laid down was from  Progressions by Anthéne and Andrew Tasselmyer  on Constellation Tatsu. Listening to it, the track seemed perfect for a grey autumn day.  Now I had my theme or vibe. From there I just browsed my new releases folder to come up with an ambient...

      sounds swim all around drifting in the warm embrace of this strange beauty   This my second 4th world mix and it's similar to the 2018 version. It still follows the Jon Hassell esthetic of  "a unified primitive/futuristic sound combining features of world ethnic styles with advanced electronic techniques." Most of the tracks are new, 10 of the 17 tracks being from 2019 or 2020. I was almost...

  This mix came about because I wanted to find a vehicle for some of the great music coming out of Lost Tribe Sound and their Fearful Void series. The bundle of releases includes 15 albums to be released between June 2020 and June 2021. You can find more info here...   https://losttribesound.bandcamp.com/album/fearful-void-series   Like the website says Lost Tribe Sound "specializes in organic and...

    Sometime in the last couple of weeks we got a good downpour here at Low Light headquarters. As I stood at the front door smelling the rain, listening to the cloudburst, I realized that I had some music playing softly in the background and it blended perfectly with the storm. I stood there for a good twenty minutes taking it all in. This mix is based on that experience.   The main idea here is...

  This mix, like the title, is simple. It's straight forward ambient music. Nice and relaxing, beatless, drifting ambient music. All of the music is new - 9 of the 12 tracks are from 2020. Other than that there's not much else to say except I hope enjoy the tunes. Cheers!   T R A C K L I S T : 00:00    Andrew Chalk - Mikhail (One Long Year 2019) 09:00    Ylowknfe - Gamma (= 2014) 15:55    Innesti...

image by Thomas Park   This mix was a lot of fun!  Back in April, Peter van Cooten, of  Ambientblog , created the awesome mix,  Lockdown . After it posted we talked about doing a collaboration mix. As Peter is in Holland and I am in the States we would send files back and forth to each other adding more tracks with every pass. We had to decide on a theme and a format. In the end the format became...

  This mix came about from an idea by a listener, Kevin. He suggested a mix based on artists from Japan. I asked for track recommendations and Kevin came back with an entire list. That list fills out most of this mix. I added tracks by Hiroshi Yoshimura, Geskia!, Sawako and Akira Kosemura. Kevin also suggested the title - "Not seeing is a flower" which means that reality can't compete with imagina...

  I have been planning on a new dubby mix for a while and I have been planning for a mix with a slow-ish train vibe. Somehow those two concepts merged and became this new mix - Dub Train Dub Station. There's not much else to say about this mix. It's pretty much what you'd expect - a collection of mostly dubby tracks that have a definite train feel, combining two of my favorite vibes in one mix. Ch...

photo by Wil Stewart  https://unsplash.com/s/photos/wil-stewart   I've been working from home for a couple of months and you'd think I might have some extra time to work on some mixes with being locked down and all. But nope, I seem to have fallen farther behind with a lot of things. I wanted to get a mix up onto Mixcloud so that I don't go too long in between uploads. But I hadn't done anything n...

  I haven't posted a Sunday Morning mix since January and with how much things have changed since then I figured we could all use a mix with that Sunday morning vibe. So here it is #20 in the Sunday Morning Music series. It's mostly new music, with 13 tracks from 2019 & 2020. One of the oddball old cuts is from 1980, John Martyn's "Sweet Little Mystery." I've always liked the tune but I hadn't hea...

  I can always count on Paul for a good palate cleanser. After the bizzaro world of DEVS & the continuing covid crapola, I think everyone is in need of a little positivity. Paul and I have talked often about how a lot of ambient music has a melancholy vibe. I know I definitely gravitate toward that end of the spectrum. Paul figured we could use something hopeful in these strange days. Here's what...

  DEVS, a tv series on FX/Hulu, is easily one of the best things I've ever seen on tv. It's written, directed and produced by Alex Garland the man responsible for Ex Machina & Annihilation, two of my favorite films of the last ten years. The sound design and music in his films is always perfect. His musical collaborators are Ben Salisbury & Geoff Barrow and they are responsible for the music in DE...

This mix started nearly two years ago when I created a playlist on Spotify called "Sax is Back." In there I collected tracks that used a saxophone as a main instrument and had an ambient vibe. I was careful to not let the tunes devolve into Kenny G on the beach schlock. But I still wasn't sure if an entire mix of sax tunes would work, but, I gotta say, this mix turned out really well. It's cohesiv...

I like to think that I put a lot of thought and effort into these mixes. Hopefully, the mix as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts. But what I do is nothing compared to the transformative touch that Peter Van Cooten brings to his mixes.  Each mix is a unique work of art. Peter rarely lets a track play in its complete form. Instead, he uses smaller samples and deftly weaves the tracks in a...

  Today, March 28th, is International Piano Day. This is what the Piano Day website says about today:   “Why does the world need a Piano Day? For many reasons. But mostly, because it doesn’t hurt to celebrate the piano and everything around it: performers, composers, piano builders, tuners, movers and most important, the listener.” – Nils Frahm  Piano Day, an annual worldwide event founded by a gr...

  I have to come clean. I stole this idea. Dennis Huddleston, who records as 36, posted a Spotify playlist a couple of days ago and I thought it sounded like a good theme for a mix. Here's his playlist...   https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4JYOGGauPlBZJ6fGliNC8l?si=WccLv7aASuSlzznfwpLKKA   All the tracks in this mix have quarantine/isolation appropriate titles such as "Stay Home," "Return to Self...

  After the last mix, I was trying to decide what to do next - sea mix? orchestral? shortwave? train? Well, Paul beat me to it by sending a tracklist for another excellent train mix.   Here's what Paul has to say about this mix: “The main qualification in selecting music for a train mix is that it has that distinctive rocking rhythm, like a cradle. Like a lullaby. Beyond that, there is the paradox...

  It's hard to believe there are still 9 months until the presidential election here in the US. It feels like the 2016 campaign never ended. Working in TV news I need to remind myself to step back, log off Twitter, turn off the tv, and listen to some ambient music, especially meditative music.   I know most ambient music is good for meditation but for this mix, I was looking for formless music tha...

This is a re-posting of sorts. I was going through old mixes trying to figure out which ones had not been posted to Mixcloud. I plan on posting some of those old mixes as-is to Mixcloud in the coming months.  One of the mixes I dug up is Sequential Circuits, originally posted 12 years ago. Yikes! I've been doing this for a long time. I really like this mix but while listening to it I decided to gi...